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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth.

You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..."

Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would find minor, or very major, things to disagree on. Judaism is massively different to say Druidism or Buddhist. Crumbs, _within_ Judaism you have a full spectrum from Ultra Orthodox to unpracticing.

I would thus caution you from viewing the world as falling into either religious or irreligious. Ultimately that classification is not meaningful.

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It is not always possible to qualify every single word, especially in an Internet forum comment, so I might argue that the trap lies with the reader. As when one encompasses a generality, one should consider that it rarely applies to the totality of the categorical word. While the anecdote presented in the article involves a presumably particular sect of Judaism, I don't think one would be hard pressed to find similar analogs in most of the other major religions in the world. It's no surprise because the foundations of these religions were developed thousands of years ago, in which humanity's understanding of the world beyond itself was still infantile, at least more infantile than today's juvenile understanding. So I don't think it's much of a leap to generalize to religions rather than single out this particular one. Religion is more about culture and control than it is about searching for understanding, the latter of which you might find more in spirituality, art, and science.

I like something Schopenhauer said about a lot of errors coming from either defining a concept too generally or too specifically. Something like that

You have AFAICS:

   religious

   atheist

   agnostic

Is it even possible to be a religious atheist I wonder

For sure it is. Scientism is an example. It even has creation myths, the stories of the Big Bang and Copernicus being two examples.

This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.

The guy is catholic, the wiki page of his doesn't mention Scientism, and you describe a belief in science, not any god. So I don't getcha I'm afraid.

The big bang isn't a creation myth, it doesn't say anything about what existed beforehand, and if come up with enough evidence, the "theory" would be invalidated and replaced with one that is less inconsistent with our observations. I am not aware of- but would love to learn of- creation myths which are continuously updated as new data is available.

Scientism is something that philosophers claim exists when they don't want to get in an argument with a scientist.

I’m more talking about the creation myths of science. One example being Copernicus having to break free from the suppression of the Church. The other being the Big Bang, which some claim usurps religion, when in fact it was originally devised by a Catholic priest.

What I’m driving at is that science is an awesome tool, not at all at odds with religion. It’s one, very effective method, but it’s not the end all be all for truth.

The scientism I’m driving at is people putting blind faith in science as a replacement for other forms of understanding. The argument is that religious or philosophical understanding come in when science has reached its absolute limit. The two are not competitive with each other.

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