Nobody really knows

[Wilson23]

Posting this in the PB because there's no way it doesn't turn political.

In both scientific and philosophical terms, the existence of God can never be ruled out entirely. (God can never even be defined satisfactorily.) But nobody knows anything ABOUT God. Nobody knows what His word is. Nobody knows what his will is. Nobody knows if he hears or answers prayers. Nobody knows whether He cares if we capitalize his pronouns. A lot of people THINK they know, and sometimes they think it really hard -- but they don't.

The most odious, objectionable thing about Christianity is that it places VALUE on FAITH. You just can't get more wrongheaded than that. Faith is a vice, not a virtue -- I am tempted to say a sin, because sloth is traditionally ranked as a sin and faith is a form of sloth -- it means giving up on any rigorous search for truth and just accepting what you're told. And all faith in the religious sense is a form of wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is not always wrong but it is always suspect, and you don't need to be a philosopher to see why.

And don't gimme any crap about Non-Overlapping Magisteria!
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Overlapping_Magisteria

From "The Case Against Christianity" by Michael Martin:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Christianity
He addresses arguments of the form that we ought to believe in Christianity because it is good for us to do so. These can be seen as pragmatic or ethical arguments - or, as he puts the distinction, believing for beneficial rather than epistemic reasons. Examples of such arguments include Pascal's wager and William James' attempts to justify religious belief in pragmatic terms.
He argues that there is a strong presumption that we ought to believe for epistemic rather than beneficial reasons. At this juncture he invokes W. K. Clifford's arguments in his famous essay The Ethics of Belief that believing without sufficient evidence is morally wrong. Clifford advances a number of reasons for its alleged immorality. Martin adopts these reasons, but adds an additional element: in addition to its violation of our moral duties, Martin believes belief without evidence contradicts epistemological duties which exist independently from ethics.
Martin accepts that, hypothetically, there are situations in which belief without evidence may be justifiable. He gives the example of the nuclear terrorist who threatens to destroy New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, unless you convert to Christianity.[3] He argues that, under such an unlikely circumstance, the rational and moral approach is to at least try to believe in Christianity. However, given that these are very rare circumstances, his implication is that in more ordinary circumstances belief in Christianity without evidence is morally and epistemologically impermissible.

 

[Rightguide]

Marx opposed Christianity as well. But Christianity and its faith undeniably built and shaped the character, values, and institutions of the greatest and most advanced (Western ) civilization in history.

 

[Wilson23]

Marx opposed Christianity as well.

Well, there's nothing in Marx' philosophy that actually argues against the tenets of Christianity. It is an atheistic philosophy only in that it assume purely material causes of the course of human events, allowing no role for the Finger of God -- but, so does any theory that won't get you laughed out of a history department, these days, and for some time before Marx'. Also he opposes organized religion as a tool of the ruling class, but that's whole other discussion.


Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.

It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew gardens and a jeweller's shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.

Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.

<snip>

Mr Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia, the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need for a ‘next world’ to give it meaning. It is this that leads innocent people like the Dean of Canterbury to imagine that they have discovered true Christianity in Soviet Russia. No doubt they are only the dupes of propaganda, but what makes them so willing to be deceived is their knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have got to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.

The very people who have dynamited our civilization have sometimes been aware of this, Marx's famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.

-- George Orwell, 1940

 

[Rightguide]

Well, there's nothing in Marx' philosophy that actually argues against the tenets of Christianity. It is an atheistic philosophy only in that it assume purely material causes of the course of human events, allowing no role for the Finger of God -- but, so does any theory that won't get you laughed out of a history department, these days, and for some time before Marx'. Also he opposes organized religion as a tool of the ruling class, but that's whole other discussion.

Marx’s opposition was not just theological or philosophical, but materialist and political. He didn’t just oppose Christianity as a set of beliefs; he opposed its social function in capitalist societies. His goal was to abolish the conditions that create the need for religion, not merely to refute religious doctrines.

 

[Wilson23]

Marx’s opposition was not just theological or philosophical, but materialist and political. He didn’t just oppose Christianity as a set of beliefs; he opposed its social function in capitalist societies. His goal was to abolish the conditions that create the need for religion, not merely to refute religious doctrines.

Wouldn't we ALL like to abolish the conditions that create the need for religion?

Well, it's not really possible. There are four Gods -- that is, four psychological human needs God answers:
1) God the Creator. Simply answers the question, "Where did all this come from?"
2) God the Provider. The one you pray to when you want something.
3) God the Judge. Provides some moral order to existence.
4) God the King of Heaven. Provides a personal afterlife.

