God is the great spirit friend

[jstrodel]

And I don't doubt you truly believe all that. It's still not proof of anything except that you believe all that.

It is different from a religious belief. It is a testimony, no different from a description of something that happened at a crime scene. You have no evidence that it is biased in anyway, and your theorizing about my motivations serves to ground your skepticism no more than my theorizing about your a priori commitment atheism ground my rejection of your beliefs. It is an empty claim.

Senses are tools used by the brain to interpret stimuli. There are countless opportunities for bias to enter, and all it takes is a single instance.

In this case you have interpreted some kind of event to be communication from a God you already knew about because you spent your entire life living in a culture where that God is either the primary deity people worship or one of the most important ones.

You keep using the terms "interpreted". In many cases the experience of the supernatural has nothing to do with interpretation. You misunderstand the nature of the experience. It is not of the nature of a belief or interpretation, it is more like a person who saw someone steal something from 3 feet away and the person next to them saw the same thing and they both took photographs and took them to a judge. You misunderstand the certainty and clarity of spiritual experience. It is not even a matter of someone who was at a crime scene who saw an experience directly and was sure that his perception of the events did not bias the perception.

The things I have experienced have been confirmed by multiple people all around me experiencing the same exact thing. Much of it has been written down and confirmed by others.

There is no interpretation involved in something like this.

You reject the experience probably because you will not treat a spiritual experience as having an equal testimony as normal testimony. In fact, you will not even give it the weight of 1/1000th of a percent. If you saw 1000 independent testimonies of people who directly claimed to have experienced the spiritual world, you would not entertain the possibility that it could be real.

This is all based on your argument that the material world is probably all that exists. You can't prove this, but you will hold on to this to the degree that you will give no weight to a common experience of human beings.

This is what it means to be closed minded and prejudiced. Saul Kripke, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century called materialism "a prejudice". He is right.

The materialist is not a free thinker. He will always believe materialism, despite not having a shred of evidence to disprove spiritual entities other than a study which is inconclusive. He will not seek out for instance the charismatic movement to see whether spiritual things exist. The reason is that the materialist doesn't really care whether materialism is true, he cares about the ideology of materialism and its political and social implications.

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That isn't what he asked you, so I'll put the question to you a little differently.

Imagine that you are an unwashed heathen like me, who has no dog in the fight. Imagine that you met someone who had precisely the same experience you claim to have had with Yahweh, the sole creator of the universe. Imagine, also, that you meet a Muslim, who has precisely the same experience you claim to have, only he says that his came from Allah, the sole creator of the universe.

How can you tell which one is right, if either of them are?

You can't tell based only on that. But religious experience is not intended to prove the existence of God, only to demand that honest people seek God for themselves and consider carefully whether the experience is true, and how that would impact the most important questions in life. Of course this is what it demands of honest people.

I do not expect to prove to you that my experiences are legitimate, but I can prove that an honest person who desire to know the truth should at least take seriously the question of whether they are authentic in a much more serious way than just listening to the people. I say this because of the widespread acceptance of spirituality and its continued importance, even through the supposedly wiser modern times when people expected it would disappear as a superstition. Faith in the miraculous remains, in the most rationalistic quarters of the most educated countries in the world. People continue to describe miraculous experiences, they are not caused by ignorance of science or primitive desire to explain phenomenon that are unknown to them.

The supernatural is a part of being human, and the person who relegates the study of the supernatural to the level of the study of UFO's or Scientology imposes a massive prejudice over their lens of history which eclipses some of the greatest and wisest human beings who accepted the reality of the spiritual world.