Convince me to believe

[If my soul was made of stone]

It's important to hold a critical perspective regarding the institutions and principles that men have created to surround faith, but not to let it color the root of one's faith. If you want to hold earnest and uncritical faith, you must find love for the divine and cultivate it, ground yourself in it. From there you will find the will to believe with your rational faculties what your instincts know, and for you to better understand your relationship to the ways that we honor divinity and carry out its will.

I can only speak from my own experience, but this is how I crossed the gap between desiring faith and holding faith.

[If my soul was made of stone]

No system of metaphysical belief can be entirely justified through sophistic logical chicanery or what is perceived to be objective empirical evidence. Ultimately, all such beliefs rest in some form on faith and irrationality, as we are imperfect beings without the knowledge afforded to gods and irrational beings driven by instinct and passion that are not meant to hold it. It is affirming to except a degree of epistemic subjectivity in the meanings of what one deems resonant. I'm told that it's my schizotypy that makes me perceive additional layers of meaning in what are typically considered mundane occurrences, but I have always felt that this diagnosis is as much the pathologization of non-conformity and non-linearity of the sort once associated with spiritual insight as one of genuine distress and disorder, and there is a transcendent healing force in finding such meaning in the world around me.

The idea that any system of such belief is uniquely rational or empirically verifiable is thus ridiculous to me, and what makes debates like these so tedious and vacant (assuming, of course, that one's belief genuinely stems from that rather than using it as an ex post facto justification for one's irrational belief, which is a pointless exercise in disguising one's own nature and motivations that warrants cutting the middleman). Rational ideas can obviously be derived from one's instinctual first principles, but such axioms cannot themselves be justified by what they beget. We can find evidence in the world around us for our beliefs, but it is just as subject to our priors and means of perception as the beliefs that lead us to forge those connections of meaning.