Even godless religions like Buddhism can play all roles but the first. (Buddha never claimed to be a god, but they pray to him anyway.)

 

[Rightguide]

Wouldn't we ALL like to abolish the conditions that create the need for religion?

Well, it's not really possible. There are four Gods -- that is, four psychological human needs God answers:
1) God the Creator. Simply answers the question, "Where did all this come from?"
2) God the Provider. The one you pray to when you want something.
3) God the Judge. Provides some moral order to existence.
4) God the King of Heaven. Provides a personal afterlife.

Christianity built the greatest civilization on Earth.

 

[Wilson23]

Christianity built the greatest civilization on Earth.

No, Christians built it. Very different matter.

In any case, how does social/political success reflect on the truth of religious doctrine? Was Islam true when the Euros were primitive by comparison?

 

[Wilson23]

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theology
Imagine two nerds arguing about which would win in a fight: the Enterprise or a Star Destroyer.[note 1] And then imagine that they were part of groups that had been arguing over these questions for centuries and had exhaustively documented everything. Finally, imagine that some of them considered what they were arguing about to be things that not only actually existed, but were literally more important than life and death (others just enjoy arguing). Madness? This. Is. Theology!

 

[Bray123]

Nobody really knows if God prefers men to kneel down and clasp their hands, or to lay on a sofa with their ankles crossed.

 

[Hel_Books]

Marx opposed Christianity as well. But Christianity and its faith undeniably built and shaped the character, values, and institutions of the greatest and most advanced (Western ) civilization in history.

Actually, the advanced nations were the ones that rejected the religious tomfoolery that kept Europe in the Dark Ages after glorious, civilised (pagan) Rome's long, long run.

The USA and other successful nations, such as Germany and Japan, is successful because the dead hand of intolerant, anti-science religion is so much weaker in those nations.

 

[Wilson23]

Actually, the advanced nations were the ones that rejected the religious tomfoolery that kept Europe in the Dark Ages after glorious, civilised (pagan) Rome's long, long run.

The USA and other successful nations, such as Germany and Japan, is successful because the dead hand of intolerant, anti-science religion is so much weaker in those nations.

And there is a reason why the Scientific Revolution happened in the Protestant countries even though the Renaissance began in Italy.

 

[Hel_Books]

Christianity built the greatest civilization on Earth.

If you're referring to Western civilization, remember it's the countries with LESS religious nonsense (the USA, France, the UK, etc) who were more successful, compared to the hidebound Christians of places like Spain, Italy (and Russia too, before they replaced Jesus with Lenin - of course now Putin's brought back Jesus to support his war effort!)

 

[Wilson23]

People of faith: Just hypothetically, what would you see in the news that would make you say, "Nope, prophecy is NOT being fulfilled, Bible is wrong there!"?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falsifiability

 

[SkyBubble]

Well, there's nothing in Marx' philosophy that actually argues against the tenets of Christianity. It is an atheistic philosophy only in that it assume purely material causes of the course of human events, allowing no role for the Finger of God -- but, so does any theory that won't get you laughed out of a history department, these days, and for some time before Marx'. Also he opposes organized religion as a tool of the ruling class, but that's whole other discussion.


Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.

It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew gardens and a jeweller's shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.

Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.

<snip>

Mr Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia, the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need for a ‘next world’ to give it meaning. It is this that leads innocent people like the Dean of Canterbury to imagine that they have discovered true Christianity in Soviet Russia. No doubt they are only the dupes of propaganda, but what makes them so willing to be deceived is their knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have got to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.

The very people who have dynamited our civilization have sometimes been aware of this, Marx's famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.

-- George Orwell, 1940

The things that needed to happen for the earth to support life, let alone human life, all had to fall into such narrow statistical windows that the chances of all of them doing so are virtually zero. Yet they did. To me, that strongly implies a driving force. Taht force is what we call God.

 

[SkyBubble]

Marx’s opposition was not just theological or philosophical, but materialist and political. He didn’t just oppose Christianity as a set of beliefs; he opposed its social function

And that's a large part of his problem. Most of the advancements of civilization have been attributable to religion, as my classmate Bruce Sheiman pointed out in An Atheist Defends Religion.

 

[Wilson23]

The things that needed to happen for the earth to support life, let alone human life, all had to fall into such narrow statistical windows that the chances of all of them doing so are virtually zero. Yet they did. To me, that strongly implies a driving force. Taht force is what we call God.

