Materialism as a religion

I’m not limiting anything which is why we should keep on looking, and ponder the mystery of chemistry. 

In the meantime we know the chemical breakdown of a human:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composit...human_bodygd

I’m not strongly averse to these elements being little ‘bits (projections?) of mind’ rather than ‘little bits of matter’ in line with your idealistic view. I’m not sure whether that really explains those ‘big questions’ more satisfactorily though... I guess individuals can decide on their preferred pragmatic worldview to get things done/get them through the day etc.

Funny how threads intertwine. We both contributed to that thread about Shakespeare in the Conspiracy forum and that got me thinking about chemistry and its roots in alchemy. There is a popular view of alchemy which involves "primitive and superstitious" old men trying to convert base metals into gold. Of course, as usual, the popular view is not the whole story and those who are interested will know all too well that many of the founding fathers of modern science (including Newton) were indeed alchemists and that their calling was every bit as spiritual as it was empirical.

Again, a little synchronicity pops up here. The man giving the talk in the video I posted above is the science historian and chemist, Lawrence Principe, and the same Lawrence Principe appears in this article on Alchemy from the Smithsonian web site. Still, that article refers to the transformation of base metal to gold but fails to mention the parallel spiritual endeavour which is the transformation of the "base" self to the enlightened spiritual being. 

It seems to me that the alchemists were aware of something that their heirs either forgot or wilfully ignored: that science without spirituality is like an aeroplane with a wing missing (or maybe a wing with the aeroplane missing?).