Only the mind open to independently confirmed evidence has any claim to being a seeker of the truth.  Any true seeker should live their spiritual life the same way they should live any aspect of your life, by examining the best evidence available and then determining how best to proceed until new evidence, including the evidence produced in the laboratory of personal experience, becomes available.  Life, in this way, is much like a Pro Bass Fishing Tournament.  Historical data and the collective experiences of every sincere angler to ever live can give the Bass Seeker important insights.  Still, the information that matters most is putting all the available information and technology toward the desired result of catching a lot of Big Bass!

Books written about fishing from a few thousand years ago might be entertaining and possibly even enlightening.  I'm just not certain that making a burnt offering to Pisces will help you catch any Big Bass when you head down to the river.  Of course, the burnt offerings of the past did absolutely nothing to help anyone catch fish few thousand years ago, either!  Ancient Fisherpeople didn't have sonar technology capable of telling them exactly where the fish were located.  They also didn't yet have our understanding of many of the scientific truths of fishing that have been gained over several thousand years of study, experience and scientific progress.

The Great Fisherperson, however, is never content with today's understandings or with current assumptions based on the always evolving body of scientific knowledge.  You must accept that today's certainties often will prove to be tomorrow's nonsensical burnt offerings.  As human beings, we have a highly developed ability to recognize patterns and relationships.  This ability allowed our ancestors to discover the motion of the stars in the sky and to understand when to prepare for the upcoming seasons.  Sometimes, however, humans believed they saw relationships in ways we know today to be nonsensical and superstitious.  The very worst of ancient human traditions grew from believing that relationships existed between human actions and God's favor.  Today, although no Fisherperson believes that a young human virgin must be sacrificed to curry favor with the God of the Big Bass.  However, a few continue to believe that it is beneficial to pray to the God of the Big Bass to curry favor in winning the tournament.

As we are able to gain deeper and deeper knowledge about a subject, we find that some of the assumptions we've been making were little more than non-causal correlations.  We learn that neither prayer nor rain dances bring rain when we need it.  We also know that a certain number of severe weather events will occur in predictable cycles just as they have for all of time, meaning that living on earth presents inherent risks and that we aren't likely at the mercy of a capricious Deity monitoring our behavior and keeping track of our sins to determine when and where to send the next flood or earthquake in order to discipline mankind for his inequities.

As we humbly find our way to becoming the Best Fisherperson We Can Be and to teach the Great Truths of the Big Bass to our children and to our community, we uncover evidence that many of the Ancient Great Truths were demonstrably false or were simply superstitions, rationalizations and mythologies created in the imaginations of the Great Fisherpeople of Ancient Times.  We understand enough about the Ways of the River that we expect future generations of Great Fisherpeople will see us as similarly naive and superstitious.  Future generations will recognize that some of our current beliefs were helpful to the Bass Seeker and that others were wasteful distractions, dangerous errors or both.

So, the Great Fisherpeople always ask themselves these questions to guide them to the Big Bass:

1. What can I know about our world that his helpful to my supporting my existence on the planet?

2. How do I know it? What is the evidence? How should I respond to this evidence?

3. How can I use the available evidence to achieve my own self-interest while taking into thoughtful consideration all the interdependent realities of existence?

To the extent that we live free from dogmatic assertions and enslaving philosophies, the Great Fisherpeople have been able to prosper and to live peacefully with the other People of the River.  To the extent we live as anything else and by any other method, we live in poverty and in a state of perpetual war.

As Great Fisherpeople, we are tasked not only with finding and then catching the Big Bass.  We also must insure that our ancestors are left with rivers full of Big Bass which will continue to nurture the progress of the People of the River for so long as the River Flows in the Hearts & Minds of the Great Fisherpeople.

One might call this process a strategy of spiritual "catch & release"!