Fine, fine, let's do this...
you cannot make the case that religion has local boundaries or isolationism
Yes, I can. Watch me.
This
is a map of the biggest world religions. Notice how well defined the boundaries mostly are.
This
is a map of milk consumption, for comparison. Just to illustrate that judging by distribution patterns, religions might as well be habits or tastes. Animal and disease spreading patterns look similar, too, implying that memes have some similarity to genes. Here is another illustration:
This
is a US map of Christian denominations. Notice how Baptists, Lutherans and Catholics dominate their respective areas with mostly clear boundaries to the other tribes. I predict that in the border regions there will be high church attendance because faced with those of other faiths people will try to stick with theirs and mark their tribe and territory.
And look at that, a
church attendance map
. And yes, it shows just what I predicted it would: The most attendance tends to be in places of most diversity: The middle line between the Dakotas and Texas, and, very noticeably, Utah and southern Idaho, the Mormon region that is so narrowly surrounded by Catholics.
As for isolationism, this is more clearly visible with deeply islamic countries and how they shun particularly the internet or lose believers if they don't. One could also compare religious diversity or religiosity with internet access in the US, and you will see a pattern emerge.
as far as dogma - this is no more a required element of religion than of science
Yes, it is. There are historians who believe in Truther conspiracies and there are biologists who reject the big bang model. There are no Shiites who believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God and there are no Mormons who don't think Joseph Smith was for real that one time. Religion has required and prohibited beliefs. Science does not.
it could equally be said that religions have mechanisms against dogma, and they do
No, they don't. They do have ways to discourage beliefs in other religions, but they positively encourage dogma and dogmatic thinking. I don't like to bring up history, but the close ties religions always had with totalitarianism are no coincidence. While they can be explained away by humans just being humans, i.e. power hungry, there is still a case to be made that religion helps to seize and keep power and religious thought, and I am, admittedly, generalizing somewhat here, is a good start in learning to become submissive to those in power.
Before this comes back to me, yes, I did notice the distinction of dogma and dogmatism. I am addressing the mindset that makes one produce and accept dogma. That is what I mean by dogmatism. A mindset which combats the tendency to dogmatism is in my view a force for good in this world.
when you enter the realm of metaphor, thats where you enter the realm of religion
If we are talking about religious metaphor, then yes. There are other metaphors around, some worse, some better. Let's not credit religion with creative use of language. We do that with and without it.
You went on to say that fields like psychology are moving to make a science of religion. I would agree in so far as they try to understand how religious thought comes about and how it affects us. If that is all you meant, no argument here.
is psychology a science?
Yes, so far it is. With the advent of neuroscience, when the time comes to call psychology obsolete, the label might be hijacked by future woo-scientists, but for now it is well within what we call science.
I had a few points to make about what you said regarding the IP, but then I realized that you use some labels the way Campbell would, and I shan't argue with that for now. I will say though that I think particles and frequencies are real in a different way than myths are. Myths express what we feel about this world and our place in it, as does all art. And while the tales themselves can either have occurred or not, what they express does not much depend on their historical accuracy.
when i say that science is a religion of facts ...
Truths aren't facts and facts aren't truths. Science is not concerned with truths and only concerned with facts insofar as they are the thing to be explained and predicted.
[The hero's journey] is as real as the angle of a shape or the boiling point of water but it is not something controlled and produced cleanly in a lab under a microscope
Neither the boiling point of actual water nor the angle of an actual shape are as clear and solid as you make it sound. Before they even let us into a lab we had a two hour lecture on measurement inaccuracy and uncertainty. Actually, not even so. They just told us what to do to decrease it and how to calculate the approximate uncertainty from the collected data. However, the journey is not "as real as" even those uncertain things, because it does not compare. It is like the difference of being at 30°C and being warm. One of them is a synthetic proposition that can be evaluated by some epistemic process, like the scientific method, the other one is an incorribile statement and is either true by definition or is beyond truth-value judgement.
