I’m mixing the two subjects, Sylvia Browne (and psychics) with Bible criticism…mainly because I have these open links in my browser I want to close. In a way they’re related topics as both deal with credulous thinking.

First, Browne.
Robert Lancaster who runs the site stopsylviabrowne.com (I think he started this after the boy was found alive and “well” (in the captivity of his accoster, years after his abduction) after Sylvia told the hurting and grieving parents, on national television, that he was dead and buried by a rock somewhere…or maybe it was after she told the grieving grandparents of an abducted girl that she was sold into sex slavery and is alive in Japan…when she was actually dead and dumped 13 miles from her grandparent’s home…) went to a Sylvia Browne reading in Vegas last month while he was attending The Amazing Meeting 6. Here is his wonderful and entertaining account of that evening: (It starts a little slow, but boy does it get interesting)

• I attend Browne’s Las Vegas show, and words are exchanged.

I’ve been reading some of the accounts on the site of the horrid and painful mistakes lies she tells people coming to her for answers about dead or missing loved ones. She is a horrible person, feeding off of pain and suffering for her own fame and fortune. All “psychics” are as they knowingly lie to people who trust them, often causing pain and chaos in their wake (such as the recent case of the psychic instigated investigation of the autistic girl being sexually molested–who wasn’t).

Phil Plait of the BadAstronomer recently recounted his thoughts on a disgustingly credulous Newsweek article about psychics:

• Newsweek embarrasses itself

The Newsweek article is an embarrassment. It actually says this:
“It’s impossible to objectively judge psychic powers.”
Wow. I mean, wow. Of course it’s objectively possible to judge psychic powers. It’s trivially easy to do so. We have a whole field of mathematics called “statistics”, and it can be used to judge quite well if someone is able to do better than random chance in a fair test.

I have a friend who I recently discovered believes in ghosts, specifically “orbs”. Why? Because of an emotional and personal event involving the death of her mother. She knows I’m a vitriolic skeptic, but when she told me this out of respect to her I remain silent. Some would say I’m doing her no favors about not telling her about the statistical certainty that she should have a coincidental feeling matching her mother’s death, or that memory often and easily confuses imagined feelings after an event with coinciding with an event–and you will believe with utmost certainty of the “truth” of this glitch in memory/emotion. But how do you tell that to someone talking about their mother’s death?! You can’t. I won’t. (I’m pretty certain she doesn’t read this blog). Sometimes it’s better to just shut up and let someone have their belief.

But always in the back of my mind is the nagging guilt that by doing so I’m knowingly allowing them to remain suseptible to people like Sylvia Browne who feed like vampires off the willing belief of trusting people. I feel I’m complicit in the scam, the con, the evil by not providing people, especially friends I care about!, the tools to allow them to think critically and not fall prey to evil assholes like “psychics”.

Now, the Bible.
John W. Loftus has an article today:

• Kenneth Copeland, Faith, Fear and Ignorance

I’m familiar with Copeland’s world of merchandise and have seen him on TV a few times, taking the usual cherry-picked positive thinking approach to the Bible. In Loftus’ article he discusses Copeland’s twisted use of “faith” to overcome reasoned thinking and obvious problems with accepting the Bible as a divine relic.

In his article he provides links to some great articles like “The Bible Debunks Itself (Part 1)” (which reminds me of Issac Asimov’s quote: “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” I have to say, my path towards atheism began when I finally, after years of faithful belief, finally read the book that I was professing total faith and belief in.)

“Biblical Scholarship and The Lord’s Prayer,” which focuses on the history of the Bible and its very human and mundane although fascinating creation/compilation. Which reminds me of another Asimov quote: “The bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn’t just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that — No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much less its origins.” (OK, I admit, I didn’t already know that quote like I did the Asimov/atheism quote. I found it while looking for the exact wording of the former. *grin*)

Anyway, just a couple of the great past articles Loftus links to in his latest blog post. Good reading.

Found some freethinking comics; here’s a couple of good ones:

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.That one has got some poignant comments under each comic. Here’s another that has a good comment under it (on the source site)…

.And of course this one shows a perennial argument between atheists and believers…

(I’m afraid I don’t have a link for that one.) Yeah, just like not collecting baseball cards is a “hobby.”

