[betty boop]

djf, what you wrote is absolutely brilliant, lapidary!

It is marvelous to know that someone else has been thinking through the same things as me, on the basis of seemingly similar experiences and their reflection, and pretty much gets to the same place I get to. I thought your essay was simply beautiful. Thank you so much!

p.s.: You have also "set up" the thinking of another person whose insights on these subjects I hope to incorporate into a reply in progress, Hungarian astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre -- who really "puts flesh" on Raman's "bones."

[If I can ever get to write it!]

[djf]

I have been reading and thinking about a book called "The Encounter of man and nature" by Uh-oh a guy named Seyyed Hossein Nasr from a series of lectures at Columbia? NYU?
Don't have it in hand now. His basic thesis is that the scientific view of the world has profaned us and the world by making it so that if we have no use for something, we ignore or destroy it. He touches on Christian and Islamic philosophy, but only as checkpoint type things, not as a basis. I still have half to go, it is highly recommended.
Science looks at things through rose-colored glasses. Then, it has the audacity to state that there is no such thing as "green". Nasr flatly states science is and can be only a part of the total solution.