"this is why i'm not NOT a theist - and if you'd understood kant and schopenhauer properly, you'd be just the same," suggests bryan magee

"I have little intellectual patience with people who think they know that there is no God, and no life other than this one, and no reality outside the empirical world. Some such atheistic humanism has been one of the characteristic outlooks of Western man since the Enlightenment, and is particularly common among able and intelligent individuals. It is the prevailing outlook, I suppose, in most of the circles in which I have moved for most of my life. It lacks all sense of the mystery that surrounds and presses so hard on our lives: more often than not it denies its existence, and in doing so is factually wrong. It lacks any real understanding that human limitations are drastic, in that our physical apparatus must inevitably mould and set very narrow bounds to all that can ever be experience for us - and therefore that our worldview is almost certainly paltry, in that most of what there is almost certainly lies outside it. It is complacent, in that it takes as known what is is impossible we should ever know. It is narrow and unimaginative, in that it disregards the most urgent questions of all. I think that I, like Kant, would go so far as to say that it is positively mistaken in believing that there is no reality outside the empirical realm when we know that there must be, even if we can have no proper understanding of it. Altogether, it is a hopelessly inadequate worldview from several different standpoints simultaneously; and yet it is one that tends to identify with rationality as such, and to congratulate itself on its own sophistication. Throughout my life I have found most of its adherents unable to understand that truly rational considerations lead to quite different conclusions. Such people tend on the contrary to take it for granted that anyone who adopts a different view from theirs does so from a standpoint of inadequate, or inadequately rational, reflection or intelligence - perhaps blinkered by convention, or religion, or superstition, or irrationalist beliefs of some more modern kind; or just plain muddle-headedness, if not thoughtlessness. Their attitude is what Schopenhauer called 'shallow-pated rationalism'. I have found that because its adherents identify it with rationality - and rationality with truth and enlightenment - everything said in rejection of it is misunderstood by them, supposed to come from a standpoint that is not arrived at, and cannot be defended, rationally."

from Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher (see also his remarks about Jesus and main post).