With all due respect I think you are both guilty of the same error in logic that you are criticizing. If whatever god/entities encountered in a psychedelic experience or a religious text are indeed of a higher intelligence, and the message they convey are seemingly pithy platitudes about loving one another and not sweating the small stuff, could it be that perhaps advanced knowledge about the physical universe is not all that important in the grand scheme of things?
For sure yeah, I don't have any problem with this idea. For the record I meant my comments to be taken kind of tongue in cheek, and they were really aimed more at people who try to claim that ancient religious texts, visions of the deceased, or drug induced hallucinations should be considered to be objective
evidence of the fact that these texts were written by an omnipotent being, that there is a "life after death" in the traditional sense, ie, that we retain some semblance of our individuality and can perhaps interact with the living as ghosts, or any other sort of supernatural belief one chooses to indulge. Whereas the way I see it, none of these things are really evidence, although as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and I wouldn't try to claim that these ideas should be considered entirely false either.
And furthermore, it seems to me that faulting god/the universe for not removing all obstacles/negative experiences in life is the height of arrogance and elevates man and diminishes whatever universal intelligence is out there to a mere genie in a bottle whose only function is to provide shelter from pain at the whim of a flawed creature. I think it’s a pretty universal understanding that good parenting isn’t about removing difficulties from your children but rather enforcing the importance of honesty, integrity, compassion, empathy, determination, etc. in the face of the inevitable trials and tribulations that will come their way. Otherwise it’s pretty common for those children whose parents attempt in vain to protect them from the real world become spoiled brats who believe that their parents and typically their government are that genie in the bottle. I submit that the role of the entities/universal knowledge/god may in fact have a similar relationship with us. Perhaps the impending birth of my first child has given me a lens that sees everything as a push/pull relationship revolving around this very question
Again - no disagreement there. My own perspective about the majority of modern organised theistic religions - although this could equally apply to ancient paganism - is that the anthropomorphisation of the gods, and anthropocentric way of looking at the universe - does indeed significantly diminish the majesty of the universe and of the entirety of creation. I think honestly the very idea that we could understand the mind or motivations of an omnipotent being in any way, let alone in such a specific way as to be able to extract such fine details as the commandments, elaborate prescriptive rituals and suchlike, is yet another collective human ego delusion and just ludicrous.
That said, I do believe it may well be possible to extract some kind of universal truths from our experience of being, and I have no problem with the argument that all religions are in a sense imperfect reflections of such things, diluted over the centuries by the preconceptions and biases of countless numbers of humans trying to figure out the nature of this strange, strange world.
I actually also am a great believer in the idea that "everything happens for a reason", "God works in mysterious ways" and the like, although I think these ideas are commonly misinterpreted, in actual fact however they are of course self evident. Everything does happen for a reason, in the sense that everything is preceded by some kind of cause. It's just not possible to us to actually understand all of these reasons all of the time. It can also be easily misinterpreted of course and a difficult thing to accept for people who have experienced truly horrific things in this life, but there doesn't need to be any kind of moral weight behind this statement, although it's tempting to read such moralising into it, for reasons again relating to our biased and narrow viewpoint.
Anyway just to bring it back to the "error in logic" that you noted, I 100% get what you are referring to and I agree it is an error, and not logical!
I've noticed it myself whenever discussing the nature of being with very staunch atheists of the viewpoint that everything is random, there is no higher intelligence guiding our actions, etc. Just as those who are traditionally very religious have difficulty with the idea that the creation of the universe might be simply a "natural event", whatever that means when we're talking about the beginning of nature as we know it, very hard atheists have difficulty with the idea that
we were created by the universe,
we were put here for a reason even if the means by which the universe did this was billions of years of evolution rather than an anthropomorphic god simply clicking his or her fingers.
In my view (and again, this might be my ego talking

) the only reason that one would see any real distinction between these ideas (pure randomness versus a deliberately orchestrated conscious creation) is that they haven't thought about it enough. I honestly don't see that it makes much sense when we're talking about the
creator of the universe to make a distinction between god and simply the immutable forces of nature. IMO, they are one and the same, and this doesn't diminish either of them. The argument people usually try to make - and this is usually, but not exclusively, from the hardline atheists - is that there's a difference between something being done by an act of
will versus just unconscious causality, a row of dominoes of inanimate matter.
And this, I think, is the route of the whole problem, and in actual fact the origin of all anthropocentric philosophies, strict, codified religious beliefs, and plenty of other - in my view - inaccurate and even harmful ideas that these same hardline atheists are so quick to condemn as pure fantasy - while unknowingly clinging on to one of the most fundamental tenets of all these ideas. That of the
supernatural nature of the human experience. That of a distinction between
will, and conscious experience, compared to the aforementioned row of dominoes which is unconscious, natural, and 100% deterministic.
I posit that this distinction is
entirely illusory. The mechanism of choice, stripped down to it's most fundamental level, is at it's core a deterministic process. Human beings, and the experience of being human, are a part of nature, and therefore any choice we make or any time we
choose to impose our
will on the universe, this is an
entirely natural event. There is, IMO, nothing truly "unnatural", and it is not actually possible to define an act of will in a truly logical way that separates it from the other forces of nature. Therefore, just as everything happens for a reason, everything can also said to have been done
deliberately. The Earth chose to cultivate a biosphere in which we could evolve. The sun chooses to shine, spewing heavier elements and the seeds of intelligent life into the cosmos.
"
But it's not really a choice, they're just following natural laws..." one might say... but so are we! It's only the illusion of our perspective that makes us believe we are doing anything other than this. Whatever inconceivably powerful event spawned the reality we now reside within was something really completely outside almost any context in which we are capable of thinking, possibly even outside the arrow of time as we understand it, and therefore it's the height of human egotism to think that it even makes sense to debate whether the
creator of the universe did it "deliberately", or if it was just a "natural event" as if one somehow diminishes the other, or that there's even any meaningful difference between the 2. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this event was - by definition -
divine and our experiences of being alive from one moment to the next are therefore faint echoes of this transcendent divinity.
I understand the source of the bias of course, being conscious seems to be a great mystery, and it still is a great mystery which we do not and maybe cannot understand. It's not obvious why we are conscious, even now, why there is something rather than nothing... but from all of our perspectives, despite the fact that we can be aware of the wider universe - or at the very least, it's a convincing illusion - it's also true for all of us that when we leave a room, in a sense it ceases to exist. We will in any case have no further experience of it unless and until we choose to go back there. This being the case, it's a natural, default assumption to place human consciousness at the centre of our conception of reality - allowing also that other humans probably believe themselves and the inside of their own mind to be ground zero of reality - even though we can't even be completely sure of this. That being the case, if the experience of being conscious seems to be in a sense supernatural, then why not other supernatural things? And surely, if there is a god, or gods, they must be conscious like us? For this consciousness is something magical, something separate from the rest of nature, even above it! I think when it's spelled out like this most can understand the obvious flaw in this mode of thinking, but equally, it's obvious why this is such a persistent, shared delusion, and IMO, again, the origin of all "supernatural" belief systems.
I posted about this in the Philosophy and Spirituality forum recently and there referred to it as a kind of "Qualia Bias", the first order bias of being human that distorts our thinking about everything else. Apologies to OP for going wildly off topic, will split this discussion to a different thread if needed, as you can imagine this is something I very much enjoy thinking about so thank you for giving me the chance to think about it a little more and clarify my own thinking! :giggle: