John-L-G

I believe that the universe is communicating to us continuously. Institutionalized religion is an attempt at helping us understand the universe, our place in it, etc., etc. In other words, it should be preparing us to understand and adjust to the communications we receive. The risk is that a religion will mistake its approximation for more or less final or best or most significant insight. This imposes a fixed worldview between the individual and the direct communications being received, filtering out the good and beneficial along with the possibly dangerous and overwhelming. What may have started out well, a good or at least workable approximation, over time can become almost completely out of touch with current issues. Today there is no uniting religion although they each may claim to be it. Nevertheless, the state of affairs requires beliefs that are uniting. They need to appear as self-evident facts. I (today at least) believe that the underlying reason preventing a uniting religion is twofold. First, there is a dominating idea, professed or not, that the universe is essentially psychically dead with a few patches of consciousness that somehow sprang up. And even they seem to end with death. So, few people suspect that the forces in the universe are communicating directly to them. Many believers do, but so many do not know what to believe and where to turn. The growth of science may have unintentionally contributed to the problem, distrusting everything in the psyche as too subjective to be at all reliable. Second, we each must cling to the bit of truth that we do know. We need to build from there. To do otherwise is to cut off the best in us. But it is a huge task. Thus the conflict as the search for unifying insight goes on.

Strange, your statement regarding "science" is only valid, at most, for the hard sciences, not the soft sciences. This does not seem to be pointed out anywhere in the thread. Maybe your question is answered (for you) with awareness of this difference? I would like to know, for example, how you would classify depth psychology, such as the theories of Freud or Jung? Both addressed religion, Freud pretty much looking upon it as wonderful, but illusion. Jung considered a religious attitude as central to the healthy operation of the psyche, especially to recognize the "other" in our psyche. Is this science or pseudoscience in your mind?