I had a conversation once with a woman who was a firm believer in numerology. I listened for some time as she told me how to compute my "number" from the letters of my name, by adding the indiviual digits together. There's more to it than just that, but listening to her it occurred to me that the entire system was built around the fact that we use base 10 for our numbering system.

So I said to her, "Would numerology still be valid if we only had 8 fingers and thumbs?". At first she didn't understand what I was getting at, but I showed her a few worked examples. My name in base 8 generated an entirely different number than it did in base 10 and so did hers. To me it seemed such an obvious contradiction of the whole basis of numerology, but she became very defensive (as I thought she might) and told me that numerology didn't have to follow the rules of mathematics and then refused to discuss the matter further.

This is where I have a problem with those kind of belief systems. They appear to be based on arbitrary or spurious factors that don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not that I require absolute proof. I don't even mind if something can't be proven, but when it fails even the most basic tests of rationality, then it falls into the category of blind faith.

I don't regard having an analytical approach to things is in any way limiting my experiences. All the emotional experiences that others have presented in this thread are ones that I can identify with. I have a thirst for knowledge that embraces the rational, the emotional and the spiritual.

Someone might read a poem and think how beautiful it is, but have no idea about poetic form or structure. Does that mean that a student of literature who does understand these things appreciates the beauty of the poem any less? I think the reverse is more likely to be true.

Understanding the world better does not diminish the awe at the wonder of it all. The more we seek to know, the more we find to know. Blind faith, however, believes what it will despite what the world shows to the contrary.

Faith is the outward manifestation of the closed mind.

"I believe we will find all the causes eventually."

Faith is the outward manifestation of a closed mind!

Logical positivism and reductionism in an expanding and two-way conscious reality is a mystery to me! No that's me being sensationalist, what I mean is, reducing everything to data doesn't help us understand everything. It's been said (and I believe it) that if science is to progress beyond the endless grinding mill of non-participatory cynicism then it will naturally turn a wide circle in and come again to holistic study, and exciting possibilities. We may even discover other words for dreamtime, or reincarnation, this example is purely speculative and non-facetious, but what I'm again clumsily trying to say is that (forget all the Megarak/New Age crap that's all stereotypical pap) is that the desire to discover will always fight against the desire to atomise and be damned. And just as creation leads us like a carrot, so discovery will be a creative process always. The mystery is forever, that's why it has us in it's grip. I can't see the mystery without also being the mystery. Cognitive psychology, physics and biology will one day reside together in holistic science, resemble a hyper-techno version of witchcraft. And there'll still be cries of 'burn the witch'! I'll bet my creation-crazy ass that Goethe was right.

This is an excerpt of an essay regarding progressive deanthropomorphization in science, it's a short seven pages long and leads us on into the great modern mystery: That science is really trying to 'become' nature.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:pXpR7iRgdegJ:www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/Rb4205.pdf+goethe+reductionism&hl=en&ie=UTF-8