(February 15, 2014 at 2:47 pm)rasetsu Wrote:
How do you distinguish between a directive that seems compelling, regardless of source (delusion), and one which seems compelling from a supernatural source? I'm not sure there's any way to distinguish the two, so if a deity instructed someone to kill, it would seem there's no way to conclude the person is anything but deluded. It seems this question in some sense trades on the contempt we have for delusional people, that being deluded is in some sense worthy of mockery and contempt. Is this the case?
Well that gets at something deeper than theism. How do we know who we are and want to do? The only thing worse than experiencing a well spring of conflicting impulses is not feeling any impulses at all. There is at some level a need to trust something. I guess we are all trying to make ourselves happy without knowing for certain what will work.
