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Skepticism and Atheism

A few interesting posts over the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) on the topic of how skepticism and atheism are not directly connected. The series started with a rant from Jeff Wagg about a discount promotion at Denny’s aimed at Christians. Personally I don’t see any problem with it – just like I wouldn’t if the promotion were aimed at local junior baseball teams, or pensioners…it’s all just marketing to me – but Wagg’s post revived some contentious issues on the JREF’s stance towards religion.

As such, Wagg reposted some older posts which are well worth checking out, which “demonstrate how skepticism – as the JREF sees it – can be a big tent”. The first was James Randi’s “Why I Deny Religion, How Silly and Fantastic It Is, and Why I’m a Dedicated and Vociferous Bright“. The second is titled “One Voice of the JREF“, and is by Hal Bidlack, a committed skeptic who also holds Deist views:

At TAM5, no less than three well-intended individuals attempted to ‘save’ me from my non-atheism, one even had pamphlets, with no less ardor than religious zealots bring to their cause. Some of my dear friends attempt to somehow make it “ok” for me to be a Deist by trying to convince me that it’s really just the same as atheism, I just don’t quite understand it correctly. They apologize on my behalf, and condone my naiveté, sure that I will come around some day.

My belief in a non-intervening god is, they tell me, just the same as not believing in God at all, and therefore we are on the same side. I sharply differ, in that the key issue for me is God/no-god, not the form therein. I believe I should be able to decide what I believe. I am tired of being told I am stupid, but I can get better.

Bidlack’s post recounts his own life based in science and skepticism, but also speaks eloquently about the experiences and tragedies he’s endured (including 9-11 and his wife’s cancer), leading him to the “odd sense of something greater than myself, of being part of a remarkable universe.”

Lots of discussion in the comments threads as well. A key question might be though – if organised skepticism has no trouble with Deism, how much more ground are they forced to ‘relinquish’ in terms of ‘irrational beliefs’ which people hold due to intuition or because of the positive influence on their lives?

Like much else, I always seem to end up at the maxim ‘if it does no harm’…

Editor
  1. Live and let live
    Most people achieve this with relative ease; a small-ish number of (very vocal) people just can’t.

    It’s amazing how much more life you can experience when you stop worrying about the (harmless) beliefs of other people.

      1. Religion made the laws.
        The global community is based on laws made by religion. The great animal slaughter of King Josiah was the beginning of a creature that hasn’t stopped slaughter.

        Between Judaism, Christianity and Islam there are 5 billion people walking on this planet – all delusional with the idea of a god they cannot prove – obeying laws they cannot live by, producing dysfunctional societies. Isn’t the Muslim world a picture perfect of this dysfunctional godly society? Allah Snack bar, and off they go, deeper into their godly madness. Christianity has recently invented their own utterly retarded Jesus camps. Why isn’t anyone challenging these frauds?

        Religions were invented by a few wicked men for a lot of stupid men who do not question. As for their gods…they all are hungry for money, power and Real Estate.

        Why should one have to respect a religious entity when they represent the worst and most retarded form of life on Earth?

        Behind religion man can justify his atrocious behaviour. That doesn’t mean that all of us have to live by such disgraceful rules.

  2. What’s the problem?
    [quote=Greg]Personally I don’t see any problem with it – just like I wouldn’t if the promotion were aimed at local junior baseball teams, or pensioners…it’s all just marketing to me…[/quote]

    Lawyers, they love stuff like this.

    [quote]PLUS: BASEBALL — MINOR LEAGUES; Discrimination Issue In Maryland?
    NY Times Published: Friday, December 25, 1998

    The Hagerstown (Md.) Suns say they will fight a Federal lawsuit against the minor league team’s policy of giving discounts to those who bring church bulletins to the ball park.

    Just to give up and throw our hands up and back down would be a disservice not only to our industry but to all small businesses that run such promotions, said David Blenckstone, the team’s general manager. It also wouldn’t be fair to our fans who enjoy the promotion year in and year out.

    The American Civil Liberties Union notified the team on Tuesday that it had filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Baltimore seeking to stop the promotion, which the Suns have offered for five years.

    In August, the A.C.L.U. joined Carl Silverman, an atheist, in opposing the promotion.

    Silverman, of Waynesboro, Pa., contended that he and his family were discriminated against when they were charged full price on Easter Sunday, while fans with church bulletins received a discount.

