Your cognitive skills (i.e., critical thinking) are all you have to interpret your environment. When or where are such faculties not applicable in dealing with the real world? As for your reference to great men and women in history, I think suspending critical thinking is best suited to poetry, literature and the more romantic of philosophies. It can be wonderfully luxuriant and inspire our artistic and imaginative tendencies, as with any other form of day dreaming. However, it has limited application in the real world which can, admittedly, be really quite beautiful one moment, and decidedly less so the next. Such a world requires the full use of whatever faculties we have at our disposal. I don't think that our musings, and what we ponder in our quiet moments should be considered as anything more than the pleasant distractions that they are.
No, cognitive skills are not all that human beings have to interpret their environment. Intuition, heart, feelings, holistic views, imagination, subjective experiences, philosophical and abstract thought...none of which are strictly cognitive in nature. Artists know this, as do most people when they love someone, and many traders employ these abilities, as they have found that purely mechanical cognitive methods don't always produce the best results. If you want to limit yourself to a purely left brain life and left brain conclusions based in limitations, fine by me. If you are content with limited answers to life's questions via limited tools, fine by me. If you have concluded that is the only real world, then that is also fine by me. Love is not cognitive nor intellectually derived, therefore it is not real? How sadly funny. So believe whatever you like. However, if you are pushing that belief systems onto others, passing value judgments and telling them that your beliefs are right, and theirs are wrong, then you are just another preacher on a soap box.
Emotions such as love are real -- real emotions. The emotion does not confirm the existence of the person who is loved, which is the stretch you wish to make in connecting the "feeling" of God with the existence of God. I am not telling people what to think. I am just telling them to think. That's relatively soapbox-free. As for suspending your left brain faculties and focusing primarily on your emotions, feelings, intuition or whatever to interpret your world, I suppose that is exactly what the people who send money to televangelists do, thereby enriching these televangelists and anyone else who wishes to exploit their "open-mindedness."
"The emotion does not confirm the existence of the person who is loved, which is the stretch you wish to make in connecting the "feeling" of God with the existence of God." Who said the emotions connect with God confirm God's existence? That's now what I said at all. I said there is more to life than left brained thinking, and trying to find and know an Unlimited Personality with limited intellect is illogical. You really can't speak about what you don't know. As a failed theist, you have that going for you, but you had a choice to doubt the doubt. Fine by me, but you are in no position to be preaching like a closed minded televangelist to others what "reality" is when it comes to God, or what or how to think when it comes to God. You have your opinion, so? You have your religion, i.e. atheism, others have their beliefs, so? God is not found through intellectual analysis or cognitive thinking about God, as thinking depends on the intellect itself as the deciding what to believe or not believe, and a such is a dependency on limited instruments to evaluate something Unlimited. Illogical. If all the intellect knows is limited values, then that is all it can understand is a limited conclusion. So if you want to limit yourself to that, fine by me.
Then how come you can?! You are seemingly speaking with the authority of someone who breakfasts with God daily, with your self-assured references to what is and what isn't, where God is to be found and where he isn't. Where do you get your authority? As for me being a failed theist, I'm more inclined to regard you as a failed atheist.
I'm not a failed theist...you are. I can speak from my own experiences, you speak from yours as a failed theist. You decided to believe in the doubt, your choice to give up on faith. Your choice to be a failure. Oh sure, you can play the sour grapes thingy, that is what the failed theists usually do. They simply cannot say "It didn't work for me, but maybe it works for them." Nope, nothing rational like that, just sour grapes, smug projection of intellectual superiority and bitterness toward those people who didn't fail with their faith. Since I never tried to be an atheist, nor practiced atheism, I am not a failed atheist... Doh!
Yes, we should try to comprehend. I consider furthering our knowledge, learning, growing, studying, observing as the hallmarks of well-used human intelligence. But the point is that assuming that a God would leave obvious footprints might be overstepping our abilities. We struggle to even comprehend It reminds me when one of the planetary flyby missions went past some of the more interesting Jupiter/Saturn moons like Io. And the head scientist said "we have to rewrite most of what we thought we knew about these moons." I thought, for crying out loud, these are easily observable bodies from our own planet with our massive telescopes. One mission, and we have to rewrite the books? I would say more like, even given the footprints, we probably would ignore them.
The world operates under a thought system that is unintelligible to God. It's that far from reality. And God's system is unintelligible to the world and what builds it. You can use divergent computer operating systems as a parable. And there is a Link that allows the systems to communicate. Maybe you run Linux. Someone else might run Windows. HTTP is the linking protocol. So how do we move from one system to the other? You depend on quiet moments in which you invite the truth into your mind and listen. These are pleasant, but not distractions. They are powerful. These are the most productive use of your time until you are in unbroken communication with the Link between the two thought systems. This Link will teach you all things. And my service to the world involves hooking it up to this Link. At first it takes practice. This is where you can use some faith redirected. Your practicing is the invitation. When the Voice comes, it is unmistakable. And this is your Link between the two incompatible systems. Would you be willing to devote a year to the practice of hearing this Voice? Hmmm.... The alternative is to use whatever faculties you have at your disposal. Beware, however, these faculties are what's left after having already disposed of most of your mind's thinking capacity. The ability to reason is your best asset among these faculties. It leads in the direction of truth. If you ponder truth in a way that you devote some intention to accept it and believe it...it means you want it. If you want it, it will come. Jesus
Man does not live on Wheaties alone. I would that the whole world would get their daily bread this way. So long as you are in this world, you do not communicate with our Father directly except in experience I will call revelation. The Voice you can hear daily is His appointed Voice linking two thought systems that are otherwise unable to communicate. Consider this Voice the Voice-for-God-for-you. I came to teach the world to listen, but somehow it got lost in translation. What else could we expect from a world built upon breaking communication? So here is a short recap on how to up-link. Be still and listen to the truth today. This involve the laying aside of all other voices. As a rule of thumb, this means anything you normally think, or the opinions of anyone who is dead. Walk lightly past their meaningless persuasion Such thoughts are like thunder that drowns out the Voice of truth. Hear and be silent. Say to yourself, "I will be still and listen to the truth". Hear Him today, and listen to the Word which lifts the veil that lies upon the earth, and wakes all those who sleep and cannot see. Spend five minutes, spend an hour...as long as it takes. Ask this question and expect an answer: What does it mean to give and to receive? Your request is one whose answer has been waiting long to be received by you. In the answer, expect salvation. Be ready for salvation. The answer will begin the ministry for which you came, and which will free the world from thinking giving is a way to lose. The Voice comes with miracles a thousand times as happy and as wonderful as those you ever dreamed or wished for in your dreams. These miracles end the dream you dream, showing you the truth that lasts forever. Listen with an open mind...a mind that has not already told you what salvation is. Then you will hear the mighty Voice of truth, quiet in power, strong in stillness, and completely certain in Its messages. Listen today, and you will hear a Voice which will resound throughout the world through you. The bringer of all miracles has need that you receive them first, and become the joyous giver of what you received. In this way does salvation start and end...when everything is yours and everything is given away, it will remain with you forever. Jesus