When discussing and criticizing New Age, New Thought, pseudoscience beliefs (like The Secret, crystals, homeopathy, chiropractic, ESP, psychics, Tarot, astrology, chi, feng shui, ghosts, reflexology, etc. ad nauseum) people often say “Oh, what’s the big deal? It’s harmless; let people believe what they want,” it’s often because they themselves have some belief or three that they know fall into the category of superstition and credulity. Subconsciously they think, “Hmm, I better not be too harsh on people who believe in The Secret because I know some know-it-all busybody would have problems with my belief in alien visitation.”

But there is a harm to non-critical thinking and it can be as “small” as spending good money on bunk to as significant as death:

• Teen’s death blamed on faith healing

(_Another Child Dies from Faith Healing_.) A cousin of his also recently died due to lack of medical care thanks to religious beliefs. There’s a woman I work with who also believes in faith healing, and has ignored ever-increasing symptoms until she passed out at a chiropractor and was sent to the hospital. Seems she has a brain tumor. (No word yet if it’s malignant or benign.)

There’s no reason for this. I want to try hard not to disparage faith or spirituality, but let’s be realistic here: medical science over the last 200 years has literally turned the worldview of illness in the west completely upside down. What was once thought to be caused by demons and curses we know to be viruses, bacteria, and chemical disorders. No amount of praying has ever repaired anything visibly irreparable and known to be medically incurable or able to go into remission such as amputations or visible horrific burn damage. A recent massive double-blind study showed that of the three groups of heart surgery patients, (one prayed for by large amounts of cross denominational Christians and not told about it, one prayed for and told about it, and one not prayed for) the group not prayed for and the one prayed for and not told had no difference in post-surgery recovery or complications. In fact, the one prayed for and who knew about it fared statistically worse. (Hypothesis is that some of the patients felt increased stress and concern which lead to complications.)

Recently a girl with serious Autism had a teaching assistant who visited a psychic. The psychic told her a student of hers was being molested. She went to the school with her “evidence” and they turned it to the Canadian version of Family Services:

• The Mother, The Child, The School Board And The Psychic

(_Psychics and gullible people do REAL harm_.) Long story short, it was proven without a doubt that the girl was not being molested–the psychic was full of crap (surprise!) The result of her “for entertainment purposes only” seering was to throw a family into upheaval and cost them a great deal of money and emotional distress.

Neurologist Steven Novella has an excellent commentary on this story: _Psychic Alleges Sexual Abuse_:

Any reasonable assessment of the evidence, in my opinion, clearly shows that alleged psychics are frauds - yes, all of them. Some may be self-deluded, while others (by the techniques they use) must be con artists. But they are all frauds - they pretend to do something they cannot do. Spreading false beliefs about reality is harmful in and of itself. But this harm is greatly magnified by great mischief ensues when alleged psychics make serious allegations based upon their intuitions. This elevates fraud to negligence, and perhaps even depraved indifference.

My wife is often a voice of reason to me. When I go off on something, criticizing what I think is irrational thought, she usually has a point of view that pulls me back down to civility. On this issue she suggested that people should be allowed to believe whatever bogus ideas they want, but should be held accountable should negative results arise. Well, of course that makes sense–I don’t think we should outlaw gullibility or non-critical beliefs, that’s fascist and would actually be counter-productive. But there’s a problem: people AREN’T being held accountable because people are scared to death to publicly criticize religion, pseudoscience, superstitions, or other credulous beliefs. From that CNN article on the boy’s death:

After earlier deaths involving children of Followers of Christ believers, a 1999 Oregon law struck down religious shields for parents who treat their children solely with prayer. No one had been prosecuted under it until the Worthingtons’ case [last March].

We have reached a point in our culture where criticizing, examining, demanding evidence for people’s beliefs is verboten. That kind of Christian fundamentalism which eschews modern medicine and science and puts their children in harm damn well deserves to be criticized at its very foundation. All psychics are frauds, period, and should be treated as such by the legal system and society at large. Beliefs which can and often do lead to harm should not be tip-toed around and given a pass because of some misguided desire to give all beliefs respect and tolerance. Some don’t deserve it.

There’s a CNN article yesterday:

• Should I Vaccinate My baby?

