I would agree with this. In my own life, from childhood on, the tendency to invoke metaphysical explanations steadily declined, until now everything is immediate, direct, no need for an explanation of something out-of-sight. That is for experience. As far as the rational mind is concerned, there are things unseen, but inferred by aspects of experience. Radio waves for example. We cannot see them or feel them, but there are direct experiential reasons for supposing they are there, even though an electrical engineer and a physicist might fully understand the reason this is so. For the rest of us, that the radio, when turned on, functions, is direct evidence of that even if we cannot fully understand. But if I were to say I am getting mental messages from 'enlightened beings' in the constellation of Orion, and yet the only evidence I offer is what I say, only crazy people might believe what I say. This is the difference between shared evidence and private 'evidence'. There has to be a way to connect minds via the physical world to have evidence that involves direct experience. This is basically what divides science from religion. Science by its nature cannot endorse metaphysical explanations because there is nothing to share, to point to. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote:
Re "People take words much too literally": That's my view. I think the original founders of the world religions were talking about a change in consciousness. They had an insight (ie "in - sight"). The unwashed masses take the words as a description of the objective world "out there". As the everyday world out there doesn't match the founders' descriptions they are then forced to imagine a "supernatural" world were those words would apply.
