Faith explained

[boutons_]

Science and "true" religion are perfectly compatible.

Faith- or belief-based Religion is sort of a hustle, a con job, intended to shut down intellectual enquiry and investigation, especially challenges of religious magic. The Catholic Church dominated, and restrained, European culture during the aptly named Dark Ages, for 1000 years.

Nearly all of the Christian faith-based beliefs and mysteries, essentially the same as magic, were promulgated 2000 years ago to conscript people who were pre-scientific, ignorant, uneducated, tribal, ie, tribe vs tribe war-mongering, unreasoning, lived by magical thinking, had the intellectual sophistication of a 6-year-old today. The OT is a bunch of scary, simplistic fairy tales and fables meant to seduce and intimidate the wild and woolly Jews into a more civilized behavior. The NT has a totally different, revolutionary, more advanced and humane message, but "christian" fundamentalists and evangelicals insist on emphasizing the violent, intolerant, vengeful OT (exactly like the Muslim fundamentalists do), while giving only lip-service to the peaceful, tolerant, welcoming NT.

There, that should throw the cat among the pigeons.

[johnsmith]

"Would this not mean that our notions of God, honor, love, justice, the spirit world, and all things unseen and imperceivable are mere mental constructs?"

Should we be prejudiced against, exclude a priori, such a discovery?

EVERYTHING is a mental construct. With no human nervous system, there is no human.

In Vedantic and other Eastern cosmologies, there is the idea that the world as we see is "maya", an illusory reality, while "Reality" remains mostly unknown. And each human's goal is self-Realization and then Self-Realization so the true Reality can be perceived directly. And self-realization requires purifying and refining the body and nervous system so it can perceive Reality correctly. And weak echo of this is the Greek ideal of "a sound mind in a sound body". Is the universal practice of altering consciousness by consuming chemicals to acheive a different consciousness nothing but a desire by the nervous system to escape reality, or perceive reality differently?

An analogy would be someone saying Newtonian physics is all there is. But Newtonian physics, for all its grandeur and power, was only a tiny, myopic view compared to the more "real", and much more powerful, quantum physics.

So your PS is that Atran is suspect or unworthy of attention because 1) he's not a Bible-thumping Christian evangelical on your side and 2) the hated NYTimes wrote an article about him?

I get the impression that Atran is a more serious thinker and searcher for truth ("Truth"?) than people who consume the packaged pablum harangued at them by "Christian" "ministers".

So let me get this straight, the above post from Numb-nuts here was edited more then two hours after he posted it. This leads me to two different questions: 1.) Does anyone else actually go back and re-read what they posted two hours later? 2.) How am I to believe anything he says when very clearly he goes back and changes what he says (sometimes days later)?