Fallacious reasoning. See https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

 

[SkyBubble]

Sorry that you're offended by a good case for God. Not surprised, though.

 

[Wilson23]

And that's a large part of his problem. Most of the advancements of civilization have been attributable to religion, as my classmate Bruce Sheiman pointed out in An Atheist Defends Religion.

Only in art -- not in ethics.

 

[SkyBubble]

https://web.archive.org/web/2009022...ahoo.com/is-consciousness-quantum-547190.html

"Consciousness is the singular for which there is no plural," wrote the scientist Erwin Schroedinger. Schroedinger, famous for his theoretical disappearing cat, was one of the pioneers of quantum science.

Lately, I've been contemplating the idea, if I understand it correctly, that things in a quantum Universe are essentially wavicles -- potentially, at least, in several places at once, achieving locality only when observed. Only when we focus on them do they show up in a specific place called here.

The essential principle is that there is an observer consciousness that is the overriding force in the world, that we all live in that consciousness and that it reveals itself through each of us. It is only when it acts as us that the quantum wave of all things collapses and it settles into an "objective" reality, all other possibilities being discarded in this experience.

Well, isn't God like that? God is everywhere. God is Omnipresent. "There is no spot where God is not," as we often say in New Thought. Yet when we go into treatment and focus on a specific aspect or quality of God, it shows up right here. The nonlocal becomes local, as the scientists say, the only difference being that it is also simultaneously local to everyone else and in different ways.

Ultimately, of course, the observer and the observed are the same thing, but the Universe is set up in such a way as to be able to observe itself. Were it not set up in this way, it could never collapse the wave of potential and nothing would then occur, according to Dr. Amit Goswami, one of the scientists featured in the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?". There would be no choices made, thus there would be no resulting actions. The continued unfolding of the blessings of God requires an observation and an observed to interact and get the show on the road.

In his book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, Dr. Goswami produces a scientific case for the idea that consciousness drives what manifests in the world. He makes his case by means of quantum physics, but the ideas he discusses comport closely with New Thought.

Goswami defines consciousness as "the ground of being (original, self-contained, and constitutive of all things) that manifests as the subject that chooses, and experiences what it chooses, as it self-reflectively collapses the quantum wave function in the presence of brain-mind awareness."

The idea that consciousness is "original, self-contained, and constitutive of all things" and that it "manifests as the subject that chooses and experiences what it chooses" will be quite familiar to New Thoughters. This is quintessential New Thought philosophy.

Goswami discusses the quantum wave -- the existence of objects in a field of potentiality -- and the experiments that have shown that particles such as photons, even when separated by massive distances, can "communicate" and act in the same way instantly, defying the theorem that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. These particles have been shown to be able to be in more than one place simultaneously, until observed, at which time, a choice having been made, they collapse their quantum wave and concretize into a given state which is perceived.

Does the same thing happen for people? An experiment in which people who had established a mental bond were locked in metal boxes and one was stimulated to test his response showed that the other partner responded in essentially the same way, showing that these quantum properties apply also to macro objects such as people.

This is why that which is known anywhere in consciousness is known everywhere in consciousness. That is why treatment (scientific prayer) said anywhere works right where the person is who is being prayed for.

According to Goswami, Rene Descartes got it slightly wrong when he wrote "Cogito, ergo sum." ("I think, therefore I am.") It should be "opto, ergo sum" ("I choose, therefore I am.")

In New Thought, we say that it is all about choices. We are always at choice, and the choices we make determine what happens in our lives. It's not what we want, but what we choose. Our choices are revealed by our expectations. When our choices don't work for us anymore, in the words of A Course in Miracles, we simply "Choose Once Again." As we make new choices, new circumstances follow. The formless shows up in new forms, the nonlocal takes on new locality.

The process of creation is a quantum event continually unfolding as and through you. Will you choose to direct it and make your life what you desire it to be?

 

[Wilson23]

https://web.archive.org/web/2009022...ahoo.com/is-consciousness-quantum-547190.html

"Consciousness is the singular for which there is no plural," wrote the scientist Erwin Schroedinger. Schroedinger, famous for his theoretical disappearing cat, was one of the pioneers of quantum science.

Lately, I've been contemplating the idea, if I understand it correctly, that things in a quantum Universe are essentially wavicles -- potentially, at least, in several places at once, achieving locality only when observed. Only when we focus on them do they show up in a specific place called here.