    The Maryland Human Relations Commission ruled in July that there was probable cause for a hearing on the promotion, which could be in violation of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    An A.C.L.U. lawyer, Dwight Sullivan, said Wednesday that the lawsuit was filed after discussions with team officials failed to convince them to drop the promotion.

    We’re filing under the same act that says lunch counters shouldn’t exclude blacks, Sullivan said. It also prohibits public accommodations from discriminating based on religion, and that’s clearly what’s happening in this case.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/25/sports/plus-baseball-minor-leagues-discrimination-issue-in-maryland.html%5B/quote%5D

    Me? I would have made up a copy of the Flying Spaghetti Monster flyer and be done with it…in fact, time permitting, hand them out to people coming in. he he

    🙂

  3. Christianity
    Christianity makes as much sense as all the other religions.

    [quote=GOD]I’m going to create man and women with “original sin”. Then I’m going to impregnate a woman with myself as her child so that I can be born. Once alive I will kill myself as a sacrifice to myself to save you from the sin I originally condemned you to. Ta DAHH![/quote]

    Sounds good to me, where do I sign?

    😛

    1. Well…
      The thing is Tihz_zo, you’ve just embarassed youself, haven’t you?

      You explore a subject failing to understand any sense of nuances or depth and then act like you’re the man in the know.

      I personally don’t follow any organised religion but I can’t stand to see comments like this. People far more intelligent than you or I have studied religion and found value to it, and people far more intelligent than you or I have studied religion and disagree with it for reasons far weightier than yours.

      And the Spaghetti Flying Monster? I don’t even understand how that still gets used in such debates. Answer me this- have you heard of many cases where people have reported feeling a sense of God or such a being.

      You see, you may disagree with NDEs, mystical experiences (both arranged and sudden) etc. You might think they can all be explained away. However, the people who have these experiences talk about a ‘God’ being so whether it is true or not, it is something that can be argued about. The Spaghetti Flying Monster is a construct, created without any sense of evidence.

      Do you believe that something thousands of people claim to have experienced is the same as something that one person made up? Even if you don’t agree God is real, do you still see a difference? Would your little pamphlet have addressed this?

      1. Hi
        Should i put my name down as governor 😉

        I personally dont follow any religion, but find comments like this quite funny, in their broad brushstroke manner. Most jokes falter if you broaden them into a 13,000 word thesis (this does not seem to have been written for anything other than its obvious affect). You are right though, many thesis have been written in defence of or pointing out the problems with, various religions. I somehow suspect that this isnt likely to reflect the full nature of his disagreements with religious statements of fact or ideology.

        The flying spaghetti monster is not supposed to be anything more than it is, it is a parody of a subset of one aspect of religious phenomena. It is not the best and it is meant to be comedic. A more relevant, but still missing in many components of the full phenomena, is Santa/Father Christmas. My sister even heard the bells of the reindeer on the roof, not particularly of interest in any way other than that the mind can either create or interpret sensory input in correspondance with belief. The point is that i cannot disprove that the person, even though it was meant as a joke, didnt stumble across the real answer to our concept of God. That we are not made in its image, but that the much more numerous species of tentacled marine animals are.

        I am an atheist and a physical scientist. Here is the crunch though. In what way is being educated enough to see that the worlds major religions have got the world almost entirely wrong. That the arguments in favour use sets of philosophical argument that at best apply to en entire genre of imaginative constucts and at worst fail against better philosophies and understanding available to us than those who penned those scripts didnt have. That in their favour they use experience that anybody has, even as an atheist i have a sense of awe and what i can call the divine, it would make me somehow different as an emotional human if i didnt, it is just invested differently because the framework of understanding is different, so it cannot be used to argue for one God or another, Osiris, Yahweh, Brahma, or to that extent any- or at least it is a very poor argument lest we are tempted to use any emotion we like, even the negative ones. How would this rule out the existence of strange phenomena, as listed in your comment.

        Religion is a bunkem into which we have breathed various home truths, desires, dreams and hopes. Do i believe in NDE’s, mystical experiences etc? I believe in the unknown, sure.

