Hi Chris.

I don't especially wish to read the writings of far-right figures. From what you say here, they have misinterpreted the original teachings to fit them into their warped ideologies, and I don't need any further evidence. For example, misunderstanding 'the metaphysical world is the true, or ultimate, reality' to mean 'the metaphysical world is the only one that matters'. It's hard to believe that he will have a pleasant time in the afterlife, and will need many further incarnations.

Good joke about Christianity/Gnosticism but more applicable to real chickens and eggs. Some serious historical research could come up with some answers. And of course it all depends what you mean by Gnosticism, which is a word coined by later scholars to describe a wide diversity of groups and sects. I would say that there is reasonable evidence that (what we now call) Gnostic ideas preceded (what we now call) Christianity. There is a further problem that (what we now call) Christianity preceded Jesus by a long time.

I agree with what you say about the experiential nature of Zen compared to Buddhism, but I think that was the point I was making in the first place. It may have been later, but was it an evolution? In practice perhaps, but in beliefs? But we may just be quibbling over semantics.

Regarding Judaism and the Messiah, as your references show, this is a very complicated topic, with many layers. So forgive me if I don't pursue this further. (If this were an academic discussion, we wouldn't be allowed to use Wikipedia. But as it's a friendly chat, that is of course fine.)

Regarding religion and moving forward, I agree with your basic idea, things move on and change will come. You call that 'evolution'. So we have to decide how we define evolution. Is it just a synonym for 'time moves on'? Or is there some implication of progress? Enlightenment science has enabled humanity to move on in our understanding of the physical universe, technology, medicine and so on. But the dominant worldview that accompanies this, physicalism (with accompanying atheism) is now a big obstacle to making further scientific progress, if by that we mean a better understanding of the universe and how it works.

Like you, I don't believe in the type of heaven you describe. That's why I said the Pope was wrong. Heaven as he conceives it doesn't exist.

Atheism as a lie? Very complicated topic, but briefly... As you say we need to define the term. Is an atheist a non-theist, by which we mean someone who doesn't believe in a God of the anthropomorphic type described in the Old Testament. In which case we can have sympathy with that position. Or do we mean someone who denies anything supernatural, metaphysical, anything beyond the material world, i.e. scientific physicalism? This would rule out Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Gnostic ideas, and that was the lie I was referring to. Having said that, is it possible that some lower-level deity in a polytheistic system might resemble the 'God' of the Old Testament? Perhaps.

I agree with your views on dogmatism and zealots in science. They are primarily the ones that I see myself in a battle against in my Medium writings. Also agree with you on the good points in science. There is a problem, however, when new papers and ideas are 'peer-reviewed' by the dogmatic zealots you refer to. What chance would any outside-the-box new work have of getting published? There are various examples of this.

Personal experience and introspection do tend to be rejected by science. After all, the scientific method requires reliable data. Anecdotes from personal experience can always be attributed to false memory, lying, subjective impressions, and, of course, cannot be repeated in an experiment, which is a requirement for reliable science.

Regarding the ancients and their science, “the limits of their technologies”, and “the limits of their understandings of the scope of the universe”, I think you would benefit from reading some alternative history. An alternative viewpoint would be they were incredibly advanced technologically, which we are only now beginning to catch up with, in which case their science must have been pretty good. And it also seems that they had a very sophisticated understanding of astronomy. I also think you are misinterpreting the symbolic language of Egyptian mythology as what they actually believed.

Evolution may indeed be a well-tested theory, one with a near-endless list of examples of evolution in action. But what do we mean by 'evolution'? The word means something like 'change over time'. Who could disagree? What the word is often taken to mean, however, is the neo-Darwinian conception of natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations. And that is a wholly different question. It's what atheist physicalists want to believe, of course; that's why they constantly say that 'evolution' has been proved. And that's why that understanding of evolution is an enemy to religious beliefs. You correctly say that evolution shouldn't be that enemy, but that means you must have a different understanding of evolution from the neo-Darwinians. Don't forget that Richard Dawkins said that Darwin enabled him to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.