I like Shermer. More people should be encouraged to think outside the traditional paradigm as he has.

The problem with his thinking is that it completely misses the post-positivist and post-modernist explications and explorations of phenomenology.

The absolute truth is that truth, itself, is not something we can successfully communicate with each other about. This is a philosophical, and quite historical, matter of fact. Truth is not conceptualizable because it has no known beginning and no known end. Once we place a label on something and start communicating using that label, we diminish the importance of truth and whatever we might know and be able to communicate about that "truth" up to some point in time and space.

The importance of truth is encoded in the Ten Commandments, but not in the traditional religionist interpretations of those commandments. In the obvious implication of what Moses was attempting to communicate the encoding becomes quite plain. "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain," was simply a statement that can be successfully understood as, "whatever you think truth is for you, those beliefs will have immutable consequences for you in your life." They will know you're a Christian by your love is also a similar statement. "What is the basis for your thoughts on the subject," is also a good question that betrays the same understanding as Moses' commandment.

Such is the nature of the human condition: we have a critical and crucial relationship with the meta-information locked up in our beliefs about what is true and final about ourselves, yet we have yet to become able to communicate about our own personal relationship with our own understanding of truth with one another.

Religions all start as spiritual or intellectual traditions that do their level-best to address the human condition, but soon our faulty beliefs about ourselves take over the critical and crucial communication processes involved in sharing the information we uncover about ourselves with each other. The spiritual or intellectual traditions become bureaucratized and tangible, which diminishes the intended message like a snapshot of a moving phenomenon that also fades over time. We can point to the fading colors and the halcyon days when all was new and bright, but the fact is the damn snapshot was a blurry mess to begin with.

Also by my understanding of these things, science and the scientific method follow the same rules as any religion: once we get bureaucratized and tangible, we miss the point and diminish the actual value of our conclusions. And so science becomes a means to an end, but that end invariably becomes a method to perpetuate a faulty understanding of what happened at a given point in time and space in our relationship with whom we believed we were. "I think; therefore, I was," is a much better interpretation of Descartes' introduction to the thinking of the positivists that many scientists still believe has yet to be disproved.

Phenomenologists introduce us to a tripart relationship: the object, our awareness of the object, and our interpretation of the process we utilize to become aware of the object. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The observer, the observed and the process of observation. All of these statements describe the same basic phenomenon of the human condition.

We have as yet been unable to hold the attention of any mass audience long enough to communicate these matters and their importance to our daily lives. The models of religion, of proselytizing, of brainwashing, of socialization -- none of these models works long enough to get the basic point across that we have become stranded in the middle of some sort of philosophical "nowhere" with the only idiot who has the means to kill us on any number of different levels: ourselves.