Posted by Irgend Jemand on 18:39 10/25/01
In reply to: (none)
Ok, I guess now that you've written about it in the atlas, I can write about it here without confusing everyone. It looks to me as if Endajué is the most "science-compatible" religion I know. With the "science-compatibility" of a religion, I mean how far science can go without starting to question some of it's basic dogmas. As far as I know science hasn't found anything yet that would proof the idea that there's something underlying everything in the universe and something that makes all the differences wrong, and I also can't see anything in modern science that would say that one can't see life, the universe and everything as a big dance if one wants to do so.
A problem among the stuff that you haven't put up might be Endajué's dualism, but that's apparently just a minor part of the religion, and there are supernatural powers on Almea after all. It also believes in long cycles of time, but it doesn't say anything about the content of the earlier cycles anymore (the Axunnaic religion Meshaism did), so there's no reason why they shouldn't be filled with whatever Almean science might find out about the planet's prehistory.
What do you think about all this?
Interesting angle! I take it you don't like gods very much? :)
I used to argue a lot in comp.ai.philosophy, which focuses on the unanswerable questions of AI; I was amused to find that "dualism" is a swear word there. People seem to take it as a bizarre, self-evidently wrong supersittion.
But till a very late date, dualism makes a lot of sense; in fact you could hardly deny it without being insane. The laws of the physical world simply don't help you, except by analogy, understand anything inside our heads. Even in the early scientific era, with a knowledge of gravity, basic chemistry, and even evolution, non-dualism would get you precisely nowhere.
Even today one can hardly claim that dualism has been refuted. It's merely been discredited-- largely by the fall of a related doctrine, vitalism. It turns out not to be necessary to posit a "life force" to explain why living things differ so spectacularly from planets, stones, and other non-living things. That makes it harder to maintain that there's a mysterious quality that distinguishes conscious from unconscious life.