When I was at the university, I had a roommate who was a Rush Limbaugh Republican. He was an accomplished saxophone player, and he said that the other music students were liberals because they were thinking with their emotions.
Yet these are the same people who think that people who do not have regular human emotions are “sociopaths” – cold inhuman monsters lacking a conscience.
You need to make up your mind. Are feelings good or are feelings bad?
When something that has prevalence among people gets attacked, that thinking needs to be challenged. If something is bad, why is it there at all? If we have evolved then our feelings have evolved for the benefit of the species; and if we have been created then they are there by divine design.
And if our nature is fallen or of the Satan? Then that extends to everything human, including such things as reason and survival and status concerns. In either case these things are equal – either in mutual virtue or in mutual sin.
I choose neither to damn nor extoll either reason or feelings. I believe that both can be good and bad. I advocate having proficiency in both. That way, the two sides check each other in their capacities for wrong while combining with one another to achieve wisdom faster and fuller than through either acting alone.
Reason has prevalence among people as well; and I do not see it as a bad thing. I see reason as a tool. Tools are what you are using them for. If you use reason to design machinery or conduct scientific inquiry then you are doing the right thing with your reason. If you are using it to abuse or control people then you are not doing the right thing with it at all.
Abuses of a value discredit the value itself. So we have a bunch of anti-rational ideologies. These are wrong as well. The problem is not with reason but with abuses of reason. The people who claim the creative, the intuitive and the spiritual to be irrational discredit rationality; which leads many people who have experience such things to turn against rationality itself.
I do not make the same error. Once again, reason and feelings are equal – either in mutual virtue or in mutual sin. In either case, having proficiency in both makes it possible to correct errors in each and combine with each other to achieve fuller wisdom.
Be both passionate and intelligent. And see the two modalities working together achieve greater things than either can by itself.