        Do you believe that something thousands of people claim to have experienced is the same as something that one person made up? Yes, of course. That is because the item of stated fact and the articles of experience and belief are different. Science for example has just as much a history of disproven ideas as that of the worlds lost and forgotten religions. Perhaps concepts like Thor or Osiris were not created by a single person, but it is the affect of the item of stated fact on the expression of the people that this is about. The truth is that you can make up an idea that spreads though a culture and that idea becomes the standard way of expressing a phenomena, even though the idea is false. This is exactly how we work.

        1. seeing is believing and vice versa
          I always like studying the history of the tail end of the middle ages, and the beginnings of our modern societies. For those who don’t know, that’s the same time period, the few centuries around the fall of the Roman Empire (1453). The people in the early part of the period saw things quite differently from us, yet you can see where we come from.

          When we look at clouds, we sometimes see shapes that remind of something else. A ship, or a horse. The key part is today they look similar to those shapes.

          In the middle ages, they didn’t look similar. It was a ship in the sky.

          —-
          No amount of cursing at the round earth will make it flat.

        2. Uneducated?
          [quote=daydreamer]
          I am an atheist and a physical scientist. Here is the crunch though. In what way is being educated enough to see that the worlds major religions have got the world almost entirely wrong.[/quote]

          I am not religious either. I don’t go to church, I don’t take the bible at face value and I even have doubts about whether such a person as Jesus of Nazereth ever existed historically. I do believe that we are part of a greater reality but I’m not going to make any claims that I know precisely how that reality is structured. That would be sheer arrogance. And it is just such sheer arrogance – as in the quote above – that dismays me when I listen to, or read, atheist scientists.

          The presumption is made and oft-stated that religious people are uneducated. Dawkins goes so far as to say they are stupid. This is patently not the case. Many Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. are extremely well educated and far from stupid. But because fundamentalists are such easy targets, all religious people are portrayed that way.

          There is a whole spectrum of spiritual belief with highly intelligent people (yes – even some scientists) supporting different aspects of those beliefs. Yet only the scientists who subscribe to the materialist philosophy are accepted into the fold. The others have to keep quiet or risk being hounded out as heretics. Look how they treat serious researchers such as Radin or Sheldrake. If anyone doubts the existence of such a body of heretical opinion within the scientific community, they might like to visit this website:

          http://www.scimednet.org/aims.htm

          By the way, you have to be very well educated to join that organisation. I couldn’t because I don’t have a degree.

          David.

          http://www.davidsmuse.co.uk

          1. Thanks for the reply
            Hi David,
            Yep, a controversial section of the comment, especially on this website. Perhaps i should pad it out a little bit.

            I think you have made a little jump between the meanings of educated and intelligence. Obviously they are very different things. I have never studied structural engineering for example, but not having done so does not negatively affect my intelligence or make me stupid in any sense. What it does do is affect my ability to discuss intelligently on the subject of structural engineering.

            I would never go so far as to say that religious people are stupid as this would be rediculous. Firstly i am evidenced based, where it exists, and there is alot of statistical data available regarding the IQ of religious people as they constitute a large section of the population. There is no evidence that they are stupid.

            However, there is a single point of contradiction. Intelligence does not stop you ‘behaving’ intellectually poorly. Here there are two different approaches, one poorer than the other. I remember listening to a theologian describing the damage that the 19 century theologians did to religion by trying to move it alongside science. It reminds me of the warning Pope John Paul 2nd was given when he claimed that the big bang was confirmation of creation. Stephen J Gould’s principle of non-overlapping magisertia is useful. Religious ideas do not have to be placed within the realm of science, they can remain purely philosophical. Whenever testable claims are made and are found to be untrue it weakens the stance. The recent attempt to take some scientific findings as proof of God has effectively done this. Intelligent design is a good example, but there are others that are not so obvious and merge philosophy with loose factuality.

            Where am i going with this? Well, the most intellectual theologians i have listened to effectively hold to the principle of non-overlapping magisteria and hold a philosophical view of God, alongside metaphorical understandings of scripture. This is important because there is no point of intersection.

            Back to my engineering comparison it is similar to whether i discuss over dinner how bridges should be built, something i know nothing about, or whether i discuss the philosophy of the meaning of bridges, what the perfect bridge might be like, how bridges affect me or make me feel etc. A poor example perhaps, but the difference is there.

            The reason i say this is that if you are not educated in a subject then there is an amazingly high chance you will get it wrong. This is the only reason to care. I can discuss structural engineering all day, but the reason not to is that i would probably be talking nonsense.

