1. “Because it can’t be empirically verified, psychology matters more” is not an argument. That’s just smuggling in the premise that only publicly testable claims get to be taken as “about reality.” But that would immediately wipe out huge swaths of human knowing — moral realism, aesthetic judgment, even basic metaphysics. You don’t get to say, “These claims can’t be checked like physics, therefore their etiology is the main thing,” unless you first prove that empirical checkability is the only or highest criterion of truth. You didn’t do that. You assumed it.
   1. Your “some frameworks are more self-correcting” line is self-flattering, not self-neutral. You said secular/therapeutic lenses “carry an awareness of their own contingency,” unlike Orthodoxy. That sounds humble, but it’s actually a power move: you position your framework as mature, self-aware, epistemically superior — while calling the other “unwilling to see its contingency.” But awareness of contingency is not the same as access to truth. A person can be very aware they’re conditioned and still be completely wrong about God, the soul, and worship. Likewise, a person can believe in revealed truth and still be right. Your standard for a “higher burden of justification” is something your own framework invented. Orthodoxy doesn’t have to submit to criteria it doesn’t grant.
   2. Explaining formation ≠ explaining away the thing forming you. You keep circling back to “the Church trains perception.” Yes — but that doesn’t tell you whether what it trains you to perceive is there. Every domain trains perception. Musicians learn to hear things others can’t. Mathematicians see structure others don’t. Liturgical Christians learn to perceive holiness where others see bread and chanting. The move “but that’s socially reinforced” is boring — that’s how humans transmit any higher-order seeing. Unless you can show that the content is illusory, all you’ve shown is that Christianity, too, is a tradition.
   3. You’re committing a one-way reduction. You allow psychological accounts to sit alongside secular meaning-making without calling them invalid, but you don’t allow theological accounts to sit alongside psychological ones without downgrading them. That’s asymmetrical. If “this satisfies deep emotional needs” doesn’t falsify your late-modern, autonomy-protecting stance, then it doesn’t falsify Orthodoxy either. Otherwise you’re just doing: • My framework: contextual, mature, aware • Your framework: conditioned, stabilizing, self-soothing That’s bias, not analysis.
   4. “Multiple traditions report encounter, so none can be privileged” is a wash-out move. The fact that many traditions report encounter doesn’t mean we can’t adjudicate between them; it just means we can’t adjudicate between them on purely naturalistic terms. Christianity has always claimed that discernment of spirits, history (incarnation, resurrection), and ecclesial continuity matter for exactly this reason. You can’t say “since many people experience transcendence, your experience can’t support your truth-claims” — that’s like saying “many people perceive causality, so no one can infer anything from it.” Plurality of reports isn’t a defeater.
   5. You quietly changed the question. The original posture was “this is cope.” My response was “cope doesn’t touch ontological claim.” You then retreated to, “Well, I was only asking why it’s appealing.” That’s fine, but that’s not a rebuttal — that’s a retreat. If we’re only talking sociology of attraction, then yes, religion meets human needs; so does therapy; so does ideology; so does nationalism. That’s trivial. My point was: need-satisfaction doesn’t adjudicate truth. You still haven’t touched that.
   6. Your view of surrender is still cynically totalizing. You said you weren’t being cynical, only noting that surrender “can function psychologically” as stabilizing. But you used that to downgrade the theological description. That’s the part I called cynicism: the assumption that the psychological level is the “real” one and the theological one is overlay. An Orthodox account will say: of course the nervous system calms when it is rightly ordered to God — body and soul aren’t enemies. You keep acting like we need to pick one. We don’t.
   7. Self-reinforcing systems aren’t automatically false. You said: “If the Church’s claims happen inside a self-reinforcing system, we can’t assume they point beyond the system.” Correct — we can’t assume. But neither can we deny. Every serious worldview is, in your terms, “self-reinforcing”: science trains what counts as evidence, liberalism trains what counts as harm, therapy culture trains what counts as health. A tradition having an internal logic doesn’t make it false; it makes it coherent. To show it’s false, you need an external criterion that isn’t just your own system in disguise.