> "...just because something doesn't exist as a documented and 'peer-reviewed' ... piece of categorized research doesn't mean it isn't there, and in many cases

> "...just because something doesn't exist as a documented and 'peer-reviewed' ... piece of categorized research doesn't mean it isn't there, and in many cases important philosophical perspectives from alternative traditions of inquiry have been impressively validated by modern science." There is nothing controversial in what you are saying and most scientists are likely to agree that, at times, modern science does verify what has already been stated based on non-scientific grounds. But at least to me (and I think plenty of others) this is not a problem in the first place. Science is an approximation of the truth, our best current understanding of the world and we know that there are things that we simply don't know (heck, the world would be quite boring otherwise). Science is instead about making small gradual improvements to that approximation and this is where my view on things clashes (I think) with yours. The idea that some philosophies/religions sometimes get close to our scientific understanding reminds me of a person that claimed to have dreams depicting future events. This person would make a crude drawing of what he saw, then march down to the local bank that had a clock with year, date and time and take a photo in-front of that clock. Later on, after for example 9/11, he would go back to these dreams and perhaps find something similar to this event. But this is the lure of post-hoc reasoning, what he initially had was a crude drawing and the meaning and connection to New York, Al-Qaeda, etc. came after the fact. To me, the connection that you describe works in a similar fashion. There is a lot of strange things that you get with your package of beliefs but I do think that any claim to being more in-line with modern science is mostly due to cherry-picking and cheer luck and that we are better of picking our philosophies/religion based on some fuzzy idea of "morals" rather than their relation to our current scientific understanding.