            Religions teach, from a very young age, that they have an answer, but owing to the fact that they make claims about reality and are not purely philosophical constructs they cross the line between this distinction.

            Back to my own career; when anyone without an understanding of geology starts talking about the planet, which the religions are oft likely to do, with any specific claims (not metaphor or philosophy) then there is a good chance they will look silly.

            Doing this is something we all do. It is an act of responsibility to say that we dont know. Admitting this on philosophical issues is obvious. We do not know the meaning of the universe, or the meaning of the Earth, should it have one. What we do know is the precise transition points of granite, or the crustal morphology of subduction zones, the chemistry of clays and their weathering processes, oxidisation processes, volcanological processes resulting in different surface structures, tectonic processes, differentiation chemistry, nano-palaeontology, micro-palaeontology, intrusive volocanology, structural metamorphosis of rocks, chemical metamorphosis of rocks, affects of stresses, differential faulting, etc etc etc.
            The reason to know all this is that it is very difficult to understand the planet if you don’t.

            No-one is saying we know everything, but some people are saying they know more about a subject than people who have not even studied it. I will make this statement about geology, having a degree in it and a decade working in it as well as having seen and studied sub surface geology in the UK, Holland, Denmark, northern and southern North Sea (which is a rift structure similar to the Rift Valley), Azerbaijan, USA, Canada, Mozambique, South Africa, northern and southern India, Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea.

            Geology was a subject that met religion head on from an early age, pretty much from its conception. To a large degree the more nebulous and philosophical view of religion we have today, instead of the creationist view that was much more widespread just 150 years ago in Europe, is due to a strategic retreat away from geology’s findings (along with the other sciences which fed into subjects such as the age of the earth). Much of this was done by christians who sincerely thought that the study would confirm the widespread belief in biblical literalism. It did not.

            My point is that without an education in a subject it is impossible to even know if you are wrong.

            This is the arrogance. Not claiming honestly that this is the very best that we know right now, but thinking that without being educated in a subject you are still correct.

            I would add a couple of things. Atheist to me is where i am right now, but i do not rule out all God types, i just dont actively believe in them. I am agnostic, but in the sense that i think no-one has come up with a description that fits the evidence yet. Some types of deism fit fine with the available data. Even some types of theism, with a few allowances made. Alien interaction is also a good explanation of some claims. Geology and the paranormal do not intersect in the same way as geology and religion have done. The paranormal is a loose collection of strange events which fit some peoples ideas and it could go either way as far as current explanations go. I’d like some of it to be true, some of it not to be.

            Dont get me started on Sheldrake. He has a nice research staff though, they were friendly. Some aspects of his ideas have merit, which is why he has attracted a few big names in quantum research. I see no reason in principle why his ideas couldnt be right. He is a biologist though and his idea is very bio-centric. An application of evolutionary principles to a universal field applied across the sciences. I can only speak for geology, but there are big holes he has not addressed. Aside from altering the age of the planet (which would be fine) his principle of evolved physical structure is not backed up outside of the fossil record, such as in changing chemistry of rocks, alterations in crystal formation and chemistry. He is trying to say that even the constants are evolved, which is ok, but the geological record does not look that way. Plus of course we have a time machine into the heavens and can see back billions of years and the rates of atomic processes in stars, an indicator of the fundamental constants does not seem to differ. Changes in them (like the alpha constant) or in gravity would result in a different picture. He has some interesting data, but i am not sure if it wouldn’t be better explained with other, albeit it new and profound, ideas. He just seems too bio-centric to me.

          2. :), ah the dichotomy of
            :), ah the dichotomy of personal reality.

            I like the multiple symmetries of those. How they entwine the understanding and ignorance of our existence.

          3. Education and knowing
            [quote=daydreamer]
            My point is that without an education in a subject it is impossible to even know if you are wrong.
            [/quote]

            At the risk of trying to defend something I don’t actually believe myself, I would have to say that what you seem to be suggesting here is a bit of a tall order. Would you have all theists do a degree in geology before they can decide upon whether they believe in God? Wouldn’t the biologists demand the same? And the physicists? And who is to say that you – the educated – are interpreting the evidence correctly after all?

