The Sky Fairy

I've been reading Gagdad Bob's book, "One Cosmos, Under God".

The title of course begs the question if we shouldn't go back to the original, more politically correct "One Cosmos, Indivisible" ... but from what I can see, the two ideas end up in the same place if you really spend time thinking about it.   Which most people don't.

And, as I'd hoped, it has me thinking.  Or thinking again.  Thinking things I already knew but have difficulty putting into words.  Or even things I've put into words before, somehow the thoughts have been broken and left unsung.   Perhaps they are broken because they have been unsung, laying around for entropy to work on.  Use it or lose it, as they say.

At any rate, here's one that coalesced out of the synergy of his thoughts with my thoughts which had in turn been influenced by Watts Thatts and Pirsig's BeerMW shimstock  ... which in turn only seemed to stimulate  seeds already planted in the inexplicably fertile soil of my mind:

The difference between the "scientific" minded and the "religious" minded is that the former pretends he understands the Universe while the latter, at least implicitly, admits he does not.   Ask the former to explain what it means to understand understanding sometime, and see what kind of answer you get.

The latter refers to this "something else" that must be a guiding hand, a causing cause -- whereas the former merely obfuscates it in pseudo-scientific language, kicking the extraphysical can down the metaphysical road.  It's a neuro-network.  Electrons trapped in neurological loops, storing information.  Ok.  Fine.

But what makes sense of THOSE?

What is "sense"?

Me, I'm somehow in between.  I dig science.  But it does not, and cannot -- explain everything.  I've been on a long, strange trip in this life, an arc from blindly uber-religious to a rather violent destruction of that base, through the valleys of gnosticism and then Zen Buddhism and beyond, and finally back to the event horizon of at least the recognition of the value of religion and religious thought -- though from what I at least think is a higher orbit in the electron cloud.   I have a new appreciation of Christianity, though it is somewhat detached.  Still, it kinda looks like that comfy brown leather chair with the brass tacks I've always wanted.

The journey isn't over.