Sunday, December 20, 2015

The Dualism within me

Not sure for certain if others here feel the same way but I expect that many do. I have always considered myself a rational person. Logic and reasoning and a healthy dose of skepticism dominates my thinking. Many years of immersion in the sciences have definitely played a key role in my personal evolution but so has the writing of Hume, Burke, Mills, Russell and in the more modern context Hansen and Dalrymple. On the surface I should be a strong agnostic yet I find that as much as I try, I cannot free myself from a spirtualism (perhaps mysticism..I even have a fondness Kabbalah) that I should theoretically reject.

I believe, although with limited scientific evidence, in an essence that extends beyond the physicality of the matter/energy universe and even though I cannot quantify or even qualify its being, its presence seems real. Perhaps this is a function of my individuality (so defined by my genetics and environmental history) but as much as I have tried to shrug off its presence and succumb to scientific materialism and the logical consequence of atheism I simply cannot. To do so would be untrue to myself just as much as an adoption of religious orthodoxy and blind worship flies in the face of who I am. I have tried to reconcile these two pillars but such attempts seem contrived so at best I operate under the avenue of separate domains. Acknowledging that there may be fusion on an objective level somewhere but content to treat the dualism as a outgrowth of my subjective challenge.

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