This is a really great article. It’s surprising to me why this isn’t taken as a reductio ad absurdum of the materialist position. If we follow their logic to its inevitable conclusion we find the self doesn’t exist, is an illusion or a useless by-product of brain processes.

But then some people accept the conclusion without apparently asking who or what is accepting it? So I think it’s right to say James isn’t proposing an agnosticism that can’t know rationally, but a rational judgement about the limits of rationality itself.

It leads us logically to mysticism, which isn’t some vague out of touch feeling but the very concrete act of what to do when we get out of bed each morning. What to value, what to pursue and what experience or state of being those repeated actions create.

And I don’t think our modern experience of finding traditional religion difficult to inhabit is an intellectual problem, but rather a habit created by ways of thinking and acting. A secular society isn’t neutral, it forces us to adopt certain ways of interacting with each other and removes our shared metaphysics, which is just to say our shared sense of what reality “means”. We are all, in that sense, adrift in our own little worlds.

And while I will interpret Christianity in an overly liberal way, I admire it’s necessary sense of human connection and collaboration, that we're all “brothers and sisters” in Christ, the bringing forth of the divine into this world, into it’s biological flesh. Ultimately lofty and ultimately grounded at the same time.