Martin Bosworth writes: “I don’t find myself persuaded by people like Dawkins or Hitchens any more than I do their opposite numbers among the imams, bishops, etc”. *You* then interpret the second half of that relation as “fundamentalist religious types”.

But I’d say that the “opposite numbers [to Dawkins] among imams, bishops etc” are far from “fundamentalists” – they’re very thoughtful, often sophisticated scholars, in the mould of Rowan Williams or Karen Armstrong, who will take a holy text as a starting point, not a final word, and do whatever is necessary to adapt it to meet contrary evidence or argument.

Precognitive dreams “may be a sampling fallacy at work” – then again, *there may not*. You make a good argument that there *may* be such a fallacy – but then you proceed to treat the case as proven, which it isn’t.

“Something is going on, that something is marvelous, and that something often escapes rational explanation” – here, I think you’re maybe doing a disservice to the scope and possibilities of “rational explanation”. If you read Douglas Hofstadter’s “I am a Strange Loop”, you’ll find he provides perfectly rational (physical, mathematical) explanations for the existence of something you could quite plausibly call “the soul” – something that does indeed exist independently of the body, and may well outlive it for an indefinite period.

Bingo. And the probability is that we won’t ever get all of those explanations, which seems to scare the shit out of (or the Jesus into) most people.

The picture shown in my link gives a perfect example of the lens of life, the filter, and either image you see is correct, and neither is wrong.

http://masteroftheuniverse.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/perspective-and-mental-filters/

Jeff