Although I haven't believed in a God since I was 10, I think the spiritual realm is separate from the scientific realm, and thus, faith can be as unreasonable, as fantastic, as anything. After all, the Holy Texts were written as a series of ALEGORIES (I don't know if muslim, jewish, and christian extremists notice that). Thus, the goal of a creation myth, a religion, or a faith, is not to explain things like the creation of the universe, but simply allow the spiritual to explain that process as well. We explain everything around us with the physical, as in, senses, the mental, as in, understanding, and the spiritual, as in, feeling.
For example. There is a desk that has emotional, spiritual significance for you, because, say, your best friend sat there and killed himself two weeks ago. It is completely and utterly unreasonable to say the desk, by any means, "reminds you of your friend". There is nothing similar about your friend and the desk. Physically, the senses and your brain tell you this is a useless exercise, and you're programmed for efficiency. Then remains the spiritual realm, which completely understands that the desk does, in fact, remind you of your friend. Nobody in the world will try to argue that this kind of spiritual power doesn't exist. Same with religion vs. science. We're talking about the UNSEEN, about the SPIRITUAL, based on no evidence. I never understood why this was religion vs. science. They have NOTHING to do with each other. Science uses the physical and intellectual realms to come up with theories explaining how everything works and how we could use that to advantage. Meanwhile, it is the duty of the spiritual realm to give emotional significance to everything that science explains, and sometimes things that science doesn't explain.
Thus, spirituality become extremely subjective. It's not about a god or a religion. It's actually about making spiritual sense of the world. It is hard to believe the complex emotions like guilt can simply be products of matrices of neurons. The body and the brain don't control everything. There have been many people who have sacrificed their lives for someone else. The physical and mental realms would opposed that, the spiritual would agree.
Anyway, blah blah blah, my point is, the spiritual is about how YOU make sense of the objective world around you. It is wrong to try to subdue it. Educational institutions need to be reformed to allow emotions to play as great of a role in development as mathematical and verbal thought. After all, emotions are part of intelligence, and someone who doesn't have emotions is pretty dumb regardless of IQ.
Again, that was a tangent. The spiritual realm is a personal, subjective choice. So lately I've been reading a lot of creations myths/theories.
The one that satisfied my spiritual needs was:
JRR Tolkien's version of the creations of the universe. Beautiful, articulate, covers MOST bases, and does not have the pitfalls of Chirtsianity (why does eveil exist with a good God?). In Tolkien's story, the world is a mixture of music that each Valar (God) created out of her/his mind. Some of them were envious and somewhat evil, so they mixed their music with the others, and thus was created the miserable chaos that we call earth.
Obviously, much more complicated. But this is one single man's theory, that is, IMO, better than millenia of philosophers and religions.
EDIT: sorry for the long post/tangents. I'm on a very powerful stimulant right now.
[This message has been edited by sii (edited 03-18-2006).]
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