The moral point is now moved to a different thread, so there it shall be discussed amongst us all.
if scientists are moral it is because they have been exposed to the ideas of the religious belife in the value of life and individual worth
The misconception you are having is that this is a religious belief. It isn't. It happens to be claimed by some (not all) religions to some extent, but it is not inherently religious. I would go as far and say that it is a basic animal instinct, far older than even our own species, which is why we find it throughout the animal kingdom to varying extents. Some people are born without that instinct. We call them sociopaths. Interestingly, they are on average not very much less religious than the rest of us, some are even far more religious. Indeed, many religions tend to speak lowly of the human being and thus provide easy justification to those with a grudge against mankind.
i dont see that there is any scientific validation to these ideas at all
science could even be said to refute that there is ANY value to ANY individual or even any species - or even life itself
That could be said, I suppose, but it would be wrong. There is no scientific finding that would remotely indicate that people or life is not valuable. Nor could there be such a finding in science, because there is no science studying worth. What can be said is that psychology and biology in general have an increasingly good idea of why it is many of us value each other, which is more than any other reasoning ever did for us, but it can't tell us why this should be so, though, unlike religions, it never pretends as if it could either.
it could be said that science not only gives us the power to destroy everyone and everything, but it also FAILS to give us a reason NOT TO
People don't fail at things they don't attempt. And decent people don't claim success when in fact they miserably failed and know it.
the idea that scientists are "ethical" is imo simply not true
the scientists of phillip morris or at least some of the scientists at bp or exxon spring to mind
I recall saying that you don't get away with being dishonest or unkind as a scientist. That is, there is no place for you in science unless you adhere to some ethical standards working with your subject and the people around you. That does not mean that scientists are good people in general, but your reputation as a scientist and your employ in academia vanishes if you sell out. Likewise, if you are working for a company, there is little you can do about them scewing your results which makes you no worse a scientist for it. But if you lie by trade, that company better pay you well because there is no genuine research centre or university departament that will have your name attached to their papers.
Now one could say that people who make a habit of being decent and honest at work might have some of that outside of work, but I don't think that the environment outside of work needs be adressed after how many preachers we know of who
in the line of their work must profess what they don't believe and often deceive other people into believing it, too.
religion should not be viewed as a collection of literal facts in the way that world history is considered to be a collection of literal facts
Except neither world history nor religion is not a collection of literal facts, one of them is in many cases a collection of mostly falsehoods, and it is that very same one that most often keeps insistinting their story is a collection of literal facts, while the other almost never does anything of the sort. There are holocaust-denying historians. Are there flood-denying young-earth-creationists?
we are all beowulf - we all have to face a goliath, and reconcile ourselves to the appearance of oya, and we will all bow to shiva in our time
these things are TRUE
but they are not FACTS
How do you know? I get it that you mean it metaphorically, but how do you know that no human was born, lived and died without skipping one, multiple or all of these steps?
and science does not sufficiently deal with them, as far as i can tell, exceot in the earlier mentioned realms of say psychology, within which fields characters such as the hydra and medusa are VERY real
more real, some would say, than the boiling pint of water, which needs, in a manner of speaking, only alternate measuring standards to change
No... That's not true. Science does deal in metaphor, because ultimately all our models are mere models representing the real thing with limited accuracy, much like metaphors do. However, in psychology characters like the Hydra or Medusa are not "VERY real" at all. The only times it deals with those is when dealing with human fears and dreams, their origins and what underlying emotions can be derived from them. The only real thing about them is that somebody's brain really imagined them. They are nowhere near as real as the boiling point of water which is no matter of imagination at all.
Thoughts are real, contents of thoughts need not be.
The map is not the territory
.
I shan't say much on the intelligent design thing. It seems to me though that it was conceived and presented as a form of creationism all along, but since it matters little to the argument, I'm willing to accept tentatively for the sake of discussion, that it is not in its roots creationist.
