Billy wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:
Billy wrote:

I guess what bothers me is your out and out dismissal of Nad's
revelations, not that they are superior or inferior to your's.

He asserts that all religions are in conflict with science. I'm a
member of one that is not. I know of plenty of others that are not.

He asserts that science answers the why. It does not. Science measures
but does not assign moral value. Science describes the mechanisms
without addressing the meaning of life. Science can direct goals but it
can not supply goals except regarding the growth of science.

I'm inclined to see religions as power structures

That's the religious organizations. Some have a lot more than others
but all have some. Religions tell about spirits, about what happens
after death, offer answers to the questions about what life means and
what are the goals of life. The religions also have certain features
included because the market demands they must. They must teach some
form of ethics, though the ethics come from the universe not from the
religion. Religions use allegory to teach ideas indirectly.

Philosophy can assign moral value, address the meaning of life, supply
goals. Religion can be viewed as a branch of philosophy or as a
competitor to philosophy. Philosophy can be viewed as a branch of
religion. I tend to see them with a Venn diagram showing their overlap,
neither being a subset of the other. Various religions have various
overlaps with various philosophies. To the extent your values are
important to you it is usual to inspect how the various religions
overlap, consider the ones with good overlaps, reject the ones with bad
overlaps.

Religions teach a spiritual approach to life. How does this tie in to
gardening? Gardening is one aspect of a spiritual approach to life.
Sometimes the spiritual experience is in the background, sometimes in
the foreground. One time I was digging up a part of the lawn to install
stones to add a walkway next to the driveway. Landscaping that's not
quite gardening.

As I dug and cut through roots and exposed bugs and worms I saw in
my heart how the world is alive. The story of how Odin and his brothers
slew Ymir and crafted the world from his body went from a story to
tell children to something I was experiencing transmitted through the
blade of the shovel into my hands. The ground is alive. That's science.
That's also religion of the sort that I want to be a member of. If a
religion does not teach that that's not a religion that will hold my
interest. If a religion does teach that I'll look further into how it
transmits meaning and value.

That we are called on to worship this god is offensive to my democratic
principals. Call it hubris, if you will, but I have a much easier time

It can fill volumes how it came about that democratic principles can to
be in the various regions of pre-Christian Europe in various forms and
how they interacted with the evolution of Christianity as it overwhelmed
the older religions then proceeded to absorb parts of them.

believing that a perfectly good religion can be based on a pack of lies,
especially if it exhorts its followers to reason.

Telling a bunch of stories is only lies if you claim the stories are not
fiction. Only the JCI family does this.