My answers and other general philosophical meanderings

Your words:

I guess, trying to flesh out my thoughts here, I saw in your original post what I believed to be a "pragmatic" approach to all of life. I could be wrong but that is how it appeared to me. In simpler terms it sounded like you were saying, "Hey, if it works for you then believe it!" That is why it conjured up in my mind Pascals Wager. Now I personally think pragmatism is wrong, so I would never use such an argument, but I thought it drew good application to what it sounded like you were saying. To me, trying to think from the pragmatic ways of things, Pascals Wager does appear to be the most pragmatic approach to life.

My response:
I don't really think most believers think Pascal's wager is a good proof of the existence of their god, or that they treat it as good evidence of their belief. I think it more or less comes across, at least to me, as an expression of the perceived futility of non-belief. Does that make sense?

Some more of your words:

Anyway, on to something that I suppose is more relevant to both of us. It goes back to what I originally asked and a statement you made in your latest blog.
"The insurance policy that you are suggesting that I buy doesn't cover all the possible eventualities, much less the primary one that the evidence of nature supports, that we just simply exist and should make the best of what we have."
So is our view of nature purely pragmatic also? How do we really know if any of this stuff actually exists. How do we know if our conception of nature is real or imagined, or is all that matters is that my conception works for me? In other words, how you understand nature is simply a metaphysical concept in your mind. Are you saying that it really doesn't matter whether that concept reflects what is real or not, so long as it "works for me"?

My Response:
I've figured out that there is a whole lot out there that I don't really comprehend all that well at all. To put it in more precise terms, My modes of perception and integrating data place hard limits on my ability to accept input and integrate that input in a way that accurately models reality. I like certain models and dislike others. A few things that I've figured out, about myself at least:
1) I don't like changing my model of reality.
2) I don't like it when my model of reality proves to be inconsistent with how I perceive reality. To put that in more concrete terms, if I've decided in my head that "X is true", and things happen that make it pretty dang obvious that "X really isn't all that true at all", I find it extremely upsetting.
I may be weird or crazy, but I can't live with that inconsistency when I see it. It weighs on me. Part of who and what I am is that I work at that point to figure out a way to either revise my mental model, or what pieces need throwing away, or if I need to throw it away entirely.

I'm a pragmatist, Jason, mostly because my lack of pragmatism has been violated more than once. I accept what works, and reject those things that I see as not working, mostly just simply because I don't know how to do otherwise. Here is an example of my pragmatism: If someone were in a fairly pragmatic way able to show me that christianity provides a more accurate conception of reality than anything else, I'd accept it as true. Here is another weird result of my pragmatic idea. If someone's christianity leads them to make choices in how they interact with their environment that helps them and those they love flourish in that environment, it doesn't matter if the christianity(or any other religion or worldview or personal philosophical construct) is correct or not. It may even be a character flaw on my part that I can't be like that(flourish as a christian while knowing that christianity isn't real, simply because it'd be a good way to cope with a very christianized environment), but I don't know how to be other than what I am.

So if you tell me that prayer works, I want to see it work in a way that is clearly, obviously the result of prayer, and not the side effect of some other process. Sorry, but at this point I don't think that you or anyone else can do that in any meaningful way. If you say that your god is real, and that it/he loves me, I'm fine with that, but I want to see consistent evidence of that, that I can point to, and see as working in a consistent manner. Hasn't happened so far, hehe.