Existential Comfort Without God
Given that we don&#x27;t totally understand reality, is it not a little premature to be taking the &quot;magic&quot; out of it? I mean, what if the base substrate of all that is (underlying subatomic particles, at the tiniest levels we don&#x27;t have the technology yet to explore) is actually what we commonly consider to be &quot;magic&quot;? :-D<p>In my nearly 40 years of being alive, I&#x27;ve personally encountered 3 broad &quot;categories&quot; of people so far:<p>1. Religious types, who are super uncomfortable with the unknown and wave it away by pointing to &quot;God&quot;.<p>2. Scientism adherents, who are also super uncomfortable with the unknown, and wave it away with, what looks to me like, a magical belief in science (&quot;science can&#x27;t explain this, but I totally trust that it eventually will&quot;). They like to denigrate people in category (1) without realizing they&#x27;re guilty of a similar kind of magical thinking.<p>3. Mystics. They appreciate science and its shortcomings and don&#x27;t resort to magical thinking. They&#x27;re capable of non-dualistic thinking. They don&#x27;t resort to &quot;God&quot; or &quot;science&quot; to wave away the unknown. They&#x27;re comfortable with being uncomfortable as just yet another part of the human experience. They accept their personal limitations and make no declarations about the existence or non-existence of things about which they could not possibly know.<p>1, 2 and 3 also roughly model the various stages of individual development outlined by M. Scott Peck in &quot;Further along the road less traveled&quot; [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;M._Scott_Peck#The_four_stages_of_spiritual_development" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;M._Scott_Peck#The_four_stages_...</a>