So it's so awesome to learn that there's a scientific and logical framework that I can now explore, which finally makes sense with what I always felt, instead of the a rock and the hard place of materialism and mainstream religions, which were stifling, and really did feel like suffocating a bit.
What's interesting about this whole "between a rock and a hard place" thing is that religion in a way brought about this whole materialist mindset. I'm currently reading "Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy" by David Ray Griffin, and he describes how during the enlightenment, there was an intellectual war between basically 3 factions: the oldschool scholastics/Aristotelian types, the naturalists/mechanistic people (who would later become the materialists) AND the pantheists/magic people who argued for a philosophy that saw God embedded in nature and also believed in telepathy, telekinesis and so on.
Now, the religious types had many reasons being against the latter, one of them being that in this view, "miracles" are really part of nature/reality and not something "only God" could do. In their opposition to this "magical"/psychic mindset, they drifted towards a mechanistic view of the world, where God is outside the materialist world and can intervene/suspend the laws of nature and so on. Keep in mind that the early enlightenment peeps like Descartes, Newton and so on still believed in God; but they had this dualistic mindset: God as the "supernatural" and so on plus the materialist universe. Later, of course, materialists just removed God from the equation.
What this tells me is that there was an epic "intellectual divide and conquer" game going on. Those at the time would be unaware of it, and I'm sure for example that some of the religious types had good reasons for attacking some of the magical nonsense going on. But in hindsight, all this seems like a perfect "adjustment" of intellectual life that produced the evil materialism we have today. It also led to a denial of "phenomena", such as the ones Laura experienced (although the religions preserved some of that, especially Catholicism).
It's also interesting that today, we have a similar "three corners" situation: the religions on the one hand, the enlightenment types/atheists who believe in evolutionism on the other, and the postmodernists who are both against religion and against the enlightenment. The latter deny biology and evolutionary psychology and so on, but not because they know more, but simply because they are even more lost in lala-land. So again, this smells like "divide and conquer": ah, the postmodernists deny evopsych, so I must be for it! They deny genetic determinism, so I must accept that! Some religious people deny evolution, but believe in loads of nonsense, so I must be for evolution! And so on.
This again IMO shows the "finetuning" of intellectual life to produce soul-smashing and the mess we're in today. There seems to be a "hidden hand" - otherwise it's impossible to explain how this whole mess came about. Because at any stage, things could have gone differently; but they didn't!
