(2023-07-14, 10:27 AM)Merle Wrote: I have moved on. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I have learned a lot. Hopefully people have also learned from me.
I summarize my experience at Adventures in Psienceland.
@Merle, I hope you might visit us again from time to time.
I visited your own site and may I say I found a very moving and interesting account there, entitled
How My Mind Was Set Free
That is a description of a journey. Something I think all of us are on, each in our own way. I appreciated reading this, thank you for sharing it.
Our backgrounds are very different, the starting point different yet the journey itself may have a great deal in common. For example in my case from the age of about 11 my education was primarily focussed on science and technology, it was how everything was described, explained and understood. At home we did not discuss religion, but sometimes topics such as the nature of electricity, the inside of an atom, and astronomy, the working of the Solar System, stars and galaxies as well as at that time various manned and unmanned spacecraft sent out for the first time in human history beyond the Earth's atmosphere and reaching out to satellites and planets out there.
The journey of liberation which I undertook was therefore a different one, but liberating oneself from the constraints of the educational background was every bit as necessary, as difficult and as painful.
As for the current thread on 'Filter Theory', it is not one of my main interests, it is a somewhat obscure side-branch from my perspective. But as I said, our journeys are different, even though they have much in common.
edit: I forgot to emphasise that I'm from the U.K. living in England and the role of religion in society is very different from that in some parts of the U.S. Here we have a mostly secular background to society. Religion certainly during my formative years was mostly part of a cultural background in much the same way as literature of Shakespeare or Wordsworth is part of the background. As in most European countries, the perspective on these things is completely different to that across the Atlantic.
In this respect, the place where a person lives, in which country, which political system, what background society, probably plays a much larger and more significant role than is generally appreciated. Describing things in terms of religion or of science neglects the major contribution of cultural background which is perhaps the 'elephant in the room' in many debates.