intelligent design / defining terms /

[Cometman]

Glenn Scheper wrote:
Such things, though not peer-repeatable, are NOT "zero evidence".
-- 

Of what, though?  Not to denigrate your dream, I have a similar outlook
to yours in many ways and respect the Gnostic tradition.
Evidence of possible precognition, of tuning into some larger reality
than one's own existence or what we see on TV or read, yes.
Evidence of a brand of deity? 

this piece of ground i'm standing on is connected to a land mass, which
is part of a world, which seems to be part of a larger system that I've
read some reasonable facts about, and beyond that I honestly can't say
what's going on

Religion seems to be the attempt by its propagators to convince others
that they know more than that.  But I find the argument by authority
(to expect people to believe that "this guy in a robe speaking Latin"
or, later, "this leather-bound book written by people living in a
patriarchal society thousands of years ago" has all the answers) 
extraordinarily unconvincing compared to the tradition of free thought
and scientific inquiry celebrated by and in people like Galileo,
Copernicus, Crick and Watson, John Stuart Mill -  "this makes sense,
sheds a little more light, and perhaps we can vault from it to a new
level of understanding" 

However, human experience - mine, at any rate - doesn't completely
consist of skepticism and logical thought.  It probably won't be
popular with religious people, but I submit that the willing suspension
of disbelief when reading fiction flows from the same source as
religious belief, and its abilities to develop the soul stem from a
similar widening of one's point of view, a willingness to listen to a
lengthy story and comprehend its rules and derive profit from those
contemplations.  For instance, the moral content of Pynchon's fables...