But there is a chance that the answers will discomfit a great many bureaucratic and doctrinal religions. The idea of religion as a body of belief, im… - Carl Sagan

But why had science lost its way in the first place? What appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy. You could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly — like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who’s more religious would you say — the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.