            Most often, in discussions of this sort, Occam’s Razor is invoked. So the geolocial record suggests that the earth is a certain age and the most parsimonious expalnation of all the evidence seems to point to a world created by accident in a random universe, a long, long, time ago. It is a neat, packaged explanation which has no need of any intelligent creator or supernatural first cause.

            My point would be that, fair enough, the evidence is in and it does point to a very old earth. Your education will take you that far. But then you step over into philosophy and make conclusions that are – at best – only suggested by the evidence. This has nothing to do with education and everything to do with personal bias.

            Science is a wonderful tool and healthy scepticism provides a bulwark against our more fanciful daydreams. But to suggest that those educated in certain academic disciplines have the automatic right of arbitration over matters of belief is – in my opinion – going a little too far. There are different kinds of evidence … some that scientists refuse to accept. Some people would claim to just “know”, from a profound inspirational or enlightening experience. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the uneducated monk in his Tibetan retreat smiling a little patronisingly at the arrogance of the educated materialist.

            Obviously, I can’t argue your subject with you, any more than I could argue evolutionary biology with Dawkins. Nor would I want to. All I would ask is that you (collective) stop patting the rest of us on the head saying “There, there – don’t worry – we have it all worked out for you”.

            David.

            PS – I know I didn’t address most of your points. Firstly, I’m grabbing a few minutes in my lunch hour and secondly, I don’t really feel qualified to comment. I tend to get out of my depth very quickly in these discussions BECAUSE I don’t have the advantage of a good, academic education 😉

            http://www.davidsmuse.co.uk

          4. Hi David,
            Thanks for your

            Hi David,
            Thanks for your reply.

            I agree with you entirely and this is about the hardest part of this debate, for me at least.

            There are a million different directions this can be spun depending on what you want the outcome to be. This is especially true where the philosophical context is greater than any factual one, such as where belief might be more important to wellbeing than actually trying to get to the truth. This reminds me of the difference between the usefulness of factual reality in comparison to practical reality. Practical reality almost always wins hands down, or has done historically especially.

            We are all more educated and experienced than others at somethings, we are all also skeptics, whether we are septical of paranormal claims, or whether we are skeptical of mainstream science.

            I would say that the God idea is special in humanity. Most ideas are more normal in that the more educated you are and the more understanding you have the more you are recognised as having a valid opinion on it, such as how long to boil an egg for, how to buy a plane ticket, where the supermarket is, how to build a computer, how to breed animals. This is all normal. The question is whether the God Hypothesis is special in that it is somehow outside of these normal rules.

            The first thing to realise is that it too is built in the same way as what you critisised above. Certain facts, from our existence, the planets existence, the universes existence, to beauty, to apparent design, to love, to goodness, to scripture, to historical interpretations etc are used to create an idea that is then expanded outwards philosophically. These philosophical conclusions are also at best only loosely supported by a biased interpretation of the evidence. This is also a bias. One question would be how this bias compares to scientific bias. How is christian bias changing their interpretation in comparison to islamic bias or hindu bias.

            Where we step into philosophy can be very revealing. As you point out geological evidence can only take us so far before we must also step into philosophy. The point where we do so will inevitably be where the evidence becomes poorer and weaker and more open to bias, rather than informing bias. You missplace the point in your comment above though as to the point where geology risks becoming philosophical. This is not your fault per se, but is what i mean. You could not know the mistakes you were writing. Geology can take us much further back in a line of evidence than the age of the Earth. The question then becomes whether we can continue that line of evidence backwards using physics. In this sense perhaps learning some geology, followed by physics would be good if anyone wants to talk about this subject, else they too will probably be wrong.

            The answer to this of course is to say that geologists have got it wrong, are misinterpreting evidence etc. One thing that makes it harder with geology than astrophysics, nuclear physics etc is that geology is available to everyone, right under your feet. Anyone can check these facts if they wish to. A good chunk of it is just looking and measuring, but with stuff right here, not out there that we cannot get to. Except the deep inside of the planet of course, though it too has left its evidence on the surface. I would argue though that to disagree with something without even bothering to learn it is the ultimate of biases. It is very easy to claim that the Earth is young, but much harder to gather the evidence and understand it to disprove the idea. The same goes for the formation of the planet, its evolution etc.

