Atheism Versus Magic

 more and more we find ourselves adjusting to the relentless technological progress of our civilization. yet at the same time we cannot let go our outdated, tribal instinct for superstition and make believe. as a result this creates a dissonance, an incongruence of mental states, which leads to a kind of schizophrenia. our brains crave scientific sureness, it craves epistemological weathertightness, yet at the same time our soul longs for affirmation in what is irrational, in answers such as 'what is the meaning of life', 'what is our purpose on this earth', 'who am i', 'where will go after i die', 'is there a personal god that listens to me that is concerned with my life' - and similar questions. and this search has led us down rabbit holes of all sorts of whimsical and unchallenged beliefs, which our rational thinking does not permit. we know better than to believe stories of prophets parting the red sea, of miracles being performed by mystics and yogis, of supernatural forces overseeing our lives. but we have to live with these two dissonances in our mind, not only in exceptional times, but on a daily basis, whenever we are confronted by fresh information. of course there are different types of people, with varying tendencies towards irrational thinking. some people are firmly grounded in scientific way of thinking, and shun any form of irrationality, then there are those at the other extreme, who discard anything which smacks of scientific rigor, of materialism, of technological metaphor. they grounds their lives in rickety systems held together by chance occasions and events, bizarre associations, mostly inconsistent, and contradictory. we strive for the truth these days, and we are constantly being updated on what the truth is. nothin rest on firm principles, if there is anything that science has shown is it is that nothing goes unchallenged. people strive to be be objective in their assessment of the world, and to eliminate any form of value system, but value systems are inbuilt. we cannot help but employ them in our thinking. people strive to be more like the machines that we build, like the algorithms of super computers, that sort through the mind and provide answers grounded on statistical probability.  at the same time there is a strong current pushing us in the opposite direction, towards untruth, towards the falsehood, towards misapprehension, towards the Orwellian police state where everything is self contradictory. we seek the wisdom of the moderator, the middle way. the one who can synthesize the irrational and the rational. but this is hardly to be found anywhere in todays society. you will either have fundamentalists or hardline atheists. people who have come to the conclusion that balance between the two is the most important.

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