This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests t

This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests that scientists should overcome their personal allergy to religion and instead trust the data. He suggests the compromise of rejecting the "theology" of the religion, presumably because it is "unscientific", and instead focusing on the empirically observable physical social practices. I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice. And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team). It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive. The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings. https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-revolution-changed-our-worldview/ https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s