Edgar,
Religion is a yoke, and that's what the word means.
It's meant to yoke us to the world, of love, Nature, and creatures.
It's all metaphor, and is meant to be rich, and to open us. It's a Yoga.
It's a series of lenses, developed anciently through to the present form we
call Science. Science is different in structure and form from other religions,
but not different in its increasing appreciation in us. Science, too, is a
Yoga, see.
Science is about Nature, not about Science.
People have gotten and do get in trouble with religion when they make it
literal or take it literally and forget that it is metaphor. Religionists --
keepers of religion -- have done this too.
Scientists get in trouble this way when they take MODELS literally, and forget
Nature.
Awakening shatters all the hardened and cured Epoxy of models, and the
concretized metaphors.
The greatest block to realization -- and, indeed, the factor that makes
realization NECESSARY at all -- is, instead, human "identification with ego".
The block is not Religion, Edgar; it is faith in separate personhood. That
faith is developed in secular as well as religious societies.
Granted, there's no accounting (by me) of how religion may have affected *you*
in your walk. Even if it was good for you, I suspect that you view evidence
from the larger world and calculate that the effect of religion on environment
and on people has been overall-negative.
I personally know it goes negative when taken or used literally, not as rich
fertile poetic metaphor.
--Joe
> Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote:
>
> Loving everyone and the planet and all its creatures and studying science
> rather than religion...
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