The essential principle is that there is an observer consciousness that is the overriding force in the world, that we all live in that consciousness and that it reveals itself through each of us. It is only when it acts as us that the quantum wave of all things collapses and it settles into an "objective" reality, all other possibilities being discarded in this experience.

Well, isn't God like that? God is everywhere. God is Omnipresent. "There is no spot where God is not," as we often say in New Thought. Yet when we go into treatment and focus on a specific aspect or quality of God, it shows up right here. The nonlocal becomes local, as the scientists say, the only difference being that it is also simultaneously local to everyone else and in different ways.

Ultimately, of course, the observer and the observed are the same thing, but the Universe is set up in such a way as to be able to observe itself. Were it not set up in this way, it could never collapse the wave of potential and nothing would then occur, according to Dr. Amit Goswami, one of the scientists featured in the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?". There would be no choices made, thus there would be no resulting actions. The continued unfolding of the blessings of God requires an observation and an observed to interact and get the show on the road.

In his book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, Dr. Goswami produces a scientific case for the idea that consciousness drives what manifests in the world. He makes his case by means of quantum physics, but the ideas he discusses comport closely with New Thought.

Goswami defines consciousness as "the ground of being (original, self-contained, and constitutive of all things) that manifests as the subject that chooses, and experiences what it chooses, as it self-reflectively collapses the quantum wave function in the presence of brain-mind awareness."

The idea that consciousness is "original, self-contained, and constitutive of all things" and that it "manifests as the subject that chooses and experiences what it chooses" will be quite familiar to New Thoughters. This is quintessential New Thought philosophy.

Goswami discusses the quantum wave -- the existence of objects in a field of potentiality -- and the experiments that have shown that particles such as photons, even when separated by massive distances, can "communicate" and act in the same way instantly, defying the theorem that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. These particles have been shown to be able to be in more than one place simultaneously, until observed, at which time, a choice having been made, they collapse their quantum wave and concretize into a given state which is perceived.

Does the same thing happen for people? An experiment in which people who had established a mental bond were locked in metal boxes and one was stimulated to test his response showed that the other partner responded in essentially the same way, showing that these quantum properties apply also to macro objects such as people.

This is why that which is known anywhere in consciousness is known everywhere in consciousness. That is why treatment (scientific prayer) said anywhere works right where the person is who is being prayed for.

According to Goswami, Rene Descartes got it slightly wrong when he wrote "Cogito, ergo sum." ("I think, therefore I am.") It should be "opto, ergo sum" ("I choose, therefore I am.")

In New Thought, we say that it is all about choices. We are always at choice, and the choices we make determine what happens in our lives. It's not what we want, but what we choose. Our choices are revealed by our expectations. When our choices don't work for us anymore, in the words of A Course in Miracles, we simply "Choose Once Again." As we make new choices, new circumstances follow. The formless shows up in new forms, the nonlocal takes on new locality.

The process of creation is a quantum event continually unfolding as and through you. Will you choose to direct it and make your life what you desire it to be?

Sounds a lot like this https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

 

[SkyBubble]

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2617649.Bruce_Sheiman

“Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago—just a couple of centuries—when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world’s greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements.” ― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

 

[SkyBubble]

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2617649.Bruce_Sheiman

“Recent research cited by Cass Sunstein, for example, has shown that people with a particular political orientation who join a like-minded group emerge from that group with stronger political leanings than they started with. “In almost every group,” Sunstein writes, “people ended up with more extreme positions …. The result is group polarization, which occurs when like-minded people interact and end up in a more extreme position in line with their original inclinations.” And with the Internet added to the fundamentalist equation, it is now easier than ever for extremists of all types to find their ideological soul mates and reinforce their radical thinking.” ― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

 

[SkyBubble]

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/5972380-an-atheist-defends-religion

“Religion’s misdeeds may make for provocative history, but the everyday good works of billions of people is the real history of religion, one that parallels the growth and prosperity of humankind. There are countless examples of individuals lifting themselves out of personal misery through faith. In the lives of these individuals, God is not a delusion, God is not a spell that must be broken—God is indeed great.” ― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

 

[SkyBubble]

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/5972380-an-atheist-defends-religion

“The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.” ― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

 

[SkyBubble]

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/5972380-an-atheist-defends-religion

“In conclusion: Knowledge of the material world and the natural order of things have brought humanity unimaginable wealth and prosperity. Yet what we desire the most is truth: understanding our special place in the world; purpose: a meaningful personal destiny; and wisdom: the guidance to lead a good life. Material knowledge is entirely the province of science; truth, purpose, and wisdom are largely the province of religion.” ― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion