Back to the beginning: the cave

[robvalue]

I agree, theists are trapped in a cave of sorts. Some more than others.

Escaping that cave still leaves us in a larger cave, one from which I can never see any way out. We can't directly experience reality, because any information we get must go through at least one filter, most likely several, before we can interpret it. At most we can model our observations of reality as accurately as possible.

I'd wonder, if in escaping that larger cave, you'd have to leave behind all vestiges of humanity, including all the senses and the way we organize their input, and arrive at some more elemental truth.

It seems to me the goal of some branches of meditative Bhuddism could be described as an attempt to step out of the cave in that way.  (and please note that I'm referring to philosophical and meditative practices, not institutional Buddhism with temples and prayer wheels and all that)

I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure how that could work. The "leaving behind" you describe sounds like becoming dead! I'm not trying to be flippant; just trying to figure out what it means. Even if we manage to develop some "other" sense by which we can experience reality, I don't see how it gets around the problem.

I agree that some religious stuff does indeed sound like it's trying to escape the bounds of our human form. The results always sound like utter made up shit to me though (I know you weren't saying their attempts are valid so far). It seem impossible that we could ever "know" anything objectively about reality, because it would always require some sort of frame of reference; some way in which the knowledge has been organized or filtered.

The problem with religion trying to get around this stuff is that we end up with loads of people all claiming to have all these "truths", yet they generally contradict each other and none of them have any way to demonstrate them to anyone else.

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I guess we can just turn into this kind of ethereal mind that God is always described as being, which somehow directly knows things about reality. The problem is that if we return to our human bodies after doing so, we then have to filter what we supposedly know in the same way using our human brain.