Welcome February!
We’ll see?
Wanted to comment on “religious” science. I see it as believers trying to validate their belief by corrupting the meaning of Science, the scientific method of validating phenomenon.
“Please define what you mean by religious science?”
I think the corruption of words and meaning has brought us to the brink of human disorientations jeopardizing our survival and understanding.
Knowledge is not the property of belief. Perhaps knowledge is not the property of science or anyone? Knowledge is and will always be incomplete. It belongs to human consciousness. It belongs to any person who has it and uses rational thinking as their guide in living.
Science opens and measures the fundamentals of what exists by rational process that can be documented, validated by experiment and measurement. It requires that it be repeated by others who can also validate it by following the method and or/ to create another repeatable way of rational measurement to prove and validate its result and information. It has a foundation in using objective processes of basic principles of discovery of material reality.
When science steps beyond the basic practice of its methods it becomes speculation and must seek the means of measuring the speculation in measurement and experiment.
It should be noted that science has not and cannot measure everything. There is a whole universe beyond human dimension yet to be discovered, dimensions of reality we simply do not currently know or understand. Science requires a posture of humility, openness and respect for the unknown and the unknowable, as well as that which is known and the task of continuous learning. Science does not capture the consciousness, it should open it and fill it with valid information.
The study of religious phenomenon can be a valid study of measure if the scientist is not seeking to validate self or belief. It should seek to know what is, what its phenomenon means in the history and evolution of human consciousness. Religion is not conscious.
Religious history is a bloody mess. It has been used, and still is, to bring coherence to tribe and community life; for better in that it can teach and establish ethical rules of behavior that can bring unification of group life into function and purpose.
The “downside” is that it captures the mind through feeling based fantasy that distorts both the capacity of observing reality objectively and sustaining the rational reality itself.
There is no science of “religious” science, a science of religion.
A current expression used in the public domain that uses “God” to validate what government does, and the validation of government authority, mission and purpose, is rather frightening. It seems to be approaching a crisis in the U.S., and around the world, that reaches back to that dark time of our belief based reality when zealots incited people to attack others because of what they didn’t believe. In the current access to exposure and awareness, in the mixing of beliefs, we have violence being expressed towards the “other” in the name of Love and “God”.
I’m wondering if we aren’t on a backward path of repeating a not so controllable violent religious era of the persecution of rational, non believing humans and those of other belief based religions who are felt to be wrong? Is this a symptom of some arcane collective neural reaction of the past coming forth in the present, stimulating hate and violence in the social conduct of those who are guided by feeling based realities, particularly of religious believers, in a response to conflict of feelings of those seeking validation in an incoherent social matrix? This could turn explosive and violent.
Another condition of educational neglect has minimized and replaced the instruction of rational thought with belief based indoctrination. We call them religious universities. We also have neglected the necessity of having and using rational thinkers to run government and its institutions.
Then there is the irrational condition of uncontrolled breeding of people with a deficit of capacity in a pool of poverty and hardship.
How is rational thinking supposed to find its way to the head, the leadership at the top of the social hierarchy?