Many years ago was a typical materialist, science and debate bro (half of Reddit lol) who went down the regular path of existential anguish that is pretty normalized in todays youth, failing to deal with the problem of the absurd. Various philosophers grapple with this (Sartre, Camus, nietzsche). I found them to be pretty lackluster and I always much favored epistemology as the real meat-and-bones of philosophy.

I was so opposed to dogmatic thought I was enforcing my own kind of dogma of scientism and materialism that I wasn’t self-aware enough to realize. After my epistemology graduated to a slightly less amateur understanding I started to really appreciate other philosophers such as kierkegaard or William James as truly quite genius. James proposed an epistemology compatible with religion, kierkegaard was the only philosopher so far that made sense of the absurd and I found his subjective method of communication to be extremely captivating.

Tuning in to, and not dismissing my subjective experiences, along with plenty of advice from kierkegaard lead to me developing a relationship with god.

I eventually took that one step further and dismissed the Bible being the necessary word of god as being another speculative notion which kierkegaard also discussed. Kierkegaard always took Christianity as a given, but I never did, so Christianity was less permanent to me. Ultimately I just try to have a lasting relationship with god, and generally consider the dominant features spanning religion without particular attention to detail, I think kierkegaard would condone if not approve.

Anyways, TLDR: the pragmatic dialectic weakened me from arrogant debate bro, kierkegaard (properly) introduced me to Christianity and religion, eventually just became religious over speicifically Christian.

Yeah, you’re misinterpreting his argument. Speculative reason as in objective reason (Descartes, hegel). I don’t know what the etymology behind that is but it’s not equivalent to colloquial speculation.

Again, I’d read his argument before judging prematurely. His whole point is faith in god shouldn’t be “based on evidence” so you’re not in disagreement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_reason

Faith is practically the opposite of speculative reason, are you aware of what speculative reason actually means? It’s not what you might colloquially infer, if that’s what your argument. Either way I would probably consider his argument before casting judgement.

And I truly believe his is the only ultimately sustainable path towards religion, it seems the rationalist path to Christianity has somewhat slipped its foothold whereas submitting to faith is as strong as ever. Kierkegaard is the only major philosopher so far that paints a favorable path towards religion in my opinion, I was lifelong atheist and converted when I read him. I wouldn’t call myself a christian anymore but he definitely left a permanent impression.

He believed it was wrong to stake your highest passions on speculative reasons and world-historical based or institutional interpretations on the Bible, both of which were prone to revision and cut out the subjectivity of the action in itself. I think those ideas have aged very well in the coming of Christendom