What is Reddit's opinion of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion?

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My boss would love this comment with or without context...

No a lot of my tonality right now is coming from the book I am listening to regarding morality. I am not normally this introspective. Essentially what I am doing is taking what I think and feel about this then run it through what I've learned from the book and then reanalyzed it and responded with that.

I am not too far from a toddler learning how to walk I might get a few steps right but I'm probably going to fall down pretty quickly and not have any idea how that happened whereas everyone else it would have been plainly obvious.

Edit, the book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008OEMNNQ

It looks like you put a lot of credence into faith. This may depend a bit on how you define faith, but some amount of faith is always necessary. There are always areas in any persons worldview where they have gaps in there knowledge or uncertainty. In a way you have to use faith to fill those gaps, if you are going to believe anything you've got to put some faith in the hope that you are right despite the fact that you will never know everything. This is how I use the word "faith" anyway.

So while I've said this and acknowledge that it is absolutely necessary, I should point out that there isn't anything particularly useful about faith. Faith isn't a tool to be used to get closer to truth because faith has no loyalty, faith can be used to believe in anything, which is exactly how it's used. I've got to put faith in some things, but I don't give myself points for having faith; I give myself points for filling those gaps with actual knowledge so I can have less faith.

Perhaps you would define faith differently than I do, and so please clarify if you think the way I'm using it could be improved but the fact remains that if someone is trying to find truth and another person recommends adding some faith along with their own intuitions to help find truth, well, they would be giving bad advice. I can't think of a definition of "faith" that would make this a useful thing to do. Instead I would tell them to do as much research and ask as many questions as they can and make an as informed position as possible. Even so they could still end up making a mistake, which, I guess, is why you invoke divine assistance.

I've spent a lot of time arguing how people all think so differently, and that we aren't guaranteed to get to truth no matter how hard we try, because I feel this poses a significant difficulty to anyone who thinks we need to believe a certain thing in order to fulfill our purpose, or get into an afterlife. This problem is potentially solved by introducing divine assistance, however I would like to introduce yet another problem: Even with divine assistance, we still have to filter that assistance through our own fallible minds in order to interpret what the divine is telling us. We can still make mistakes like thinking we have been divinely told something when we haven't, which is something that actually happens... In order to save this idea, I think it's necessary to just suppose that if someone does the best they can to seek truth in God, then God will reveal the truth to that person in a way where that person will know that they have found the truth.

This implies that there is something you have to do to earn grace, because if you have not found that grace then clearly you are doing something wrong. If someone hasn't found God then either they are being dishonest or they have failed some sort of test and have not earned access to that truth. So why haven't I found that truth? Is it possible that there is something more I could do? Perhaps I have not really done the best I can... well I think that is true, but has anyone really done the BEST that they can? I thought that was the point, that we were imperfect. So maybe I am being dishonest, well as far as you can know that is a possibility, but you have to deal with the fact that there are many people who claim to seek God and don't find him, and personally, I think this fits well with the theory that the world is a mystery. And because people are so different, we all see different things, and feel different things.

I think that there may be a God, but I think there are some answers He simply doesn't give us, clearly He made this world for us to figure things out ourselves. And maybe I am wrong about that, and that could be dangerous if some of the things you believe are correct, but there is only so much room for doubt. At the end of the day I must use faith to believe that I have a reasonable picture of the world while gently testing that against alternate information when I can.

You suggest reading the Bible, I'm sure I'll return to it and give it some reading once in a while, although, oddly enough, even when I was still a Christian I felt like I got more from God directly than I did from the Bible. I may give your book suggestion a try too, the evidence regarding the resurrection is something I'd like to know more about. If I were to give a book suggestion it would definitely be The Righteous Mind, which isn't really an argument for or against anything you believe, but it is a very informative(and easy) read about the subtleties and mistakes we can make when we strongly believe we are right.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.