Lutha Mahtin posted:

I notice in your post here that you seem to be talking about what I would say are several separate issues, and it's not clear to me if you realize that many people consider them separate. One is the issue of how people approach religious, cosmological, and philosophical ideas in terms of truth and authority. Another is the issue of how someone believes their chosen understanding of truth and authority relates to other people who do not have the same beliefs or life experiences that they do. These aren't the only ideas in your post, but these two are very large ideas on their own so let's just stick with them for now.

When considering the ideas of truth, authority, and/or correctness, I have to start by saying that I'm a little skeptical of your statement that you "don't have the context to understand" how people accept ideas about the world, their experiences, reality, etc., because everyone does this. Regardless of whether someone considers themselves religious, not religious, whatever, everyone has ideas and reasoning about their experience and how/whether this experience exists within a broader reality, as well as about the nature of that broader reality. So if you are indeed basing your reasoning about this issue upon the logical assumption that there are several ways of looking at the world, one being your own way and another being the "religious" way, and that these two ways are mutually exclusive and possibly incomprehensible to each other, I would then have to put on my smug postmodernist hat and say that this assumption is (1) in some ways Othering religious people in comparison to you and your own school of thought, and (2) not a whole lot different from, for example, a religious person who cannot conceive of how an atheist could possibly live by a code of morals. Please note that I am not saying that you are indeed doing this or that you're bad or mean or anything negative: I'm just trying to give you some ideas to think on, because clearly you are someone who has thoughts about stuff and is curious to learn, which is cool and good.

And actually, I lied that I was going to cover the two topics I listed in my first paragraph. I will try to write more eventually but time is short at the moment, so I'll just post this part for now.