[monktastic1]

Perhaps the greatest trick that materialism has pulled off is conflating "natural" with "material." To the idealist, mind -- this experiential fabric that is directly and unmistakably apprehensible -- is perfectly natural, and so idealism is "naturalism." The in-principle-unobservable abstraction called "matter" is what's spooky and unnecessary.

Struggling hard to avoid a particular outcome ("*-worshipping") makes it harder to be completely unbiased and look where the raw data is pointing. That's why the Enlightenment, in setting itself in direct opposition to the Church, ended up with materialism (though it first made a foray into Cartesian dualism).