I am also 1 post overlimit now, so I return quietly into the folds of Nothingness from which I arose. :)
--- Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote: Even so, I am an athetist of many orders of magnitude beyond anything that Dawkins could probably understand. In fact I would say, that my remotness from the gods is a religious experience all its own. One of the more interesting thoughts to me in this realm, is the idea that an entire cosmos without gods of any sort, turns out to be one of the more profound mysteries of human conception, and further, that alone recommends it. Or more simply, if you can convinvce yourself that there is only the world and its processes, and nothing more, all the world turns out to be a far more mysterious and interesting place, than if you postulated a divinity, not matter how elaborately conceived and magnificently arrayed.
I think in effect that is the primordial religious experience itself, but it is only accessible to me if I abolish all the gods in advance. It is much more mysterious that all human existance should arise from some half understood process of life, itself an engima, and then simply disappear one day---more mysterious than any other alternative.
The problem with the thought that the gods are a delusion, obscures understanding far more thoroughly than it illuminates it. In fact both ideas, god and the delusion are reciprocal to each other and leave most of human culture, the arts, and human experience completely inexplicable and alien.
If I can push the idea that there is the world and nothing else far enough, I realize that for all of their accomplishments, most of the sciences still remain tethered to some form of metaphysics, perhaps most subtly within their mathematical conceptions, without realizing it.
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