But are there really three apples in the basket? Or do we only perceive that there are three apples in the basket because we are stuck in the 3rd dimension of a 10 dimensional universe (if you buy into superstring theory, which I am not sure I do lol)?

I do think that we as humans are, for whatever reason, hardwired in our brains to form the basis of our thoughts from a root of Idealism (or religion, or whatever, but I think that at the base level of our thought processes, it's all the same thing). Like, a religious person has a set of beliefs that they take on faith, and that's what they use as a lens to understand the world through. Likewise, the athiest or secular scientific rational has a much different set of beliefs, but still, we simply /cannot/ know everything, and so those beliefs too are based on a set of principles that simply must be taken of faith. Even a person like myself, or yourself (or so I get the impression), who believes that there is room in the world for all different kinds of beliefs, as long as we don't try to force those beliefs on others, still that idea of ideological tolerance is /still/ a faith-based idealism that we use as a lens through which we understand the world, right?

Kinda like we're trapped in this hormone-ridden meat-sack that is our brain, and simply lack the omniscience to see outside of it, to see the "real" truth of everything, and so we just have to operate on a little corner of it, blindfolded, by feel, ya know? Or something, maybe, I dunno lol.

I do think it's a crying shame that so many folks seem to think that science and spirituality have to be at odds, too. I think that they operate on completely different areas of the human experience, and thus can coexist. And indeed perhaps support each other in a meaningful way. One of my favorite rants is, when a very orthodox Christian is trying to tell me that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that the theory of evolution is some kind of crazy blah blah Devil Speak blah blah, I tell them, "How do we know that evolution wasn't the method by which God (or whatever) realized the creation of what is? If we assume that the Christian creation story is metaphor rather than literal, doesn't it sound like a primitive culture trying to describe the big bang and evolution through the lens of mythology, as a result of their lack of scientific understanding?" At which point I usually get branded a Heretic and yelled at, and the conversations ends, which is a shame. But that's fine, maybe I play too fast and loose with faith, and maybe they are right. I guess we all have the right to believe whatever we want, so it's all good. And it would be nothing more than Hubris for me to think that my ideas are the right ideas, too. :P