Speaking personally, I do my best to reconcile a spiritual practice and spiritual beliefs, which I believe are separate from empirical truth, with an intellectu

Speaking personally, I do my best to reconcile a spiritual practice and spiritual beliefs, which I believe are separate from empirical truth, with an intellectual rigor about the latter. Again, this something I apsire to, not always achieve. This is a complex topic, and I think a little orthogonal to the main point I was making, and also Nadia's essay. For some reason, the story of the Mormon archaeologists such as Thomas Stuart Ferguson comes to mind - they had to struggle to reconcile these two poles (which were in strong tension), and for the most part ended up keeping their cultural ties to the church while feeling a loss of their personal religious faith.