It floored me. Because of vaccinations we’ve eradicated polio, a disease which used to kill or paralyze or cripple literally hundreds of thousands of people a year. Measles? Silly measles, we can risk it–why vaccinate. Because measles is a highly contagious disease with a 10-30% fatality rate and killed half a million unvaccinated people in 2003. There’s a reason we vaccinate children–it saves countless lives from many easily preventable diseases. And because of completely non-critical thinking, this process is thrown into question. Because of three converging conditions, this life-saving science is questioned and debated and needlessly avoided by many:

• Symptoms of Autism reveal themselves at the same age range in which we vaccinate kids–regardless of vaccination. We’ve known this for decades, we see this in places where vaccinations aren’t done. It is coincidence which confuses correlation with causation.
• We’re diagnosing more cases of Autism because of changes in methodology. It used to be that only the most severe cases of Autism were recognized as such–non-functional, “Rainman” style Autism. Now an extremely expansive continuum of symptom severity is being diagnosed. People with Ausperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning Autism was virtually undiagnosed a couple of decades ago…now doctors are more readily recognizing and diagnosing cases. It’s always existed–we’re just diagnosing it more and it has nothing to do with vaccines.
• Parents understandably want to blame something. No one, parents, anyone, likes hearing “sometimes things just happen.” People want reasons, they want answers, they want something to blame. It’s completely understandable, perfectly human. It’s why people turn to ideas of “luck” and fortune, ESP, ghosts, aliens, what have you, for explanations to coincidence, accident, unexplained (in their mind) occurrences.

But the bottom line, is test after test, study after study, research after research, prove that there is no link between Autism and vaccines. In fact, one of the most vocal proponents of the connection was invited to help design what was one of the largest and most comprehensive studies examining the possible link. When the data was analyzed and it was becoming obvious that once again there was no link, she took her name off the study and started a propaganda campaign to distance her involvement and try to discredit the study.

Sometimes people want to believe something despite all evidence to the contrary. That’s delusion.

We should hold people accountable for the effects of their beliefs, absolutely. But what happens when those responsible for holding people accountable themselves rely on magical-thinking, superstition, and other woo? People get a pass. Children are being killed by medieval religious beliefs? Well, we have to be tolerant of religion (especially in this country if it in any way involves the words “Christian” or “…of Christ”.) “Psychics” like _Sylvia Browne_ crassly lie to grieving families, feeding on their pain and grief for their own fame and money? Well, it’s for “entertainment purposes” so they’re covered. (Or, hey, in Sylvia’s case it’s a “religious belief”! Two passes in one!) Besides, cultural leaders and gurus like Oprah advocate mysticism, New Age and New Thought, psychic beliefs, and pseudoscience–so, there must be something to it.

And so we continue to support and encourage un-critical thinking and credulous belief in woo as a culture in general, and that affects our legal system, politics, media.

The other day I heard a commercial for some “all natural” prostate health herbal supplement. “And it’s all natural, so you don’t have to worry about those annoying side effects that come with pharmaceutical products.” Got a message for you: poison ivy is “all natural.” Hemlock, toadstools, heroin, arsenic, Ebola, hepatitis, cancer, cyanide, anthrax…all natural, my friends! And here’s another clue: if something, like an herb, is capable of any kind of “positive” biochemical effect on your body, it’s capable of producing unwanted and negative side effects. The only difference, FDA regulated pharmaceuticals go through rigorous testing to find all or most of those side effects, their severity, cross medication reactions. Herbal remedies get none of that testing. St. John’s Wort? All natural, and promotes liver disease. Ginko biloba? All natural, and contributes to heart disease and strokes. (True) homeopathic “medicine” is the safest, being pretty much complete water, so what’s the harm? A lot if people trust water and sugar tablets instead of seeking needed medical advice for symptoms that may indicate something water and sugar don’t affect!

A culture that believes in woo won’t and can’t hold people who harm others or themselves, based on woo, accountable in any significant degree.

• Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
• James Randi’s Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions.
• Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time.
• Madeleine L. Van Hecke’s Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things.
• Thomas E. Kida’s Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking.
• Robert Burton’s On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.
• Podcast: Point of Inquiry
• Podcast: Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
• Blog: Memoirs of a Skepchick
• Blog: NeuroLogica
• Blog/podcast: Skeptoid
• Common logical fallacies
• Comprehensive list of logical fallacies
• Cognitive bias

Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid blog/podcast has made a spiffy little movie (40 min) as a primer for critical thinking:

♦ Here Be Dragons - Movie

It’s got some nice visuals, but I let it play in the background and just listened to it while I worked. It’s a little rough (for example, there are several pronunciation gaffes and one section early on where you just see a montage of products of pseudo-science for like two full minutes. It gets the point across that we’re surrounded and innundated with pseudo-science we don’t even think twice about, but it gets a little tedious to watch. But, get past it and it gets a lot better!) …in general it’s a fine film with great advice and information!

