I also hate tomndebb. Not for any particular reason, mind you, I just like being in the popular crowd.
Suck my Baal.
pssst, the tomndebb haters crowd is the unpopular crowd. You jumped on the wrong wagon again.
Goddamnit! [/Cartman]
Experience is knowledge. How you interpret your experience may be done correctly or incorrectly. Many witnesses to a store robbery may incorrectly identify an innocent person as the culprit even though they were no more than a few feet from the actual perpetrator when the robbery was committed. They have the actual knowledge they need to identify the correct person, but they fail to do so for any number of reasons. Which is why when you say you base your faith upon your experience I have to question how you’ve interpreted that experience. If you don’t, or won’t, state what your experiences are, then how can the rest of us question them, or more importantly, learn from them? I think that is where Tom runs into trouble. On a board that is supposedly here to fight ignorance, I think it is the wrong attitude to take. But that being said I don’t feel he is under any obligation to provide any more information that he has, or feels he needs to. I just think it undermines his effectiveness in any religious debate he is involved in.
Apology accepted, Captain Liberal 
No, it isn’t. Justified true belief (Gettier notwithstanding) is knowledge.
But who says what is the correct interpretation of my experience? Certainly not you. Unless you’re willing to let me decide whether your interpretations of your experience are the correct interpretations. Not that I’d want to. I figure if I want to live your life, the least I could do is pay your mortgage.
They believe they know who did it.
Only if they’re lying. They can’t possibly both know (here) and not know (above). Your argument doesn’t do empiricism any favors, by the way. If their senses fooled them, then they do not know because their belief is not true.
But your interpretation of my experience is not questionable? That’s, quite frankly, just weird.
Well, speaking for myself, I’ve related my experiences many times. Interpretations have varied from “lying” to “delusional” to “hey, that’s pretty cool!”.
Then whoever has had no religious experience to relate is also disqualified because he has no experience to compare. It seems to me that in order for the Christian to share his experience for examination, the person he shares it with must have a common (shared) frame of reference. Suppose, for example, a skydiver describes to me what skydiving was like. How can I possibly argue with him? The only person qualified to oppose him is some other skydiver.
The sum of your life experiences are your knowledge. You have no other knowledge other than what you have learned from others or done on your own. It doesn’t mean that what you have learned is true, or that you’ve interpreted your experiences correctly.
Any amount of people can give their opinion of your experience if you relate that experience to others. If I give my experiences to others for their opinion I want them to comment on them. Maybe I’ll pick up on something that I’d have missed otherwise. My interpretations of those experiences have been proven wrong in the past and I have no reason to expect perfection from myself in the future. If you claim you are any different then I think your god should make room on his throne for you.
Their knowledge of the event and what they saw is what they are basing their identification on. This is what they experienced.
Their experiences do not match reality. They are probably not lying. Lying is something done deliberately. Eyewitness testimony is far from fallible even if most of the identifications are done with the best of intentions.
Who said it wasn’t? If I claimed to be picked up by martians and anal probed, then shouldn’t I give more than my word as evidence that it actually happened? And if it I also said that I was on medication at the time which had been shown to cause graphic delusional episodes which I don’t know about, but you might, I’d like you to let me know about it. Why wouldn’t I want other possible explanations for experiences in my life?
What proof do you have of these experiences? Why should I take your word for it if all it takes to fool the senses is a “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”
Why? Does every Christian have a mystical experience that only other Christians can understand? Do you only explain these experiences to other Christians? Doubtful as the TV has any number of preachers looking to save your soul (and empty your wallet).
How about a bungie jumper? Someone who had a dream of falling? How about someone with an imagination?
I would like to point out that GD has other moderators who don’t seem to be tagged for their bias, at least not as frequently.
Why doesn’t he just moderate another board, like say GQ, where pointing out facts and whatnot are more in accordance with the intent of the board?
Okay, that was funny. You are an evil person.
But how can something that isn’t true be knowledge? And what happens when your experiences contradict? Or when your experiences contradict someone else’s?
Suppose I try an experiment. I place 8 stones on the floor. I add 7 stones to those. I count them all and, by mistake, get a total of 14. Are you saying that I “know” from my experience that 8+7=14? What if I try it again and get 15? Do I then “know” that it equals both 14 and 15?
