How Believing in an Afterlife Can Ruin Your Life

[Felasco]

Rationality becomes something only of service to something better: full perception.

I'm not sure I fully understand yet, and will welcome further elaboration of your point if you care to share it.

For now, I'll respond to what I think I heard, and you can correct me if I heard wrong.

If by "full perception" you mean "an accurate understanding of reality" then it seems reasonable to question whether this would always be the ultimate value to pursue. We can start by questioning whether any of us have an accurate understanding of reality to share.

Human beings have a very sophisticated imagination system, which like any feature, would seem to have evolved for a reason. And to be clear, by human beings I mean all human beings, not those other human beings over there.

If a child or aging parent is dying, we will likely tell them anything that will ease their suffering and make the transition easier. We're unlikely to stand over the bed and say, "You're just a piece of meat that will soon be rotting in the ground."

If that seems sensible to readers, then there's only one more point to understand.

We're all dying. We're all weak, vulnerable, and when we dig down through all the sophisticated layers of psychological defenses, scared.

It would be understandable if readers in their twenties might not understand this, because of course they are immortal, and will never have to face any of these issues.

[chaz wyman]

Rationality becomes something only of service to something better: full perception.

It's a nice thought, but an empty one. Rationality is not enough. Sit is a dark room and think all you like. Or like Descartes you can sit in the fireplace, keep warm and think about what is an is not the case.
What you end up with is a system of thought. Descartes thought up Co-ordinate geometry. Thanks Descartes. But not much to do with the perception of what is real, in any sense.
Idealists and Empiricists tended to win through in the end. But the real achievement is to do rationality, through empiricism and taking full account of the means by which all knowledge is filtered through the perception and interpreted through a system of interpretive expectation (Idealism) is the road to wisdom.