> The Biblical answer seems to be that I'm simply unpracticed. I have an underdeveloped spiritual organ of sense, and if so, it's not to be wondered at that I don't have a very good idea of what spiritual reality is like. Try explaining to a blind person what "red" is. He won't really understand it, and he'll really only believe you if he has a reason to trust you as a good-intentioned source of authority. Well, I have more than one good-intentioned source of authority who can tell me about spiritual reality. So is it intellectual arrogance on my part not to believe them, to assume that I already have a perfect capacity to perceive the world? Should I suspend my intellectual prejudices and make a serious effort to practice the development of that sensory ability? Should we *all* be doing that, if we're honest inquirers?

There are some important differences between the blind man analogy and the spirituality analogy. For instance, thanks to modern science, you could explain to the blind man how colors work. The concepts of electromagnetic radiation and the visible spectrum are understandable to those who have not experienced them -- just as I think many people have an understanding of high-energy radiation even though they've never been near a nuclear reaction. I have yet to hear a cohesive theory that explains *how* spirituality works.

That's not a clear debunking of spirituality, though, since it took humans millennia to figure out how colors work. But the other thing the blind man has going for him is that colors are accepted by the vast majority of humans, and there is little argument about what is red among those who can see colors. There is no such agreement about spirituality among the world's religious adherents, or even among adherents of the same religion (or even religious sect). If spirituality is a physical phenomena that can be perceived by humans, then it seems that a good many of them who claim to be able to do this cannot. I say this by virtue of the fact that so many of them offer mutually exclusive descriptions of these phenomena.

Repeatability and verification by others is an important part of the scientific method. Claims of observations aren't accepted as fact until they are independently verified by a number of scientists working under controlled conditions. One of my big stumbling blocks into believing in spirituality is that there is no consensus among those who claim to be spiritual -- how do I separate the wheat from the chaff?

Since I don't implicitly trust my own observations and senses (which are incredibly fallible), I expect to be able to have them confirmed by an overwhelming majority of people who experience the same thing. When people can do this for spiritual things, I'll be more likely to consider making the investment of time to develop any spiritual-perception organs I have.

Stephen