And I think our arguments in religion probably are not worth much of anything. I don’t attach any greater importance to them than other people’s excitement over football. I see far far far more problems with people attaching too much significance to their arguments over religion.
I am a scientist who sees more to reality than what science can investigate. And yet I have no doubt whatsoever of the certainty of what science discovers. Its methodology is far more reliable and accurate than the methodology of rhetoric (i.e. words and language) by which everything else is done. This divides reality for me into the objective (to which science is limited) and the subjective (for which we only have words), for as I explained above I think the subjective can be ignored or equated with unreal. Thus we can naturally expect a much greater diversity of views in the subjective realm of religion and philosophy than in science.
I think this basic idea falls under the category of methodological naturalism which definite describes me also. I do think there is a kind of natural law for the afterlife but I don’t think they are mathematical or objective. The essence of science is that you get the same result no matter what you want or believe. I believe in a subjective aspect to reality precisely because don’t think reality is confined to something which doesn’t care what you want or believe. Thus if there are natural laws governing the afterlife I think they are logical derivatives from the nature of desire and belief itself. For example, not all choices and desires are equal. As an illustration… a pet rock cannot respond to what you give as well as pet dog, which cannot respond to what you give as well as a human being, which cannot respond as well God.
It is if you replace the reality with the word, such as if make too much of the difference between the word you use and the word another person uses.
When I said that religion was 90% language went all wonky because you read something entirely different into what I said… something like… all religion is about is words. And I said no such thing. The point I was making is that RELIGION has a strong tendency to confuse the reality of what they are talking about with the words they use to talk about it. Let me remind you that the reason I found the Bible so interesting was that so much of the Bible consists of criticism of religion. Religion is rather often not the word for something good in the Bible or Christianity.