I don’t want to spoil it too much, but a general rundown: Early on he discusses how “natural” does not equal better nor even healthy! Poison ivy, toadstools, e. coli are all natural. Also, be skeptical of anything that advertises it’s based on “ancient wisdom”! Ancient wisdom also gave us slavery, blood letting, spontaneous generation, the idea that bathing is evil….

Some of the best, vital, and misunderstood topics include the issue of large numbers and probability (about 20 minutes in). For example, even with strict conditions, it’s a statistical certainty that a significant number of people will think of a person at the same moment they die. It’s a statistical issue, not one of psychic ability.

About 24 minutes in he discusses the matter of “clinical studies have shown” is a marketing phrase with no meaning behind it, and explains what goes into a good research study.

The section on homeopathy is, as always, absolutely hilarious!

Then about 29 minutes in he gets to discussing why smart people believe weird things. Believing in pseudo-science has nothing to do with intelligence or education, and in fact doing so is just human. But at the end he does a good job explaining why it’s ultimately harmful to believe in what would appear to be harmless fallacies and pseudo-sciences. An important part!

He offers some books that he considers vital for a critical thinker’s reading list:

• Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. I couldn’t agree more! It’s extremely easy to read, entertaining, direct, and very positive and hopeful narrative.
• James Randi’s Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. A much more scathing look at both tricksters and cons, and innocent pseudo-science beliefs and why it’s so easy for anyone to fall for them.
• Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yeah, I was surprised too. But once he explained it, it makes perfect sense. Twain has always been a clever and witty critic of superstition and naive thinking. Hidden in this adventure down the Mississippi River is an observant critique of fallacious beliefs that’s no less perceptive and valid today than it was then.
• And of course his own Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena.

There’s a great refutation of the supposed four basic and indisputable “facts” regarding the resurrection of Jesus. These four facts are often used by Christian apologists, especially the preeminent William Lane Craig as proof of the Resurrection. Yet, they’re easily refuted by a critical thinker, like Jon Curry:

♦ My First Rebuttal

Good page to bookmark for later discussions of your own!

The latest Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast is really fantastic.

♦ Skepticast #150: 6/4/2008

It starts with a wonderful criticism of the anti-vaccine/autism movement versus reasoned thinking. For example, one of the main tactics of the anti-vaccine movement is to claim vaccines contain known dangerous chemicals. But to do this, they scan ingredient lists and pick out “bad sounding” chemical partial names and hold those up as being a significant and viable ingredient.

It’s like saying: “Salt is dangerous because it contains chlorine!” because they found that salt is sodium chloride. These people paid no attention in high school chemistry when you learned that a chemical when bonded with another creates entirely new properties. And this is just a small sample of the lack of critical thinking among this group. And the media is just furthering this erroneous pseudo-science by giving them all the support they need without offering any kind of skeptical scientific counterpoint.

Also in the show is a great interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. The fact that he was a relatively uneducated patent clerk may have helped allow him to become the genius on the level of Issac Newton and Aristotle that he was.

And in their weekly game, (spoiler warning!) they discuss the counter-intuitive findings that talking about (read: reliving) a public trauma, like 9/11, is actually potentially more psychologically harmful than keeping it inside!

Good show, I highly recommend it!

The Gene Expression science blog has an interesting post today:

♦ Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first?

It’s a meta analysis of existing data culled from various sources which indicates that people who hold onto literal biblical interpretations tend to have lower IQs, and people of certain denominations have lower educations. For example, Unitarians, Episcopalians, and Methodists tend to have less literal biblical interpretations and higher education levels, while Southern Baptists and Pentecostal tend to have the lower IQs and education.

