Divine Revelation

[Angrboda]

I was reading about the Quran yesterday, and it occurred to me that for much of the history of holy books like the bible, the Vedas, and so forth, the bulk of people worshipping such "holy books" were illiterate, and it made me wonder if the notion of "holy" words, words with magical, religious power, wouldn't have been a literal rather than a figurative truth to such illiterate people. That the myths were bound up in written language gave it its own mystical air. Now the words are less magical.... or are they? One of the beliefs about the Quran is that it is written in an inimitable style, a perfect feat of composition that could only be divine. (While cooler heads observe that the Quran has no logical structure, frequently descends into meaningless gibberish, contradicts itself and even acknowledges the contradiction (abrogation), repeats stories without any obvious reason, and borrows heavily from the bible.) It seems that anything can be imbued with special meaning. I have moments of clarity regarding theories about the human mind. What, if anything, can distinguish between actual insight and mere apophenia, seeing meaning in the ordinary or meaningless, is how such insights respond to verification procedures, and what verification procedures are applied. Someone like Drich won't bother to independently validate his insights, and just accepts them at face value; this is the "no validation" option. Then there is the bulk of religion and pseudoscience which uses verification procedures which are naively persuasive, but ultimately do not do a reliable job of separating true from false. Then you have disciplines like science and math whose verification procedures tend toward considerably greater robustness and reliability. The test of any revelation, that of insight into a biblical verse, or theorizing about human psychology, is how it fares outside your head, and outside of unreliable and weak verification procedures.

Anyway, I'm rambling.