False.
The observation of a length, temperature, etc is common among all people and can be repeated by all people.
And it is not dependend on your geographic location, your culture, your upbringing, your religion,....
Your "spiritual" experiences clearly are.
Funny how atheists, christians and muslims can independently from one another measure the length if a specific object and agree completely with eachother, but can not do the same when it concerns their "spiritual experiences".
What are you talking about? Have you ever heard of Relativity Theory? Length Contraction? Science doesn't even teach that two individuals can measure the same length exactly equivalently, as movement and speed alters the perception thereof, and we are all constantly in movement, even moving with respect to what we are measuring the length of, when we measure. Granted it is assumed to be minute when not approaching the speed of light, but it really isn't objective. Same goes for temperature on other grounds.
Also, they are highly cultural. Ever heard of the Metric system? Imperial Measurements? Feet and El? Not to mention the assumptions that need to be made of consistency and that something actual is being measured. Mahayana Buddhists would see what was measured as Void, Illusion, as would Eleatics. It really is not universal by a long shot, but requires similar axioms be held.
That is anyway not what I am talking about, but that these measurements are qualia, fragments of human experience themselves,that are only intersubjectively shared, but not shared in an objective actual sense. Also, I just gave examples where religious activity showed the same type of experience in common, such as Sufis, Trapist Monks and Zen Buddhists, which you just ignore.
I love how you, instead of trying to raise the credibility of religion to get it on par with empirical science, you are actually trying to do the opposit: discredit empirical science to get it down to the same level of religion.
What a decidedly odd way of looking at it. Tell me, do you measure your burger-making abilities by how good you are at bathing? Or do we test a mathematical proposition by the rules of Rugby?
Nothing is juxtaposed to anything else or taken down or up. It is apples vs rocks. Metaphysics against methodologic naturalism.
Superstition is rather common in the animal kingdom.
There's this famous, rather old, experiment which demonstrated even pigeons to have superstitious tendencies.
Anthropomorphisation at its finest, not to mention begging the question. Citation?
If your talking about Skinner, that shows attempts at pattern recognition, similar to Science I suppose, that also seeks repeatable patterns to account for phenomena. So, a form of Superstition in your mind, then?
It's pure psychology. Surival instincts that make us prone to engaging in the cognition error being "the false positive". The infamous simplistic example being "you hear a sound in the bushes... is it just the wind, or is it a dangerous predator?". As an animal who is also a prey for dangerous predators, simple survival instinct will make you infuse agency in that noise.
Creatures that simply assume this agency, run like hell. The others sit tight and "investigate" or "gather more data" to find out what the noise is. These are also the ones that die, if the noise indeed was a dangerous predator.
Couple that with our instinctive need to see patterns everywhere - to the point of even inventing patterns where there really aren't any,....
And you have all the ingredients you need for humans to invent religions out of thin air. In some sense, it almost becomes inevitable that religions get invented.
As it turns out, that is not correct.
What you see as "very complex behaviour as religion", really comes down to quite simple things... The false positive, primarily.
The "complexity" of religion, is really just the result of thousands of years of developping the lore of the religions. It comes as no surprise to me either that we have so many so vastly different religions, in that context.
This is just supposition. There is really no support for these statements beyond conjecture. Quite disingenuous, as if the great complexities of human religion, from Neoplatonists down to Buddhists to Christianity, could all be boiled down to sussurations. Again, begging the question to write it off as false positives without any real reason to do so. I could say Empiricism is a structure of false positives by equal measure, as all activity derived therefrom, I could just call "centuries of developing lore" thereof. After all, the whole point of a false positive is its establishment via its utility (even though untrue) - the latter being the premiere claim Naturalists try to ascribe for Empiricism alone as a form of reality testing.
