It certainly is amazing how different different folks' religious experiences are. I'm reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, and even though I'm not too far, it already has done a lot to show how much very different stuff all gets called "religious." As for why ESR thinks science and religion can't be reconciled, here's a few of his posts where he expands on that - reading at least his comments in the comment thread might also be helpful: What is Truth?, Predictability, Computability, and Free Will.
As for JMG and scientific materialism, my understanding of what he's saying, and which I am pretty sure I agree with, is that the view of most scientifically-minded folks is that the material plane is all there is. Quantum mechanics and relativity may not be directly observable by us, but their experimental and theoretical grounding is in observations of the material universe. Sure, there's been a whole lot of speculation from there (for example, one criticism of the currently-fashionable string theory is that much of the work does not ground out in observations that can be tested by experiment). I agree that most folks are rather disconnected from actually using and experiencing their five senses, lost in varying degrees of spectacle, as you say, but those specatacles are still for your eyes, your nerves, and your tastes.
And thank you for the link to ACOUP! I actually just found him a month or two ago, and I don't think I've mentioned him on the blog. I read his series on Sparta and found it fairly interesting, so I'll have to look more into his archives.
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It certainly is amazing how different different folks' religious experiences are. I'm reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, and even though I'm not too far, it already has done a lot to show how much very different stuff all gets called "religious." As for why ESR thinks science and religion can't be reconciled, here's a few of his posts where he expands on that - reading at least his comments in the comment thread might also be helpful: What is Truth?, Predictability, Computability, and Free Will.
As for JMG and scientific materialism, my understanding of what he's saying, and which I am pretty sure I agree with, is that the view of most scientifically-minded folks is that the material plane is all there is. Quantum mechanics and relativity may not be directly observable by us, but their experimental and theoretical grounding is in observations of the material universe. Sure, there's been a whole lot of speculation from there (for example, one criticism of the currently-fashionable string theory is that much of the work does not ground out in observations that can be tested by experiment). I agree that most folks are rather disconnected from actually using and experiencing their five senses, lost in varying degrees of spectacle, as you say, but those specatacles are still for your eyes, your nerves, and your tastes.
And thank you for the link to ACOUP! I actually just found him a month or two ago, and I don't think I've mentioned him on the blog. I read his series on Sparta and found it fairly interesting, so I'll have to look more into his archives.