This correlation doesn’t surprise me. Regardless of the validity or truthfulness of the Christian Bible, it’s “easy” to just say “it’s all true” and treat each distinct component as truth. It doesn’t take much thinking or reason to accept what you’re told by authority–we’re fundamentally geared to do so, as humans. Even the cognitive dissonance which is required to believe the Bible literally does not take much thought–in fact, living with cognitive dissonance requires one not to think much about the contradictions and paradoxes that create the dissonance.

But, forgetting religious validity, still, it takes a much more thoughtful person to reason about something presented as fact and appreciate nuance, interpretation, incorporate conflicting data and change your belief and thinking based on new or newly interpreted data! People with lower mental faculties and/or less experience with the challenges of education tend to prefer certainty and order and abhor uncertainty and intellectual conflict that demands resolution, and will tend to believe unquestioningly what they are told by those they look to as authorities in order to preserve order and provide guidance on what to do in their lives.

Religious belief in general doesn’t respond to IQ or education as there are a great many educated intellectuals who hold onto religious beliefs. Though, most Nobel Prize winners in the non-arts have been atheists, and in the past when religious belief was compulsory (lest you were burned as a heretic) many of history’s intellectuals were as close to Deists as the cultural religious attitude would allow.

Music starts getting annoying, but watch to the end as it’s not all examples–but gets to a very valid and significant point at the end.

…is the question Skepchick contributor “writerdd” asks in that same-titled article:

♦ Should we embrace moderate Christianity?

Her point is less “embrace” than “befriend.” She wonders if the New Atheist movement is being too hard on the liberal, moderate Christians (which is the majority of self-professed “Christians”) who don’t believe in literal interpretations and evangelism.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, would rather encourage a moderate, liberal kind of faith where people are free to cherry pick what they want to believe while they conform to modern, secular values and use skepticism to make decisions in daily life. I think I’d like to befriend people with this type of faith and work together with them to keep fundamentalism in check, to preserve the separation of church and state, and to protect the benefits of a scientific and secular society. I’d like to see society become less polarized, not more. I’d like to see people talking to each other instead of fighting with each other.

Honestly, I don’t know what opinions I have on this. On the one hand, I agree with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who say moderate religions give validity and and justification to the extremists and fundamentalists who do the most damage and spread the most hate. I reject the idea that anyone should live in a deluded state of belief based on ancient myth. Even a moderate belief in Yahweh is no different than a belief in Zeus or vampires or fairies. People who believe in imaginary figures who can be prayed to to intercede in worldly actions is potentially harmful to the individual and the people involved with them.

But then, we’re evolutionarily design to believe in something “bigger than us,” so it would seem. Some of us have transfered this need for an anthropomorphic sky-daddy into an awe at the natural universe. Should we blame people who have a faith, even if it’s based on a 2000 year old cult, when their brain is designed to follow authority and cultural tradition, when they’re otherwise reasonable in their lives? I really don’t know. it’s very conflicting to me.

It’s better to be a liberal moderate than a fundamental evangelical–no argument. But isn’t that like saying, it’s better to be a petty thief than a grand larceny crook? Or better to be unconscious than dead? If you have the ability and capability of living a reason driven life without myth and fantasy having a say in it, to refuse to do so simply compounds the “innocent problem” of moderate belief into intentional delusion–literal interpretations or not. Should this be allowed to continue without at least being remarked upon?

Now, I get the point of the article: in the fight against the spread of hatred and intolerance and theocracy, non-theists and moderate-theists are generally on the same side. It’s like the U.S. and England aligning with the Soviet Union in order to fight Nazism. Stalin might be wrong and misguided, but Hitler was a much worse enemy to both and all. I’m very conflicted about this concept.

I’m greatly interested in religious history: its origins, its evolution, its influences from cultures and other religions. Few people realize that the religion they believe or the tome they hold dear has a sordid and complex history. For example, the way the Biblical cannon was created is a huge mess of political conniving. The four Gospels that were selected, out of dozens, were selected not because of any factualness or consistency but because they supported the political and ideological beliefs of those who headed the Church.

The cult of Jesus comes from many sources including Dionysus and Horus, and almost completely from the Roman/Sumerian man-god Mithras.

The early Hebrews were quite polytheistic, with the evidence for it contained in the Pentateuch, not to mention anthropological studies of the Canaanite and Ugarit cultures from which the Hebrew tribes originated from.

