Personality Basins

I think 30% of atheists bothered to think carefully about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and recognized Pastafarianism as a funny commentary on epistemic uncertainty. The remaining 70% said “heh, stoopid Christians believe in a spaghetti monster!” and took it as confirmation of their tribe’s superiority.

I don't really care what other peoples religion/non-religion is anymore than what type of underwear they prefer, and yet...

There is nothing more "negatively religious" than believing that nothing caused that primal explosion of all that is. Unfortunately, they then proceed to throw out the positive aspects of some religious teachings concerning, e.g., compassionate concern for our fellow human beings.

Regardless, religion is a personal thing; forcing any beliefs on others is always a problem and must be prevented. We are all free to choose our attitudes and behaviors. Behaviors that harm others, however, must -- in a just system -- be dealt with by the society, for the benefit of the whole, irrespective of belief system of perpetrator or victim. Using compassion to make such decisions is always the best way, for varying values of compassion.

Yet. There's a very big difference in "I don't know," vs. "I know that no one can ever know."

Those explanations can only be accessed once we understand that the universe itself is queryable (that is our joint purpose here, us and our expansive environment together) and that a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent such that we gain access to it.

You could say that a person must learn of the challenge, accept the challenge, and then pass all the tests, thereby gaining access.

We do understand that. "What happens when I push a rock off a cliff?" is a query to the universe. The universe's response is observable when the experiment is executed and the rock is pushed.

> a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent

I have no need for this hypothesis. We can query the universe at any time simply by observing it, proposing a falsifiable explanation for what is observed, and acting within it to test our explanations.

I didn't say that you "needed" anything, but the fact remains that if you want to calculate the trajectory of something traveling at a significant percent of light speed, you will need some higher maths. Such calculations require advancing one's mind, as do other queries. But, no, none of that is necessary to find out what happens when a person's cat pushes something off the countertop.

No observation was even feasible for Einstein to formulate GR or Feynman to formulate QED, so if all that matters to you is what you see, that's your choice; I wish you well.

> No observation was even feasible for Einstein to formulate GR

Einstein made many observations about the real world to formulate his theories, e.g. Mercury's orbit, the relativity of motion, the inability to distinguish between different forms of acceleration.

> if all that matters to you is what you see, that's your choice

To be clear, in this discussion about what science can explain/understand, I'm advocating for the scientific method as the sole means through which objective truth can be verified, not the sense of sight.

When you mentioned a Creator being whose intent could be known and aligned with, my reply was a reference to a Laplace quote I thought you'd recognize. I apologize if it seemed personal. I only meant to say that we can and do query the universe to discover explanations for how it works without ever assuming the existence of gods or their supposed intentions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace#I_had_no_...