Spirituality.
10 random takeaways.
1.
Column summary:
Public belief is different from group or personal belief. Public belief is not about identity or loyalty. It is a claim about reality that requires evidence, coherence, and disciplined reasoning. Justification determines how much confidence a public belief deserves. Without justification, public belief remains unsupported.
2.
Quote:
- Michael Alan Prestwood.
- 2018.
From History:
Life is not a static achievement but a process of flourishing. Seek truth to refine your understanding. Practice honor to shape your character. Cause less harm when possible by weighing the impact of your actions. Ethical life is disciplined progress within reality’s constraints.
3.
From History: born circa 604 BCE
By tradition, he lived from 604 to 517 BCE.
To live well in Laozi’s way is to stop fighting the flow of life. The Dao cannot be fully named or controlled, but you can align with it. Practice wu-wei with others by letting them live their way, live naturally through ziran and embrace and flow with your natural life cycle, and let wisdom guide you toward simplicity, balance, and peace.
4.
To live well, let nature and science work together on your soul. Study the cosmos, consciousness, and your place in the whole. Let evidence sharpen wonder, not shrink it. Secular spirituality does not escape reality. It lets reality speak first—and discovers that awe was waiting there all along.
5.
Quote:
- Michael Alan Prestwood.
From History:
Be open to new ideas, but anchor yourself in reality. Examine your framework. Refine it. Test it. The goal is not to defend your lens, but to align it more closely with what is. Intellectual humility begins with recognizing the split between interpretation and the world itself.
6.
From History: Reference Date: 2200 CE (+/- 50 years)
To live well, get ahead of the future in your own lifetime. Do not force religion to fight science, and do not force science to answer every question of meaning. Let empirical claims answer to evidence, rational ideas handle indirect but coherent truths, and spiritual stories help shape identity, morality, suffering, and hope. Then, with humility, let go of the disproven ideas you are ready to release.
7.
From History:
A Rational Pragmatist is mostly grounded in the Grand Rational Framework. They accept science, reason, evidence, and shared reality, but may retain a small set of inherited or personally meaningful beliefs that are not fully verified. In TST, this is the normal pattern for many people: reality-first, but not belief-free.
8.
Quote:
- David Hume.
- 1748.
From History:
A clear thinker does not believe harder just because an idea feels meaningful, familiar, or comforting. Some mysteries deserve wonder, but belief should still be proportional to evidence, logic, testing, and trustworthy guidance. Think well by letting confidence grow only when support earns it.
9.
From History: Spirituality is exploration.
New Look
Spiritual ideas have an agnostic, non-theistic, or theistic posture. They can also be calibrated to reality as empirically true, rationally true, speculative, or disproven. Speculative ideas remain open but unsupported; disproven ideas have failed against reality and should be released as truth.
10.
The Open Viewpoint Method formalizes perspective-taking as a cognitive discipline. Rather than treating viewpoint as a fixed identity, it treats viewpoint as a lens to be tested, shifted, and calibrated. Used well, OVM helps one think well by reducing dogmatism, strengthening humility, and keeping belief accountable to evidence.
The End. Refresh for another set.
TST Trainer
(c) 2025-2026 TouchstoneTruth.
Writing and coding by Michael Alan Prestwood.
(c) 2025-2026 TouchstoneTruth.
Writing and coding by Michael Alan Prestwood.