Well, Lee Randolph has put together some excellent research on the way the Jewish creation story is a mix of influence from all over the region:

♦ Genesis 1:1-25 Is An Amalgam of Near Eastern Creation Myths

Full of detail, maps, timelines, and well sourced. It’s some fantastic reading!

Last month I commented on a conversation over at NewSojourn, “Where Does ‘Ought’ Come From?“, where he commits the fallacy of the false dilemma by saying that you either believe morality, ethics, “proper” civil behavior is dictated by a (the Christian) god, or else there is no such thing and any claim to believe in ethics and morality if you’re not religious (Christian) is a lie. Or his word, “hogwash.”

Well of course, as an atheist and a naturalist (no, NOT nudist!) I’m also a secular humanist, so I take great offense at the idea that you have to be either a religious believer (Christian specifically) or a nihilist. There is something in between that is perfectly complimentary to the idea that morality exists (because it does) without the need for any god (because there aren’t (–even so, why specifically Yahweh and not one of the other 2400 gods?)

But better than any response I’ve given, I just listened to the latest Point of Inquiry podcast with an interview with naturalism philosopher and Vice President for Research and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry:

♦ John Shook - Naturalism and the Scientific Outlook

It’s not a very long episode, only 25 minutes, and I think the way he discuses the argument for naturalism as a philosophy and a worldview is pretty much the final word in my book. He also discusses the role of science in society and the way science is not a study of scientists (which is what creationists and anti-scientists want to make it out to be), but an examination purely of nature and the evidence from the examination of nature regardless of the people involved.

Here are some nice bits:

Naturalism is a worldview, a philosophy of you like, that understand reality through experience, reason and science. And I break it down into these three more simpler elements but it’s necessary to understand: they work together. …

You cannot have naturalism without science. But, we have to understand, science itself is based upon our experience of the world, and, reasoning about the world. We draw inferences, we test hypotheses, we draw tentative conclusions about what reality is like. Sometimes, opponents of naturalism, love to appeal to experience independently of science, or to reason (let’s say some rational arguments for the existence of god), again–completely unhinged from science. …

The diversity of human experience is incredible! Of course religious experience is part of this. What naturalism simply demands is that… experience is not enough. Experience has to be tested by rational standards of coherence and common sense, and also it has to be consistent with science. …

Strictly speaking, science itself as a list of cutting-edge theories, that are best tested by experiments, you can’t directly infer moral conclusions about how human beings ought to live. You can’t read them off…. You can’t detect values with a microscope. There have been some objectionable philosophies that have attempted this. For example Social Darwinism once proliferated: ‘Rich people ought to survive because obviously they’re more fit,’ this sort of bogus, junk science really is a logical dead end. … Humorously, this junk science, this propaganda of Social Darwinism, was actually playing a card played by theologians played by time immemorial. ‘If it’s natural, it’s right.’ This presumption being by theologians: God set up nature so God must have deemed it right. That principle just have to be thrown out as completely illogical and unsupportable, so scientists shouldn’t do it either.

What I would suggest is that instead we remind ourselves that as naturalists we rely on experience, reason, and science–it’s the unity of the three of them that really allows naturalism to tell us real information about how human beings ought to live. Especially the experience. Sometimes naturalists think by discarding supernaturalism they have to completely discard the religious cultural heritages of humanity too. And we don’t have to do that. What we can do is we can distinguish between what doesn’t work anymore in religion and what still may work. For example: moral wisdom, about how human beings ought to live. Now of course it’s couched too often in mythological language… and it is horribly outmoded.

So, naturalism would recommend, not that we start from scratch, some blank slate, some a priori principles of pure reason to deduce how we ought to live; instead what we ought to do is we ought to critically examine and test this cumulative body of moral wisdom that comes from the world’s cultures. After all, there’s sort of an evolutionary wisdom here. Most of these cultures have lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years, human beings have to a certain extent, successfully flourished, why discard this body of wisdom? So a naturalist would say: ‘We could build a new non-religious, secular culture–not in some a priori fashion or by consulting intuitions or anything like that, but simply by taking from the best of the other world cultures. …

And from there they discuss value of life, the meaning of life, and cosmic ego versus personal ego and what may be in between when defining meaning and passing values on.
It’s a good listen!

Wasn’t going to say any more about Ben Stein’s Expelled movie, after my last post (which basically just lets Scientific American “talk”), but this is really very funny: