Hating Reason?

I told a good Internet friend of mine the other day that I hate moralising. I had just reasoned, fairly cogently, I think, in defence of the people who did not condemn outright the murder of one of three or so prominent American abortion doctors. And I hated it. I hated that I could come up with that reason; I hated that I could see a light under which I found that reasoning compelling. I hated my empathy. I hated, I think, reason itself. But I couldn't find a good reason to justify my hatred.

And that wasn't the first time I hated reason. I generally love reasoning and thinking about all sorts of things largely because the rudimentaries come easy to me and I think I am fairly good at it. In my teens I relished the chance to go online, read things, and spar with others. Back then, my biggest concern was thinking through my beliefs, trying to find ways to defend them, and trying to make corrections where needed. I'd pretend that human justifications are stricly rational, even if some of the premisses are hidden or something. I'd argue strongly for objectivity and absolutism, and against subjectivity and relativism. I'd think that finding a single, apparently irrefutable argument against a system should've been enough for someone to drop that system right there.

It's very different today. I still generally believe in objective truth and that the subjectivity is in experience, but I've been almost compelled to focus, it feels, more on the subjectivity of experience than the objectivity of the truth. I still enjoy reasoning to conclusions from premisses and discovering wonderful new things I didn't know. And I still learn sobering things that contradict what I believe and force me to change. But right now, I'm really, really preoccupied with some frustrating things about reason.

I sometimes hate the finality of reason. I hate how unavoidable some conclusions are because of certain premisses. At the same time, I hate the uncertainty of the finality of reason. There's always this thought near the back of my head that I could just be missing that piece of information or two that would drastically change the picture. Just because I've been checking and rechecking my working several times a month for the last seven years doesn't mean that I'm right. Maybe I'm forgetting something. Maybe I never knew it.

And perhaps most of all, I really hate what these things mean for my personal morality. When I was younger, I understood and accepted many of the moral teachings of my faith. But it was a sort of distant understanding. These things are plain, I thought. I get them and they're easy. I know people are different -- different people are tempted in different ways; but why do people still repeatedly do such wrong things when the moral imperative against them is so obvious and undeniable?

Well, today, I don't think I understand those things much less than I did then, but there are new pieces of things to consider. Hahaha. I now know firsthand why people do wrong things even when all their powers of reason tell them they're wrong. And it's exceedingly frustrating how good I've become at making excuses and crafting explanations. Although I find the existence of an objective ethic compelling, I find it hard to condemn people for almost anything. It's as though I think people's weakness is excuse enough to not demand good of them.

But, as you can imagine, I don't really think that.

And I feel as though this entry was crap.