[peter12]

I want to be careful with my following comments. Often, I am accused of troll-baiting, and while it is pretty obvious that I like the occasional inflammatory drive-by comment, normally what I am doing is just briefly summing up my impressions of a thread's tone in one or two sentences.

So, here is my impression. Religious believers seem to be far more clear as to the psychological meaning of being human. That is, they understand, and somewhat embrace their destinies to be utterly amazed, and completely miserable. They seem to grasp the tenuous grip that each of us has on our personal understanding of the cosmos, and our individual place within that swirling nothingness. This is true even in the most puerile of religious expressions. Man has a place, and that he cannot find it is a salient existential fact.

The rationalists, even though they border on scientism, grasp that man is a wonderer, and that he is great insofar as he can discover the rational order, and taxonomy of this wonderful universe. He often goes too far in this understanding, and tends to forget that even though he increasingly gains understanding of the material world, he often forgets about himself, and the life he has been given/forced to live.

I really, truly do not believe that you can have one perspective without the other. You cannot read The Blind Watchmaker, and not be somewhat horrified at Dawkin's insouciant embrace of the empty.