When I told an astrologer friend that I was reading Aristotle, he told me that Aristotle started the meanness that has been ongoing in the Western civilization. The confusion there is one between the value and the misuses of the value. Aristotle invented a system of logic. Logic is not a bad thing at all. It becomes bad when it gets misused to commit emotional violence.
In fact, many of the people who use logic that way can be easily shown to be illogical. We see this for example with Freudians. These people think that children are in love with the parent of the opposite gender, and that love in adulthood is transference of these feelings. This can be logically shown to be wrong. At the time of Freud there were few single-parent households and homosexuals to study; now there are plenty of them. And what we find again and again, is that women raised by single mothers, men raised by single fathers, homosexuals raised by the parent of opposite gender, and people raised without either parent, fall in love just as readily as do the people who are raised in nuclear families.
Since these people don’t have a transference figure, their feelings cannot be transference.
Finally, since the feelings developed by people raised in the nuclear families are of the same character as theirs, their feelings cannot be transference either.
So we have people thinking that romantic love is irrational. I have known highly rational people – including scientists, teachers, inventors and military personnel – who started their matches with romantic love and are still going strong when they are in their 90s. These people are far more rational and responsible than people who militate against love. And it is they that should be setting the tone for man-woman relationships.
When I was writing about my spiritual experiences, people were claiming me to be illogical. That is wrong. I have had experiences with less than a billionth chance of happening whose only possible explanations are spiritual. I would have to be completely psychotic to deny these experiences. When faced with an experience that contradicts the worldview, the logical thing to do is not to deny the experience but to correct the worldview.
So we have people claiming that one must live “on Earth.” These people have an inadequate view of what is Earth. The Earth is not just its crust. It is also the molten metal in the center, the oceans and atmosphere at the top, and all the life that lives on it. The people who see only the crust do ignorant things. And it sometimes takes a reasoned argument from a perspective that they haven’t considered to correct their errors.
I am not against logic, and I am not against science. Both are important pursuits, and a lot is owed to both. I am however against bigotry, whether it is done in the name of religion or in the name of logic. The people who think such things as that romantic love or spiritual experience are irrational are not being logical, they are being bigoted. And it then takes a strongly reasoned argument, that they cannot claim to be illogical, to correct their errors.
Logic is a useful tool, and I highly recommend that people learn how to use it correctly. What I do not recommend is that it be used to attack such things as romantic love and spiritual experience. Misuses of the value discredit the value itself. This then feeds irrational ideologies. And the person who truly respects logic will respect it enough not to use it to do wrong things.