Bold mine
As I pointed out above I don’t expect there ever to be scientific evidence until the second coming of Jesus., but thanks for being honest, I know that is a typical response.
Are you saying we’ll be able to see him as an alive guy again?
Yes - Jesus is alive, He was raised from the dead and ascended to Heaven and will come (to earth) again.
And I can kreen the veel and strell domains for a wide variety of important revelations. Naturally, such knowledge cannot be physically demonstrated in our limited universe, but it’s truth is obvious to any discerning person.
Tell him I want to see him. He owes me.
Considering the visual sense, it obviously is not true that everybody can reach an agreement about what is seen and make their descriptions identical. As one obvious example, a blind person and a person who is not blind do not see the same thing. Similarly, a person who’s colorblind or has astigmatism or any number of other disorders will see differently from a person who has perfect vision.
But there’s a point even more relevant to this debate. Even two persons with perfect eyesight may look at the exact same thing and describe it very differently. For instance, if they look at an abstract painting, one may see a deeply moving scene with great artistic merit while the other sees only meaningless blobs of color.
So plainly the eyes do not provide identical experiences to everybody. Nor do the ears or any of the other sense organs. Thus it’s no surprise that the spiritual senses also provide a variety of experiences.
Because science can not “see” or measure something is not proof that it doesn’t exist. Can science see or measure a thought, or a memory. We know they exist. Your labeling religious belief systems as mental disorders is prejudices speaking not facts.
What?
While I agree with your point, ITR, I would say that your abstract painting example suggests rather that people have different interpretations of the painting, not actual different visual experiences (though of course they’d have those as well). Me looking at the American flag and feeling no patriotism and an American looking and feeling proud aren’t the result of us seeing different things, but the result of interaction between what we see and our own selves.
It actually helps support your point more. Not only do we not see the same thing in the first place, we also have different reactions to it. Not only do spiritual experiences provide people with different actual “visions”, we also all have different interpretations of those different visions.
By this rationale, the voices/hallucinations schizophrenics perceive are just as legitimate as ‘God’. :dubious:
Having some traits in common does not make things equal. You’re warm-blooded and have probably eaten cheese - doesn’t mean you’re a mouse.
In this case it does. Especially when there are few if any traits the two things don’t have in common. There’s no more reason to believe in a revelation from God than there is to believe in the voices or other hallucinations perceived by the insane. Lacking objective evidence of gods or spirits or anything of the sort, there’s no way to even distinguish between the two. There is just as much evidence for the validity of revalations from God as there is for the revelations of the aliens from Sirius who are beaming messages into the brain of Bob the mental patient. There’s no reason to believe that they ARE different things; it’s just that people are more likely to believe the guy who says God is talking in his head and not the guy who says that alines are.
Once faith without evidence is accepted as a valid reason for believing anything, judgment goes out the window. If faith is a valid source of knowledge, there’s no reason to consider the 9-11 attackers any less the true servants of God/Allah than there is some priest who runs a soup kitchen. They both have the same objective evidence to believe that God wants them to do what they are doing; none at all.
I’m sort of with **Der Trihs ** on this one. Certainly you’re correct, but the problem with this is that the evidence for one could also be used as evidence for the other. Certainly being warm blooded and eating cheese doesn’t make you a mouse - but if all the evidence that you’re a human is also evidence you’re a mouse, you can’t prove it one way or the other. Thus they’re pretty even in terms of subjective legitimacy (though not objective, of course).
Kanicbird, you are making a number of claims. In a debate. And yet you acknowledge that you have no evidence on which to base those claims.
I’ve had some extraordinary “spiritual” experiences myself, and the fact that many other people have as well can be taken as a kind of preliminary evidence for the possibility that some sort of supernatural entity may exists.
But here you claim to have identified no fewer than 7 distinct types of supernatural beings. How is it that you are able to distinguish between them? And remember, we’ve already established that you cannot cite the Bible or religious tradition because they themselves are unsupoorted and bound up with mythology, propaganda, and ad infinitum hearsay.
I wasn’t equating the two things on a universal basis, just commenting (tongue firmly in cheek) upon them in a strict situation presented by Lekatt.
Within the context of this sentence schizophrenic delusions and a belief in God are roughly congruent because they are based upon subjective experiences, the causes of which science (as yet) cannot observe/quantify/explain. Also I showed the limits of my statement (clearly, I thought) by introducing it with the phrase “By this rationale…”
Earlier in this thread I did say that-
I’ll retract that statement now, not because I think religious belief systems are any more valid, but because they are accepted through choice. IANA mental health expert, but I think it is safe to say, although their causes aren’t strictly known in many cases, mental disorders are not intentionally adopted nor coveted by those who possess them. To equate poor choices of beliefs with true mental disorders is to insult those with such disorders (akin to equating the plight of an alcoholic with that of a cancer patient). For reasons given in the above quote, I will soften my stance to this- People who adhere to religious belief systems sometimes remind me of people with mental disorders.
To me it seems that spirituality is the thing that takes place in the heart, wherever you are, and religion is what takes place with other people, in church.
I don’t think that either is necessarily good or bad. That distinction is an unrelated dichotomy.
Tris
“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” ~ John Locke ~
Religiousity seems to be partly hardwired into the brain ( IMHO probably from millennia of killing anyone who didn’t act fervent enough; a form of selective breeding ), and children are indoctrinated with religion on top of that. I don’t think choice has much to do with it for most people.
And some disorders are “coveted” by those that have them ( and I’d label religion as one such ). The hardest to treat, because the victim doesn’t believe he or she needs to be cured.
Not trying to be an ass here, just genuinely curious-do you have a cite/study/book I could read pertaining to this statement?