#religion
The only thing science has done to my faith is help me trim off the things I took on faith that were bad deals. When science has challenged my faith, my faith has just gotten less stupid.
We often mistake religion, rituals, tradition for faith or spirituality. We're taught to take things on faith by rote, often as children, and not to question. And then we worry that if we allow anything to change or challenge that belief, we will be cut off from our spiritual selves, be lost.
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We're taught we must believe in things like a divine king that we must owe fealty to, that a man stuffed a jillion animals on one boat, or that a perfect rainbow means a magic angel will come and save everyone, or that a continent is the back of a giant turtle.
Those are stories and myths, and they can be meaningful, but we don't have to believe every detail of those stories are facts in order to have a spirit, or be spiritual.
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To paraphrase the Dalai Lama, if science proves something about religion wrong, then religion must change.
Those stories were ones our ancestors created, to serve a purpose in their lives with the understanding they had.
We don't expect a person 10,000 years ago to know how to drive a car or build a computer, we should accept they didn't know everything about mind and spirit back then, either.
Science increases my faith, because it lets me understand more of this glorious universe.
@AskTheDevil As Heisenberg put it, "The first sip of physics will make you an atheist, but if you keep going you will find God at the bottom of the glass."
No conflict between science and spirituality. If there's a conflict between science and religion, then religion is doing something wrong.
@DoveWithScales I'm with Heisenberg on this.
From my experience, I went from thinking everything was "magic" and that even _I_ was "magic", and over time, I found out something much more wonderful.
Everything is _real_.
There is no "supernatural". There's only this amazing, complex, wondrous reality that _we get to discover_.
@AskTheDevil Exactly! And it can be both. The fact that we now (kinda somewhat) understand magnetism didn't make lodestones any less magic. They're still magic. They're just magic we understand.
The inverse of Clarke's Third Law. Any magic sufficiently understood is indistinguishable from science.
@DoveWithScales @AskTheDevil Naturally. The pursuit of truth lead to establishing experiments, and the spiritual path of alchemy (lead is the base physical matter, gold is the refined human spirit). From alchemy arose chemistry and medicine (through investigating the mind/body/spirit connection and healing the body to refine the soul).
@AskTheDevil @DoveWithScales It's beautiful how it works like that.
@tippitiwichet @DoveWithScales There are _so_ many paths, that if you follow how they wind, will eventually lead you to the same truths as many other winding roads!