Your mistake is in your confirmation of the antecedant. While it is true that your knowledge is bounded by your experience, it is not true that everything you experience is knowledge.
But you said they “know”. How can knowledge not match reality? Why fight ignorance at all if you are not fighting on behalf of something that is real?
I haven’t seen Star Wars, but I’ve seen Scrooge and I have two things to say about your question. One: if the senses are as tenuous as you’ve been insisting, then science, which depends entirely on sensory observation (empiricism) skates on perpetual thin ice. It is already based on an unprovable philosophical principle (falsification), and now you are saying that it isn’t even reliable. And two: why am I obligated in any way to prove my experiences to you, even setting aside that the phrase “prove an experience” doesn’t make any sense?
Suppose you tell me that you went to see Star Wars. I demand proof. Show me your ticket stub. If you don’t have your stub, but you really went anyway, have I now proved that you never went? If you do have your stub, then you would provide it, thinking all is well. Except that I now claim you forged your ticket. What recourse do you have to convince me? If I am dead set against your claim, then there is nothing you could do to convince me of its truth. (Not that truth of a claim matters, according to you, but still.)
That’s exactly why my experiences would mean nothing to you, and there is nothing you could learn from them. You equate an experience of love with an experience of deceit.
You can imagine anything you like, but that still doesn’t make it knowledge.
God, you’re a dolt. You stir up shit and then ask, “What’s all this shit doing here?”.
I think this is precisely the reason for the atheist/christian thing that happens all the time in the Pit.
Morning, Klaatu! Now things will get lively! 
You have to admit you left yourself wide open for a zing there Lib.
It’s wrong to hate on Liberal just because he is a covert Satanist instigator.
Wide open and good to go.
Damn right. Go Satan! I miss him. I wish he’d come back.
Yes, I also miss Stan and DrainBead.
Stan. Satan played that well, still cracks me up.
Well, stanA of course, but I always thought of him as plain old stan.
Knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean that it is truth or factual or even complete. It could mean that you know something to the best of your ability given your circumstances, ability, time frame, and technology.
You know you’ve made a mistake somewhere and need to find out where it occurred to get an accurate reading, don’t you?
The sum of your knowledge it taken from your experiences. Even if in the future they can inject ‘knowledge’ directly into your brain that is something you have experienced.
But you said they “know”. How can knowledge not match reality? Why fight ignorance at all if you are not fighting on behalf of something that is real?
You have seen the picture that if you look at it one way it is a young woman and another way it looks like an old lady? In some cases it takes quite a while to point out to people that the picture can be interpreted in two ways. Yet, when it is pointed out it is quite easy for anyone to see that it is two pictures, not one. So, your senses (or how you interpret the data) can fool you, or not tell you the whole picture.
So that I can see the whole picture, too? But you are under no obligation to do so. I feel I have an obligation to point out where some people may be interpreting their experiences so as to misinterpret random, or natural events, in such a way as to make them seem supernatural in origin. Sometimes people see things that, are in fact, not there. They believe whole-heartedly in what they have seen. If the claim is that a man walked down the street with an umbrella under his arm, and he actually had a walking stick instead of an umbrella, then so what?
If they are collecting rocks and say they saw the angel Gabrielle who said to start stoning adulterers again because God was angry, then more proof than just their word is warranted before I put down the phone as I dial 911. At least that is what I think.
A ticket stub should be proof enough that I went to a particular movie especially if I can describe the movie. Yet, when you claim the existence of a god you don’t even have the ticket stub as proof. All you have is the story.
I wasn’t the person who assumed that someone who made a mistaken identification was a liar. They could well be, but they could also just be mistaken. The only one who has spoken of deceit here is you. Please don’t assume that I have the same negative perceptions of my fellow human beings as you may have. When someone makes as statement to me I assume they are stating something to the best of their knowledge (the best of their knowledge doesn’t mean they are right), not because they are deliberately lying.
And you can say you have had many experiences that lead you to believe in god, but that doesn’t make them correct or give you knowledge that I don’t have. My interpretation of your experiences may lead me to think that you are mistaken. But the good sign of a closed mind is one who doesn’t at least acknowledge the fact that they could be wrong. I admit I could be wrong about most things I say. I also