I reflect on myself again and again to see if any nonsense has crept into my thoughts. I try to be rigorous and commit myself to the axioms of logic. A statement cannot be true and not true at the same time. If it is, then the statement is not precise. Occasionally, however, there are contradictions. For example, I believe in an omnibenevolent and omipotent God. This contradicts the existence of suffering in this world. However, I am aware of this contradiction and know that either the omnibenevolence, the omnipotentce or the reality of the suffering of the world must be wrong. I just don’t commit myself to which assumption is wrong. Whereby I tend to drop omnipotence.

In everyday and practical life, however, things are different. In reality, there are phenomena such as “positive psychology” or “placebo” in a non-religious environment, or “proclamation” in a religious one. These are statements that demonstrably have an effect, but must be regarded as logically incorrect because they contradict current reality. These speeches are described as performative in speech act theory. This judges a speech based on its effect. However, this happens in the same language. And people correctly adhere to these statements.

Let’s assume we have two people. The Performer and the Logician. The performer says, “If you really believe in it, then you can do it” and the Logician objects that this is not correct. If the Logician has no sense of humor or understanding of performance, he will say: “Believe firmly that you want to be alive and dead at the same time. You can’t do that.” And of course, the Performer’s statement is logically incorrect. But the Performer also has something to criticize about the Logician. If the logician says: “The universe is almost unimaginably bigger than me and my existence has a negligible impact on the entire universe.” The performer would criticize that these statements have a negative impact on the person. And both are right. Logically speaking, we have no problem there.

We only have to judge based on our values which statements we can hold at the same time. I, personally, try to classify statements according to whether they are performative or logical and therefore sometimes accept contradictions because their claim is different. For example, the above-mentioned omnipotence and omnibenevolence is not just a purely logical statement (although it is), but also a performative one. If I believe that God has these qualities, then this influences my world view and my optimism. That’s why I don’t want to give up any of these concepts because their performance is important to me.

So why not simply move the whole area of religion into performative language? Because reality has the strongest performance. True statements have power. No matter what government or force fights against them, the truth persists. If a performative statement is also true, it becomes practically unshakable and reliable. I believe that religion is not a collection of performative statements, but an attempt to unite the two worlds of language. Thus, statements about God appear vague and mysterious, but statements about the consequences of wrong behavior are vivid.

The only value of truth is that it makes the statement more performant. Correct predictions of events are only relevant if we can adapt our behavior to the prediction. By that, I mean, if we as humanity have no performance, we will become extinct. If we have no truth, we may lose some of our performance.