The Road Less Traveled
    A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
M. Scott Peck, M.D.

The Religion of Science

- Spiritual growth
    - In early stages of journey, deals with knowledge, not faith
    - Necessary that we learn
    - Must expand our realm of knowledge and our field of vision through digestion and incorporation of new information
- To develop brodader vision, we must be willing to kill narrower vision
- Road of spiritual growth
    - Begin by distrusting what we already believe
    - Actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar
    - Deliberately challenging validity of what we have previously been taught
    - Path to holiness lies through questioning everything
   
- Our religion must be wholly personal one
    - To be best of what we're capable of
    - Forged entirely through fire or our questioning
    - Born of our own experience of reality
- For most of us, everything is secondhand, even emotions
    - Few have developed distinctive personal life
    - For mental health & spiritual growth, we must develop our own personal religion
    - Not rely on that of our parents
   
- Science is religion
    - World view of considerable complexity
    - Number of major tenets
    - Necessary for humans to subject themselves to discipline of scientific method
    - Begins with experience
    - Experience must be verifiable
    - Other people have the same experience under the same circumstances
    - Science is a religion of skepticism [rather than faith]
- Scientific attitude enables us to transform our personal experience of microcosm into personal experience of the macrocosm
- People who think that they don't have a religion
    - They have a profound one: they worship the truth
   
- Scientists from around the world better able to talk to each other
- Skeptical world view of scientific-minded is a distinct improvement over a world view based upon blind faith
- Scientists have grave difficulty dealing with the reality of God
    - Looking from vantage of sophisticated skepticism at phenomenon of belief in God
    - We (skeptics) are not impressed
    - Track record for belief in God looks pretty poor
   
- Is belief in God a sickness?
    - Is it primitive or childish thinking that we should grow out of as we seek higher levels of awareness
    - What happens to one's belief in God as one grows through process of psychotherapy?

Our religion, or world view, needs to be a wholly personal one, created out of our own experience.  The methods of science: skepticism and theorizing based on experience, provide one method for us to expand our world view.