Plasmatic yet again you are wrong. Memorising philosophical terms off the kronia website does not make you a philosopher. Neither does reading Ayn Rand. And for thee record I do not consider myself to be a philosopher. And you might want to swot up up on your teminology. It is strawman not scarecrow.
Are you in any way familiar with the Empiricist/Rationalist debate which occupied the Western Intellectual Tradition for centuries? Have you ever for e.g read any Kant, specifically where he deals with the phenomenal and the noumenal?
When you look at any thing you do not see the thing. You only see the light reflected by that thing. That is why you cannot see in the dark. Where is the red in the rose? The rose isnt red, it only appears red to us because it has not absorbed the red part of the spectrum.
Picure this:
You, Weboflife and I are, say looking at a red car. It doesnt matter that it is a car, it's just a 3D object. Let us further assume that we all have 20/20 vision, are all the same distance away and that all else is equal. We 'look' at the car and pick up the light being relected from it. The light comes through the eyes, travels aloong the optic nerve to the cerebral cortex and is passed to the area of the brain which deals with visuals (your graphics card). There the image is re-assembled and we see the car. But that is taking part in our brains yet we 'see' the car on the other side of the street (or where ever). Do we all see the same car? (Is the car we each see identical to that which the other two see?)
Okay scenario 2.
You are a pigeon, Weboflife is a spider and I remain human (all too human). Same car same light reflecting off it. Except in this case the light goes through your pigeon eyes, and ultimately into your pigeon brain, similarly throught Weboflife's umpteen eyes etc, etc. Do we all see the same car? (Is the car we each see identical to that which the other two see?)
If not, who sees the 'real' car?
There are now 4 cars. The pigeon's 'real' car, the spider's 'real' car, the human's 'real' car and the noumenal car (the thing in itself).
Next. All atoms are 99.999% space. That is to say that if you draw a circle around the orbits of the electrons, the nucleus and the electrons will occupy only 0.001% of the volume of that circle or sphere. This applies equally to the atoms in your body and the atoms in say your table. Yet if you bang your knee against the table all feels very solid and it hurts. So what is real there the solid knee and table or the pain?
The atoms in your knee never actually make contact with the atoms in the table.
On a different tack. You are championing the scientific method but even scientists concede that there are things for which the scientific method is not capable of investigating. Dreams would be one example. Science can only explain the how, not the why.
"Second religion is the worship of a "god" which I do not recogniza as a valid concept ..."
1. Religion does not necessarily mean the worship of a god. The word religion comes from a latin word 'ligare' (might be a bit out on the spelling there - all this is coming off the top of my head) which means connect or join (I think its related to ligature as in the medical). So religion implies reconnecting or rejoining.
2. Religion does not necessarily imply a god (and here we really should define the term god) - think Buddhism for example.
3. The fact that you don't recognize the god as a valid concept is neither here nor there (that is opinion or faith (that you are correct)) but it sets you in direct opposition to some of the greatest minds (and I mean minds) that the world has known (or at least that we have record of). Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, to name but three, were all monotheists, the Egyptians were too, as are the Indians (Hindus) as were the Maya, as were the Norse, etc, etc. And yes I can show that all these are monotheists.
You should be more careful in your use of the word 'reason'. The ancient Greeks for one example did not use it in exactly the same way as we did. To the likes of Plato reason was a function of mind not brain. In any case, just because modern science says that only reason is acceptable does not mean it is so. Who elected science to speak for all? Or is science now god?
I'm guessing you are young so I can understand your impetuosity. I was young and foolish once too.