Religion is intentional cultivation of relationship between one’s finite self and the infinite, who is understood as the ground of being, the root of morality — infinite, transcendent, partially knowable, but essentially incomprehensible.

Pity my poor friend Darwin. I’ve been slacking at him about religion all morning. But he’s smart, and smart ears are inspiring!

Prayer is not, in Habermas’s terms, an instrumental action. It is not the cause of an effect. It is a communicative action, meant to cultivate social connection.

Social connection between our finite selves and an infinite self of whom we are part, but within that, our fellow selves. It is a speech act meant to summon solidarity.

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I’m obsessed with the limits of objective thought, how objective thought stands upon other modes of cognition that can do things beyond objectivity, and what happens when we invalidate them and try to live with objectivity alone.

Objectivity is something we do, it is not something that is just there to perceive and think about. There is no objective reality, only objective truth. I think this used to be a controversial belief, but I think that is now mainstream, albeit in vulgarized form. But I think most forms of constructivism is still trapped in objectivism (only what can be taken as an intentional object can be thought). But I think the doing of objectivity is not objectively knowable.

We believe that we can construct new factual edifices and call them true until we are habituated to that new construction of truth. But we cannot sincerely take many constructions for true. Just as some designs are intuitive and effortless to learn and others are unintuitive and must be effortfully learned, recalled and made habitual before any skillful use is possible, some constructions can be intuitively, spontaneously known and, once seen, are re-seen and cannot be unseen. These are transformative understandings, and that is what I look for in what I read and my own goal in what I try to write.

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Religion is largely a matter of how we think and relate as subjects. The objective content of our thinking, and our thoughts about our relationships and those we relate to, is secondary to the subjective acts of relating.

But those who reduce all to object in order to comprehend, reduce the relationship to an incomprehensible God into an objectively believed in “God”.

A similar operation happens in psychology, or at least vulgarized psychology, where unwanted thoughts are the surfacing of objective beliefs that were already there under the surface, rather than artifacts of subjective motions that constantly reproduce what those motions produce. Most racism is attributable to racist habits of thought, and attempts to claim one thinks otherwise are subjectively dishonest, self-alienating and eventually comprehensively alienating. 

Objectivity is something that is done and produced by something which in itself is not objectively knowable. We can objectively know what it does, we can objectively know some of how it does it, and we can objectively know what is seems to not do, but we cannot objectively know the knower. In other words we can know about subjectivity, but subjects are known in a way different from objects. Subjects are known through participation in subjectivity, much of which is (confusingly!) objective experiencing and knowing of the world. I’ve said before that all subjects have their own objectivity. (Actually, what I really said before was that every subject is an objectivity, but subjects are more than only that.