I will ask you friends, do you feel the larger scientific community acts with philosophical integrity?
There are some scientific thinkers that do advance the notion that scientific discovery will offer change as regards society and human social ills. It tends to get around to the same idea though. You are an accident of nature, but you can be fixed.
I haven’t really been part of the scientific community for a long time, but when I was I never felt anyone focusing on religion at all. I think the internet foments hatred for its own sake. I would agree.
I heard a comment by Stephen Hawking that indicated he was biased against religion. I found that disturbing. To me, philosophical integrity would at least be an open minded attitude.
When I was a physics student, I was also a camp counsellor at a Christian camp. The reason I hate religion is because of my experiences at the camp, not anything to do with science or that we could all be enslaved. I myself do not hate religion. I have disassociated myself from any organized body, but religion as a frame of reference and possible path of understanding I acknowledge, at least the potential for it to be that.
I’ve come to see the religious practices as valid magick practices. Theurgy.
I sit with Quakers every week but only because I enjoy a group setting for meditation. Most of the folks in that group are hardly “religious” at all.
I think religion was better than what came before, which was basically barbarism. But I think now society has progressed and religion is holding many people back.
Religious fundamentalism is disturbing. Religion as fixed dogma, I agree, has had a negative effect. Humanities religious nature has been used as an excuse for brain death rather than as an inspiration for understanding. Many members of the clergy these days often risk being marginalized or even defrocked because they advance the notion that their faith needs to change. Religion itself has had a history of progressive reform, but for some reason this has never come easily.
I recently listened to a Ted talk regarding the SETI project, and I will openly say that I am a supporter of that line of investigation. But she began to talk as if the discovery of alien life or an alien culture would somehow create a meaningful positive shift in earth society.
The one thing I would like to see in my lifetime is humans to have verified contact with ‘alien’ life, and see the shifts that result. I’m not sure what else could shift minds more. I do think that contact with a diplomatic alien species that could otherwise maintain a technological upper hand, at least for a while, would help humanity greatly, sort of like the scenario with the Vulcans in the Star Trek story line. I also strongly anticipate that our first open contact will be with a species that has it’s own version of religion or spirituality. We might be surprised to find strong parallels between our religious history and their own. The monomyth carried to an interplanetary scale.
I suspect that their “metaphysics” (and/or) religion will be something similar to mathematics. Numerology, the views of mystics like Pythagoras.
It’s interesting that science wants to contain it all within it’s framework. I don’t know if that is good or not.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~