An outsider-even-to-outsiders position on methods of thinking, and a Mass of Celebration

German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper's book on leisure and its religious connections examines in a very accessible way both epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and the connections between leisure and religious insight. Or we might say he examines the way we find truth through the empirical methods of science verifiable by observation, experience and reason, compared to leisurely free thinking or intuition, which Pieper seems to prefer.

I think leisurely free thinking or intuition is like a very rapid way of summing up whatever empirical methods of observation, experience, and reason we have absorbed (or not absorbed ) in our life, so rapidly that we don't see the mind or method involved----they are sort of the same thing.

Artists and ascetics tend to lead with leisurely free thinking or intuition and scientists tend to lead with observation, experience and reasoning, but the best artists and scientists probably use both methods.

Being a religious philosopher Pieper compares leisurely free thinking or intuition to religious celebration and festival. I see this as the tone of the projected Mass of Celebration in the Outward Path of the projected Theoevolutionary Church; not in contrast to the Sacrificial Mass of the Inward Path of traditional religion, but rather as transforming the symbolic inward experience of God (thought of as spiritual but really a peak material experience) to the Outward Path of material evolution to supermaterial Godhood.

The sacred, or Godhood, is seen as supermaterial and reached through material evolution. The hero is featured in the material Outward Path to ascending levels of supermaterial Godhood rather than the early sacrificial martyr saint of the Inward Path, which is still valid but transformed. Science can join religion without the standard antagonism. It is an outsider-even-to-outsiders religious view, but in any case a religious celebration and festival of life, not death, is called for in the projected Theoevolutionary Church: a Mass of Celebration.