William wrote:


"My point of view is that any belief based on faith is a religion, 
whether it is officially recognized as such or not. Compared to science, 
which is based on observable evidence."

Basic to the Erasmus Luther debate was the distinction between faith versus
works as the basis of salvation: both were out of sync with gnosis/jnana or
direct personal veridical experience as the foundation of "knowing." In
1460, Cosimo de Medici purchased the Corpus Hermeticum from a Greek monk a
work suppressed throughout the Age of Faith/Dark Ages by the Church. Medici
effective ordered Marsillio Ficino of the Platonic Academy (funded by the
rich banker Medici) to put all other works aside until the Corpus was
rendered from Greek to Latin - took four years. That work was perhaps the
singularly most catalytic work seeding the Latin Renaissance and it's
scientific heresy as well as reactivating the Gnostic heresy. In later
times, the Northern Renaissance followed, with folks such as Newton,
Ashmole, Rene des Cartes, Leibnitz all brothers-in-arms by means of the
Rosicrucian and Masonic mythos uniting religion und science by means of
their guiding metaphor that in order to gnow the mind god one must open
Liber Mundi, the book of nature. The Church was thoroughly pissed by that,
launching it's pre-emptive strike (akin to Bushs's failed presidency) known
as the 30 years war to stamp out heresy. The deal made by the Church with
Science resulted in modernity's reductionist materialism since the Church
declared the mind, seat of the soul, off limits - a heresy finally broken in
1878 by Wm James in establishing the first psychology lab in the world at
Harvard and experimenting with Paleo shamanic substances such as peyote to
gain a sense of jnana or gnosis.

Deeming religion as what James called "blind faith" feeds directly into the
Lard Limbaugh conservative cause rallying illiterate, trailor trash redneck
conservatism, more of an emotional knee jerk reactionary emotional
ejaculation than the ideals of a Barry Goldwater or Albert Jay Nock or Wm F
Buckley. James also noted that orientation as "animal faith" in one of his
essays.

On the side of anthropology, Paleos were shamanic. According the Marjita
Gambuttas, the goddess culture of Europe goes back at least 40,000 years,
extending from the Pyrranneas to Lake Baikal, down to extant temples is
modern Turkiye. Their recorded message is found in the Tres Freres caves of
southern France. My mentor's other student, mythologist Joseph Campbell has
written extensively on those caves and their petrographs; thanks to my
mentor, many hours with Joe went far beyond his published word. Those who've
seen his series with Bill Moyers, The Mythic Image, will remember up until
pancreatic cancer took him, Joe was a lifelong athlete, an  NCAA sprinter in
his youth while in graduate school at Columbia.

When traveling eastward to India, China, and derivative cultures, 'faith'
doesn't mean a damned thing except weakness or subscription to gossip:
liberating experience is what wakes people up and develops characters con
heuvos.