RE: Logic tells me God doesn't exist but my heart says otherwise.
October 15, 2014 at 4:39 pm
(This post was last modified: October 15, 2014 at 4:47 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 14, 2014 at 10:11 am)bennyboy Wrote: Are you still referencing something I said? I don't think I'm on the same page as you with this.In the general, yes, but I'll be more specific. I was putting forward the notion that a "religious experience" as interpreted by you or I, as recorded or communicated by another in the present or from the past -may not- mean anything remotely close to what we have assigned it, to anyone but ourselves.
Think of this sentence
Bill had Jane for dinner.
-Couple of ways to take that, huh?
-Now imagine that this is a religious experience. Hard to do? Not if you're a Maori circa 1750. But how would you make this religious experience make sense to you? Is it within the remit of what you can parse, or is it too far beyond the pale to coax anything approaching truth out of? Mind you, what you did offer as a "fundamental truth in perfect accordance with the reality of the universe as we see it"(was that it?) sounds like no such thing to me. What you offered as superstitious seems concrete in ways that your fundamental truth wouldn't have the power to be. So we're kind of starting off on shaky ground claiming that religious experiences are such and such -to begin with-.
More specifically. Isn't it possible that you took your "fundamental truths" and found ways to paint them over the experience or narratives of others? "All is one" is not exactly "all is interconnected" to begin with. It wouldn't be inconceivable to find yourself arguing with some nutball -even after- agreeing that "all is one", eh? You might say "because energy and science and such" - and he'd laugh in your face, because that doesn't make all one at all (and energy and science are just liberal conspiracies anyway). "It's spirits and magic that make all one - and every child knows that."
It's just a very, very tangled web, I think. Meanwhile..."religious experience" may be a simple flush of biology. It very often -seems to be-. That's not a bug, it's a feature (just to deflect that criticism, not offered by you...but I saw another poster calling religious experience a malfunction...that seems unlikely, if the term even applies). It's also a little bit easier to defend than the idea that our premiere lunch hunting equipment is somehow stumbling across some fundamental truth of the universe every time it dopes us up..... Just the width and breadth of "religious experience" alone would give me pause from attempting to tie it to any fundamental truth. Are we talking about the fundamental truths behind the religious experience of an NDE(as reported by one) or anal sex (as reported by another)? I just don't think that religious experience is fertile ground for fundamental truth.
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