I get what you’re saying, and I agree there’s a real tension between logic and faith.
Logic is built to prove things, but it always has to start somewhere, definitions and assumptions. In that sense, even logic begins by accepting something before it can “prove” anything. Faith can feel like the opposite because it doesn’t primarily exist to provide proof the way logic does. It’s more like a lived trust and a journey into meaning, transformation, and relationship.
To me, faith is a journey toward the heart, but it often starts in the head. We try to understand it logically, rationalize it, and turn it into rules. And that’s where religion can get itself into trouble, because logic is often too binary for the complexity of human motives and spiritual life.
For example: one church eats certain foods and gives thanks; another abstains prayerfully. What’s the “correct” rule? Who is the “Satan” if one eats or doesn’t eat? That’s the danger of stopping too early in the journey: when faith becomes mostly rules,definition and boundary making, disagreement easily becomes moralized into “I’m working for God, therefore you must be working for Satan.” And once someone is labeled “Satan,” the next steps you described accusation, escalation, holy war logic, start to feel “consistent” inside that system.
But I don’t think the deepest spiritual divide is usually in the action itself. I think it’s in the direction underneath it. If I had to use a logical analogy, it’s almost closer to a quantum model than a purely binary rulebook: there are many outward activities, but the “spin” underneath them tends to fall into one of two directions.
- Up-spin: agape selfless love, gratitude, humility, and seeking the good of the other
- Down-spin: love without agape, fear, coercion, exclusion, control, hatred, or “love with strings attached”
So the church that eats certain foods can be operating in the up-spin if they’re doing it in sincere gratitude and selfless love. And the church that abstains can also be operating in the up-spin if they’re doing it to honor God with humility and love. In that sense, both can be “right” even while doing opposite things, because the holiness isn’t ultimately in the food, but in the love.
But if a church guilts people into compliance, threatens exclusion, or demands submission through fear, then even if the rule is “technically correct,” the spirit underneath it is a down-spin. That’s where faith becomes distorted into something that looks logical on paper but produces division in real life.
On limbo: I see it less as an attempt to force faith into logic, and more as people trying to answer a painful unknown because it matters deeply to them. In that sense it reminds me of Paul at times giving guidance while acknowledging the limits of certainty, “I, Paul, not the Lord…”, where he’s not claiming perfect knowledge, but still trying to teach responsibly out of love. It’s imperfect, but it’s an attempt to care for people when the question feels unbearable.
And I think this is why faith can look irrational from the outside: if you only observe religious people behaving in contradictory ways, and some seem full of compassion while others seem full of control, you don’t have a clear basis to “decode” what faith even is. But if agape is the center, then the pattern becomes visible.
In my own life, that’s what makes the journey real: receiving and learning to live in agape. Without that, faith just looks like competing rule systems. With it, the “logic” of faith becomes clearer, not as a cold proof, but as a consistent movement toward selfless love.