re: #168 lostlakehiker

Indeed. I’m in the camp of the jury that, when asked to render a verdict guilty or not guilty, returned the verdict not proved. Ethical humanism is a tough row to hoe. “We” owe a huge debt to religion. And here’s a metaphor: what are “go” proverbs, anyhow? They’re the religion of go players. Proverb believers play one way, free thinkers play another. Proverb believers tend to win. How’s that? We absolutely know that “go” is just a game with a decision tree, that there are no “go” miracles, and that everything depends purely and entirely on “if he goes there and I go there then he can go there and that would lead to this” type reasoning. By rights, the scoffer should win. He’s right. But—-not really. Because although those proverbs are not literally divine commandments, they are the distilled wisdom of many centuries of champions and go teachers. Human minds are incapable of chasing down all the by-ways and intricacies of the he-goes-there-then-I-do-that approach to go. Thus, it is entirely possible that go proverbs are true in the sense that the believer plays better than the scoffer.

Likewise, it is entirely possible that even if there is no miracle worker in the background, that even if there is no God, these religious teachings are nevertheless true—-in the sense that we would make less of a mess of our lives than we normally do if we treated them as true.

It is also possible that they’re true because faith is a resonance with something real in a sense that physics cannot capture.

I think that is an excellent post.

I can’t measure love with a spectrometer or write an equation for joy or beauty.