I can certainly choose to buy into someone ELSE'S priorities and view of existence... but why the hell would I want to do that? If nothing can be proven to be true, at least now I'm a coherent person, a congruent person, with my inner and outer aligned. Before I was living a fractured existence, with an incongruent identity; I was a fake even by my own standards.
I think it would be different if we could conclusively say that a particular deity was provable and true, vs another. But we can't.
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This puts you in a very different position from one who has a deep-rooted faith, because even the process of questioning it would in this case mean more that they sought to understand the true meaning behind the apparently contradictory information they had about that deity - to try to discern the will and purpose of God and make them more comprehensible.
Like I said, that's how I spent the first 20-25 years of my life. I was very devout, very sincere, very faithful... but very tormented by the inconsistencies.
At some point, where you're faced with increasing cognitive dissonance, you have to reevaluate and decide if your initial framework is actually wrong and you have to start from scratch.
So that is what I did. The old model was no longer salvageable IMO and at that point it takes an act of courage to scrap it, take shit from all the other people who now label you as an apostate, and start over.
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In view of what you've said here, and a lot of other stuff I've seen you say elsewhere, I'm a little unsure why you bother holding on to the "Christian" part of your identity. You might be culturally and by background a Christian (perhaps this is why you hold on to it) but your own beliefs seem pretty much wholly agnostic at this stage. You haven't exactly rejected faith outright, but appear largely dismissive of its relevance to how you live now.
You're totally right in that the two can be at war at each other. I'm only human and I tend to flip around and around within them, back and forth. I think it's also pretty evident in my personality even on this forum, where I probably seem to swing between social compassion and detached self-reliance; people can't tell whether I'm T or F sometimes, it's hard to get a bead on me, I suppose. I think life can be viewed through both lenses simultaneously, although there might seem to be a radical difference between both views.
I can relate to you a lot in some ways, as far as the struggle.
Though I was raised basically in an agnostic atmosphere, but influenced by old-school Christianity through older relatives and others, yet then determined it was all ridoculous when I entered teens in the 80's and saw the politically active preachers and their moral-political ideologies and attacks on science, and how it was all meshed together into this grand "truth" that they had a lock on, and the "enemies" of God opposed.
I ended up embracig parts of it in my 20's, because the non-christian world turned out to be disillusioning and hypocritical as well, especially for someone with AS, who has trouble fitting in.
Still, I encountered all of the unanswered qustions that Christians try to gloss over, especially regarding why life is allowed to remain in this supposedly "fallen" state seemingly forever, with everyone around me supposedly goping to Hell, and I was supposed to help get them saved somehow ("witness" and/or "pray for them") and when the "new world" was supposed to begin "soon" after the Bible was written.
So I ended up modifying the views after I discivered a view that seems to better explain many of those things.
Comprehensive Grace - Tim King
The condemnation that leads to Hell was a product of the dispensation of Law (What is commonly called the "Old Covenant"), and it ended when the Temple was destroyed in AD70 (which was "soon", relatively, from that age), and in the NT period, the two covenants overlapped, so grace was available, but you had to believe (and obey) to receive it and come from under the condemnation of the Law.
Once the system of Law was completely removed, symbolically, then grace spread to all, God withdrew special revelation (signs/wonders/miracles) and apparently, also direct guidance of the Church, which as we see history shows, spiralled rapidly out of control after the first century.
So this explains
everything. Why no miracles anymore, why no return of Christ (there may have been a visible appearance in AD70, and the antichrist and all those other figures were also people from that period).
Of course, it doesn't prove that any of this is true to begin with, but even with that, it again softens that fact that there is no more clear proof to make people belive to "save" them. (Christians often appeal to Romans chapter 1 and 2 and claim there is enough evidence in conscience, nature, and "general revelation", but that just didn't seem to do it for me and anyone I've tried to witness to. So it was like a big slap in the face when it all seems so hard to believe at times, even when we desperately seek).
So if nothing more; my one prayer is that this is true, and that it is not Hell for nearly all, or complete nothingness after death.
As for type, your personal introspection does look so much like INFP/Fi, especially the part about congruence and inconsistency.
But I can see the Ti perspective ultimately under it ("frameworks", etc. and Ti actually deals in consistency also, of course, though it is more logically focused).
Looks like the "Crows Nest" shift, when under stress, and Ti doesn't solve the problem, and it is replaced directly by Fi. Also, you did come out heavily Supine in the ICA temperament discussions, and that will also make a T seem more F-ish. And then, to have to go against an environment that was more religious than mine, and in directions more radical.
