And the ubiquity of religion, across every culture throughout human history, suggests to me a deep human need to connect with something greater and more powerful than our finite selves.
There are other ways to commune with nature than through religions and god beliefs, which add nothing for me.
It looks that way perhaps, to a materialist who views the pursuit of all human goals from a transactional mindset.
You don't understand humanists. You seem to see having a god belief or a religion as the only path to a meaningful and satisfying relationship with reality. And of course, you dehumanize those who reject religions and theism. But you're not alone. Here is one of my favorite examples of this depiction of atheism as lacking any inner life. Note that he sees himself as a spiritualist, which to him is a cut above the religionist, whose experiences are also inauthentic, but at least the religionist has them however inauthentic they might be:
These "facts" (directional proclamations) only correspond to reality in one very specific time and place. Everywhere else in the entire universe they will be shown to be false (not 'real'). So this is hardly a good example of how facts equal reality. Reality (your mythical 'objective' reality, not the idea of reality that we all hold in our minds) is always true and always real. No exceptions. While facts are only true, if they are true at all, within the very limited context of a specific time, place, and cognitive perspective.
This is your response to my refutation of your claim that facts and reality had nothing to do with one another. I gave you a concrete example of a fact and what made it a fact - it's accurate mapping of a piece of reality regarding the path from my front door to a pier - and this is how you respond, with more of this postmodern, epistemic nihilism. So what if a fact is only a fact here and now, that the directions to the pier, for example, only apply if you live where I do, and even then, not forever? That's where we are and when we're there.
So far not one of you complainers has managed to show how I am incorrect about ANYTHING I've posted.
Complainers? It's only you complaining as you just did there. You're being told that your thinking appears confused and counterproductive to others and doesn't comport with their own experience and view of reality. You object and are at times offended, but you can't give anybody a reason to join you or even affirm it any way.
You want to be shown where you are incorrect about your unsupported opinions. Where that has happened, it has had no effect on your subsequent thinking or posting, hence the comment above. But that is not the job of your audience. You need to show where you are correct, and if you want to have any impact on others, why your thoughts lead to some kind of better outcome for those holding them.
And you've still failed to address the observation that you don't actually apply this thinking to the activities of daily life, which are the primary reality we all experience. You go about the tasks of daily life just life everyone you call materialist or guilty of scientism, planning a day of chores and leisure activities according to a litany of beliefs just like the front-door-to-the-pier belief that inform your decisions to allow you to control outcomes and make all of that happen. It's when you sit down at your computer to post on RF that you can wax poetic about the elusive nature of reality and the limitations of consciousness in assessing it and belittle others and their myopic thinking for finding nothing of value there for themselves.
It seems that like so many others, it's important to you to think that you see further and possess arcane knowledge, which I can understand. I feel the same about skill with critical thinking and the world it has revealed to me, but the difference there is that I can demonstrate the fruit of that approach to reality. I'm pretty sure that you can't do that for any of the stuff you say that nobody has refuted.
I just showed you how facts are not even remotely the same thing as reality even though you claimed I was wrong about this.
No, you didn't. I showed you how you were wrong, but it had no impact on you. You just hand-waved it away by shifting focus to places and times when the fact in the pier example was not a fact.
Imagination is the cognitive engine that drives all human comprehension. Without it we would literally still be bands of naked primates living in the forests. No language, no tools, no order that wasn't written into our genetic code. And yet some of you here seem to want to dismiss and disparage human imagination as being silly and useless and even dishonest, just because you don't like that it has generated the possibility of God. How incredibly childish and short-sighted.
Straw man. Nobody here has disparaged imagination, and nobody here has objected to the idea that gods are possible. What's being criticized is your blurring of concepts like idea and its referent if any, and the willingness to believe that gods exist as more than ideas because one can imagine them.