            I guess my point would be that you are right and it should definitely be noticed when people stray away from the good evidence and into philosophy to back up their claims (as it can be used in various forms to back up anything at all). What should be noticed is that with my education i can go back in time with a complete description to at least 5.65 billion years, possibly more if physics is a good a source of evidence as geology. Theists fall almost immediately into philosophy, perhaps not when talking to someone uneducated, but watch what happens when they talk to scientists. This is surely just as pertinent to your argument as it was when it was applied to geology.

            I would like to add that something like quantum conciousness would allow all of science and geology to be correct as well as life after death etc. Obviously things like aliens, alien interference, does not conflict with science either. There is much we dont know, but also a bit we do. To know what we do, and how much evidence supports it, you have to learn it. It is just too easy to disagree with it when you don’t.

    2. Reminds me of an observation…
      Reminds me of the observation made of the dead atheist, laid out in his casket for viewing. It was rather sad, actually. There he was, all dressed up and no where to go… 🙂

      Respects,
      Gwedd

  4. Amusing…
    I loved this part…

    [quote]There were people waiting in line who didn’t deserve to be held up by my concerns, and I didn’t see the need to make a public scene.[/quote]

    Not make a scene? -Snickers- Seems making a public scene was the fundamental basis for the rant.

  5. Science & Religion/Both Story Tellers
    I’ve discovered some clarification on the ever bothersome issue of science vs religion. Or, framed in a more insightful way, the dogmatism of the “Church of Scientism” vs the dogmatism of “religious and spiritual institutions”.

    We’ve seen the host of problems when the mythologies of religions are swallowed as literal truth by the fundamentalists worldwide. But, what of the persistant belly ache caused by the wholesale gulping down of the materialist/reductionist mythos pap, masquerading as literal fact?

    Let’s see, the materialist/reductionist cosmological myth story goes something like this: Sometime around 15 billion years ago[long before human minds invented linear time] an infinitesimally small point of something somehow exploded out of nothing and thus the “Big Bang Theory” begins. Everything known since then, on this planet and the universe, is a result of a completely random, accidental, meaningless unfolding of physical and chemical processes, both micro and macro. There is nothing in these blind, unwraping events that even suggest the slightest purpose, value or significance to our existence. And, as a final kick in the butt, this whole pointless, chaotic shebang will wind down once again to a nothingness point sometime in the distant future. [Of course, there’s not a breath of evidence that consciousness, life and history can be reduced to the dicy dance of atoms]

    The foot soldiers, priests and arch deacons of the Church of Scientism expect us to go about our insignificant daily business and pacify ourselves with a detachment and objectivity towards our lives which certainly can be discribed as pathological. What kind of devious minds, besides horror fiction writers, could have dreamed up such a nightmare scenario? I say it has to be a state bordering on psychosis.

    It’s been said that the portrayals of Hell and damnation of the Bible, Dante’s Inferno and other worldwide “holy” writs were the work of sicko’s and nut cases. Well, one has only to take a gander at what the Atheists/Materialists have cooked up for us to really wonder which is worse, the frying pan or the fire.

    Let’s get this straight, the concepts of quarks, blackholes, big bang, and other scientific concepts all came from the human mind, as do all the arguments we use to justify them or critique them. All scientific concepts and theories, along with the whole system and rationale of the so-called scientific method, clearly originated in the human mind. Which means that reductionist science shares all the subjectivity and biases that it points the finger at with religion and spirituality.

    Reductionism gets hung by it’s own petards when it itself gets reduced to merely a result of the inter-action of electro-chemico processes of the brain causing a certain mental state. Perhaps it is an imbalance of certain neuro-transmitters in need of a good “fix” of anti-reductionist drugs! After all, how could an accumulative slop pile of random events birthed in a primodial soup ever have any “mindfulness” at all to even come up with the various notions of science or religion?!

    To be fair, materialism has had it’s benefits for humankind on the technological level, along with it’s inherant problems. But, physics and the rest of the sciences, have their limits and cannot and were not meant to solve and answer everything in the human arena of life. By what authority is the Church of Scientism, or any other “church” or institution, the final arbitor of ultimate truths? By their own self appointed one, that’s the only authority any of them can point to.

    This is not a case for agnostism, which has it’s own problems with intellectual dishonesty and dithering. I’m pointing to a path beyond staked out doctrines and unquestioned dogmas.

    The Church of Scientism has recently been crying out to: ‘Destroy all religions and save science.”

    I say: “Save religion and spirituality from the fanatics and fundamentalists and save true science from the material/reductionists”

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