Logic Vs. Irrationality

During a drunken discussion recently, a friend and I debated religion versus atheism. Actually that’s not entirely true, we discussed spirituality versus lack thereof. Being drunk, the argument tended to meander around in various states of clumsiness. My friend, being drunk and an atheist, used logic to argue his points. Myself, being relatively spiritual, and also drunk, stumbled around poorly constructed ideas regarding perception, idea and faith. I don’t remember how it ended up and really, it doesn’t matter. Two days later that friend confessed that he didn’t remember anything of the discussion (although I think he is being polite because his semi-drunken logic was semi-drunken solid vs. my drunken lack of a well constructed argument). I, however, remember many aspects of the discussion. In retrospect I think the discussion, in of itself, is pretty ridiculous. Think about it. Two drunk guys arguing in a bar about something that inherently can’t be argued. Logic versus Irrationality.

First off, I am a believer. Do I believe Jesus died on the cross for our sins? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily go that far. Then again, there are plenty of nuts that live in the modern world that do plenty of wacky things both good and ill. Is it plausible that some guy about two thousand years ago was delusional and justified his upcoming death as an excuse to forgive humans of sin, which in turn, founded a new religion? Absolutely! Hell, people started looking at George Lucas as a new prophet and “The Force” as a new religion, not so long ago and not so far away.

We live everyday with sets of beliefs and perceptions that may or may not be true. From silly things like expecting your car to start to assuming a traffic report is accurate. These beliefs and perceptions are based off of a history of events and expectations of a future. On a personal level, we often don’t have the hard facts of these beliefs. We simply take someone else’s word for it and history bears it out. We also use these small beliefs and perceptions to construct our reality around us. Now, oversimplification aside, religion, spirituality or whatever you want to call it, is a more complex series of beliefs and perceptions based from what we are taught, what we see and how we react (internally or externally) to construct this reality around us.

Logic is the application of a set of rules defined by a physical world, on concepts that we usually have hard facts about. The rules of logic are made up from observation, hard facts and a history of repetition. People use this logic to help them understand the world around them, or, their reality.

The difference is that you can apply logic to many everyday things and bear out hard evidence of why your beliefs are well founded. But this wasn’t always true. We didn’t always know what air was or why we needed it. Science, or more aptly, the progression of applied logic to the natural world, continues to define our beliefs of how things work and why. When we take these things for granted by not really knowing how they work, aren’t we are being irrational?

The only point I am trying to make with all this CRAP, is this... Religion is inherently irrational because of the lack of hard facts. Millions of people, for whatever reason, use religion in a positive way. Many also use it in a negative way. (George and Osama, anyone? Yes, they are the same to me.) They have no real reason for it, they just feel that it is true (whether this feeling came from thousands of years of religious brainwashing, or not, I don’t know). They have faith because they believe yet logically it CANNOT be defined.

My car will start today because I have faith. My faith in my car is logic based because I have lots of facts to support my faith. Logic CAN be applied to this.

I believe that there are many things beyond human understanding (right now) one of which includes an intelligence (or several) beyond our comprehension. Does this mean I think about a god in a white toga and Birkenstocks? No I don’t. Is this belief irrational? Yes, it is. It is mostly based from my observations, my feelings and my speculations about what my reality consists of. Am I delusional? Possibly. After all, I do think the Great Zombie Apocalypse is coming as prophesized by Romero. Objectively, I’d say that’s out there.

My friend also believes that there are many things beyond human understanding (right now) but none of which include an intelligence beyond our comprehension, at least not in a “god” way. His beliefs are based from his observations, his feelings and his speculations about what his reality consists of applied to his logic. Is he delusional? Possibly. He does think Kevin Smith is a humble and ingratiating guy and Bill Maher is a comic genius, after all. I’d say that’s pretty fucking delusional.

Irrationality and logic DO NOT MIX. People will continue to believe what they will believe. Some of it based on logic, some of it not. Most of it, bullshit. All of it is our reality, even if that means 6.5 billion variations of reality.

Of course I have to show an example of seriously delusional fuckheads here...

Unseen World