Study of human nature belongs to psychology, spirituality, phenomenology, consciousness studies, neuroscience, contemplative disciplines, etc. And -- surprise -- they didn't know much about it in the 1st Century so their attempts at explaining resorted to superstition, magic, and supernatural beings.

No I dismiss them because Game of Thrones is admitted fiction. And a real truth seeker demands reasonable evidence before they believe. Otherwise you are a personal preference seeker.

It's not preference. I posted this comment in another thread as a response to something craig said, and it works as an analogy as to how religious understanding works.

Right, everyone would prefer the story where they are free agents who can discern the truth through their superior rational intellect. Nobody wants to surrender + lower themselves by admitting that they don’t have the truth and need the guidance of a superior being.

Still, one of these is more true than the other.

Religion per se doesn't contradict what we know about these things. When it comes to the study of human nature, religious experience belongs in that list of items and overlaps with all of them.

The Genesis creation story, for example, wasn't an attempt to explain how the universe came into existence from a scientific or historical perspective. That's not the point of it. But yes, I believe that something beyond this world exists. Call it a strong intuition.

Do you think stories can convey wisdom? Aesop's Fables, for example?

When the story of the self and the story of the soul merge, they merge both forwards and backwards in time. This is difficult to grasp but it’s true.

So was Jesus born of a virgin when he was a baby? No, but the Son of Man was born of a virgin in the spirit, and since the two stories merged that also means Jesus was born of a virgin.

Similarly, Genesis 2 is not the creation story of the human animal in this world. It’s the creation story of the soul and how the feminine part of the soul was separated to create a distinct masculine and feminine soul. However, again, since the story of the self and the story of the soul will merge, Genesis 2 becomes the origin story of the self (human animal) as well.

Does that negate Darwinian evolution? No. It means Darwinian evolution is the origin story of the soul as well.

It just a conflict between emotional urge and reason .
Emotion is far from being an infaillible evidences to find truth .
On the contrary , truth should be recognized by others under every conditions.

How many times people realize they were wrong because they were angry ?
Bad analogy imo .

You act like rational truth and emotional impulse are the only two options. Detach from both and see what emerges.

Billions have the belief they need help from a supernatural being, they just don’t have reasonable evidence to believe one exists.

Moral conflicts are a personal preference. And whether to play if you keep losing the rent is a personal assessment of what your goals are and whether likelihood of achieving them improves by not playing. Neither are “truths”, they are personal mental states.

And I fail to see how it’s an “analogy” for “religious understanding” when religions are man-made ghost stories that don’t lend understanding to much of anything and the few religious stories that offer any insight into the human condition carry religious baggage with them. Better off reading Stephen King.

If you have a moral conflict with something, it is true that you have that moral conflict. To say otherwise would be untrue. It is not a preference but an orientation.

I like Stephen King.

Ooh ... I love "religions are man-made ghost stories." Precisely that. As in devils, demons, witches, angels, holy ghost (whoops we better change that to Holy Spirit, sounds kind of unenlightened), supernaturally incarnate souls, spirits. It IS a ghost story. As to whether it is man-made fiction can be debated, that is, believed to be literal or not ... but I know which side of reasonable that falls on.

James 1:27

King James Bible
Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

I quoted that to my dentist one time: "Religion that is undefiled before god is this: to visit widows and orphans in their plight." She kept asking me what my relation was to one of her other patients, who was a widow, so I laid that verse on her. When the Bible says something worth adhering to so be it. And when it says things that are a travesty, an abomination, are ridiculous, and are highly immoral ... so be that.

I’ve told you this before and it’s fallen on deaf ears: Much of what is in the Bible is a detached illustration of reality, rather than a promotion.

If you go to a therapist and the therapist brings to attention a harmful behavioral pattern, would you go around proclaiming that therapy promotes immorality? That would be dumb, right?

Yeah and if that therapist offers some good input while promoting genocide, bigotry, slavery, authoritarianism, divisiveness, mass killing, torture, infanticide, etc ... what would you do? Do you question the morality of the therapist, or do you swallow it with blind obedience? Same for the god story.

Should history books include or not include genocide, slavery, war, etc?

History books record the events. But this god/author created and sanctioned it, which you conveniently tried to sidestep in your dishonest apologetics. Do you have a problem with genocide, infanticide, humanicide? Or not so much? "Well you know, they thought it was okay in the 1st Century. Far be it from me to evaluate it myself."

History books record immorality for the reader’s benefit. Likewise, the Bible illustrates God’s immorality for the reader’s benefit.

Are you paying attention to what craig is saying?

I'm trying. I've been assiduously trying to get him to say how he became a messenger of god, how he knows who that god is, how the messages come to him, etc. And it's radio silence. I don't think he senses that that that might be a thing, that there might be a need to provide that, you know, given the history of religion in the human race. Based upon which it's about a million-to-one that he's anything other than another self-proclaimed messenger of the one and only god who apparently speaks to him personally.

His fondness of hearing himself wax poetic sophistry so obtuse that literature majors have trouble knowing what he is talking about, is in keeping with someone fancying himself god's representative, not someone trying to communicate. If his is the "it's all just a story but salvation and hell is real" defense, I'd like to know how one becomes privy to that information. That's not the way the religion has been played over the years.

Science is my new religion...

The compulsion toward materialism and the love of money so rampant in American socieity comes from an emptiness within, as an attempt to fill the void. Such a "religious culture" actually exhibiting this characteristic shows very clearly that the practice of the religion is lip service, and that the real values are in mammon. But a better practice of spirituality is possible, in which we attempt to raise our standard of being instead of our standard of living. Capitalism, though not immoral in itself, so often leads the alienated astray by offering a tempting scorecard to live by ... into a mad pursuit of that which is not actually enriching but appears to be so. A spiritual culture does not promote this wild goose chase, but a religious one often does. And that's because its canned offerings do not fulfill a human being.

The self has a soul sized hole. You’re right, it’s a hole which cannot be filled by materialism.

Jesus is one with the soul. Because of this, to be in relationship with Jesus is to be in relationship with the soul.

The self missing its soul is missing something valuable. What do you do when you’re missing something valuable that belongs to you? You search for it. You feel around in the darkness until you find it. You shine light on the darkness, so you can see.