On Belief in God X

[genkaus]

I disagree. While the experiential justification is sufficient for me to believe that I hold those cards, to rightly claim it,

FULL STOP

i.e. claim with the expectation of others believing me, I would require more than that.

*bzzzzt* I haven't once said anyone else *but* the person with the experiential justification should be believing event x/belief y.

You missed the caveat I issued down the line - IF there are no valid objections or alternate explanations.

Sure. But we're not talking about what others should take away from your anecdotal evidence. All I'm saying is that the theist has the right to claim their religious experience but ONLY because internally they are being consistent; you see a royal flush, you can claim you have a royal flush. End of. If you want to bring in other people's degree of belief with respect to any given claim, well, that's a different matter altogether...

That's another problem with theistic beliefs - they are often not internally consistent.

...yes, true, but what I was getting at is that if you see a royal flush, then you have reason to believe there's a royal flush in front of you. Getting that person to check and recheck, question themselves and think of alternative explanations is ridiculous. The only thing that would suffice from that angle would be to accept there really is a demon controlling our minds which are actually floating in a vacuum. Only then might a properly basic belief be false, because in actuality there isn't an external world like we perceive there to be. If you personally have no reason to accept that crushing level of scepticism, then treating the theist's properly basic beliefs as B-grade makes *you* the inconsistent one.

Let's leave the demons out of these. We both know that there are a myriad of ways in which what you consider a properly basic belief could be false without invoking them.

This is something you haven't acknowledged so far - that atheist does have many reasons to be skeptical about the theist's claims and he shares those reasons. If I am the one holding the royal flush, the other guy is not simply telling me to check and recheck. The first reason he gives me is that he happens to be holding a royal four-of-a-kind. That alone is reason enough for me to atleast look at my cards again. As it happens, he is also willing to show me his hand. Which means, I am not being asked to check and recheck my cards without any reason, but that I am being given sufficient reasons to doubt my experience.

Again, you're dipping into a slightly different topic. When I said "grant them that experiential justification" all I'm saying is that you should accept that they're being internally consistent, just like the guy who sees a royal flush has the right to claim they have a royal flush. Whether we believe him or not is a different topic altogether.

Granting that would depend on their claim. For example, while I may grant the experience of having a royal flush as being internally consistent, the same wouldn't stand for the claim of having five of a kind. Theistic claims often fall in the latter category. They are sufficiently contradictory to reality for a person (whether it be the theist or anyone else) to question the experience on that basis alone.