Oh and just one more little point. Ramanujan was a self-taught clerk in the Indian Railways who spent all his spare time "doing sums" to quote his wife. He sent these to the great Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy who couldn't make head or tail of them other than to say that he felt they must be right because they were so beautiful. He arranged for Ramanujan to go to Cambridge where he worked with Hardy and a colleague, Littlewood, to prove some of his work and to learn some more maths.

He died at the tender age of 31, after failing to take care of his health at Cambridge. He was known to be obsessive about his food and would simply throw out food he felt was substandard and go hungry, which probably contributed to his death.

Evariste Galois, another of those great products of the French 19th century, who invented group theory, wrote only 4 papers, all in a few months around his 18th birthday. One was his work on Group theory, which was rejected as a basis for admission to university by none other than the great mathematician Poisson, who himself gave us so much of the basis of statistical analysis. That paper has since been shown to be absolutely correct and Poisson's name is slightly muddied as a result, but it is by no means an easy thing to understand, especially since it was entirely new!

Galois was killed in a duel at age 20.

I could go on and on for a hundred pages.

Dear Craig,

I looked up the meaning of spirituality in Wikipedia. There are many meanings in many contexts.

It covers such a broad area that almost any unexplained occurrence can be called spiritual.

I have had an unexplained occurrence. I was driving down a street in Philadelphia in autumn. Fallen leaves covered much of the street. For some reason I stopped the car. After I stopped the car a little arm rose up from the leaves. A child had hidden in a pot hole. I asked the child where he lived. He pointed to a house. I took him there and told his mother about it. If I hadn’t stopped the car I would have run over him. I drove home and was upset for quite a while. I don’t know why I stopped the car as nothing seemed unusual.

“The History of Christianity” tells about theological conflicts. Are the Father and the Son of the same or of different substances? People on both sides of that conflict have killed those who had a different view. All the theological conflicts I have read about seem pointless as there is no way to determine which view is correct.

My explanation for the plethora of religions is that the views of various disordered minds are taken seriously. Sometimes the views of a disordered mind are worth taking seriously. Nash’s insights have proved to be useful and practical. However, the minds that proposed their views about the substances of the Father and the Son have produced nonsense and slaughter.

The most practical course for me to follow is to avoid commenting on or reading Sellick’s type of essay. However, the problem is that I am fascinated by religion.

MacCulloch in “A History of Christianity” wrote:

“I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species”.

Davidf, have you read much about synchronicity? You experience on the road is a perfect example.

Have a look at this:
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/catching-the-bug-of-synchronicity/

continued...

I have had several experiences along the line of David's road experience.

Once I felt the need to go the Zoo, it was a nice day and I really didn't have anything else to do, so I went.

After wandering around the zoo for 30 minutes or so I wasn't finding I was as much in the mood as I thought and I decide to leave. On the way out I stopped in the coffee stop for a quick bite to eat.

As I was sitting there, almost ready to leave I noticed a toddler poking his hand between an open door and the door jam; and as soon as I saw this a gust of wind caused the door to slowly swing closed... I leaped to the door in time to literally save the child's fingers from getting crushed or worse. The child had no idea and the child's parents had no idea what had just happened.

As I left the zoo I felt may true purpose for going had been to be in the right spot at the right time for this little fellow. It felt deeply good, like I was tuned into the universe, if only briefly.

ConservativeHippie,

I think it’s more likely that a simple confirmation bias is at work. You don’t remember, or are not aware of, all the times you could have been there for someone and weren’t. What about that time you weren’t driving along Arthur Highway and didn’t accidentally get into a head-on crash with Martin Bryant killing him before he could commit the Port Arthur Massacre? There are a lot of people you could have been there for and never were? Is that then evidence against some sort of mystical interconnectedness?

What would be amazing is if such a crossing of paths like that never happened to you. It would be amazing if no-one's paths ever crossed so that events like that never occurred. Now THAT would be a phenomenon to write about!

Despite the the quackery of Deepak Chopra and the makers of What the Bleep Do We Know, and their misrepresentation of the research done by quantum physicists, we have no way of knowing if there is some mystical interconnectedness in the universe. What we can know, however, is that people cross paths. We also know that people's moods and preferences can change, and that this can result in them changing their minds about where they want to be.

That being said, which do you think is the more rational conclusion to draw from your experience?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé tells of two of Kekulé's scientific dreams:

The ouroboros dream

The ouroboros, Kekulé's inspiration for the structure of benzene.

The new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé's honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper. Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).[10] This vision, he said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.

...

He told yet another anecdote in 1890, of a vision of dancing atoms and molecules that led to his theory of structure. This happened, he claimed, while he was riding on the upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus in London. This probably occurred in the late summer of 1855.[16]