Why secularists despise emotional faith.

There is a secular assumption that the dispassionate belief, is always more likely to be correct. The scientific method dictates that one should be detached from their experiments to prevent bias and secularists reason that this detachment ought to follow in all aspects of life. The best choice is made, argues the secularist, when it is made by logic alone, without the passionate irrationality of faith, love and wish. The “solae rationes” (by rationalism alone) of the secularist metaphysic is especially experienced in the realm of faith and religion. Although its teeth can also be used elsewhere they are most often borne against the metaphysical claims of religiousists. While the dispassionate view might be the best way to answer the riddles of chemistry or biology, it plays a distinct second fiddle to all the realms of human experience. The best choices are not made on the basis of numb rationality, nor should we try to divorce completely our emotional and spiritual content from our decision making process. To do so would make one less than human.
In the emotional world many secularists will freely admit this. Imagine choosing a mate based only on financial security, the compatibility of sets of in laws and similar personalities; without ever considering if you are in love. Imagine if decisions in the world of poetry, literature and music were made only on the basis of hard mathematical rationality, and were not dependant on emotional states. Imagine a world where Jackson Pollock created art based on marketability and sales research instead of drawing on the despair and hope he experienced in his life. A world such of this would be cold, rational and bleak. Even among the most hardened skeptics and secularists, emotional content is still valued, but when it comes to the subject of religious faith allowing emotions to play a role in decision making is scorned as weakness.
In some ways it’s the same old story. Make religious faith an outsider, allow a different set of criteria for faith, and then ridicule anyone who has it. The assumption is that the person who makes a dispassionate conversion (presumably after a long night of studying Greek texts and meditating on the apparent contradictions between quantum physics and general relativity) makes an “honest” conversion. The secularist typically still sees this conversion as being odd for a man of learning, but it is at least more acceptable. In contrast the drug addict who out of the despair and depth of his pain and cries out for Jesus simply is using religion as a crutch, because he has allowed his emotional pain and anguish to help in determining his faith. It was precisely out of a drug induced despair that Pollack (mentioned above) created his masterful art, why then should not the convert be allowed a similar habitat of angst from which to create a work of art; e.g. his personal faith.
The answer is simple; there is a stricter criterion for religious faith than for just about anything else. No one balks at Plato or Bohr for trying to find absolute answers to existence through reason, nor do they find their dander raised when Goya or Poe utilize emotional pain or even mental illness to create works of great art. But if the religious man uses either reason or emotion, or more often a combination of the two, to decide his faith he is seen as a fool. The immediate response from the skeptic to the religious man’s acceptance of faith is that in a time of weakness he reached for a crutch that the strong minded man would have rejected.
Let your faith be art, let it be science, let it be spirit and emotion and life. Draw on the same reserve of emotion, mystery and rationalism that created “Starry Night” and that split the atom. Let no one despise you for having an emotional faith, but rather question their coldness to matters of the heart.

Peace be with you all