Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[Belacqua]

Sorry, perhaps I’m misunderstanding you. You said:

If people's logic seems wrong to us, then we either point to the empirical world as a rebuttal, or show that the logic is wrong. But our knowledge of the empirical world is often flawed. And our logic is often wrong as well. So it's an ongoing problem to use them in dialectic to improve out thinking.

I guess it’s the phrase “ongoing problem” that caught me off guard. Yes, we are erroneous in our execution of logic and reason, and in our understanding of the empirical world, but I don’t think it necessarily follows to say that because we sometimes miss the mark, and fall short of these objective standards, the standards themselves are in intrinsically problematic, or obstructing our attempts to improve accuracy. I mean, they’re the tools we use to identify when we’ve used them wrong. Without sound and valid reasoning, and a method for interpreting the material world, we would be lost at sea in terms of a consistently reliable way to understand reality.

Oops, I didn't mean to imply that our methods are an ongoing problem. 

Logic and empirical evidence are the best we have, and obviously can lead to great success. The only problem I meant to refer to is just our limited human nature, and the fact that no matter how well we think we've done, there is always the real possibility that we've missed something. I mean "ongoing problem" just in the sense that we don't get to be smug, and assume we've got it all licked. 

Personally, I think millions of people claiming to experience revelations in accordance with an internally consistent, but mostly unverifiable or demonstrable framework, built over centuries, is far more dangerous than one individual thinking they a have a magical unicorn in their basement. 

Understood. I was thinking earlier about "revealed theology" and the role that revelation plays in developing systems of thought. If I write a letter to the church and claim that God has revealed something to me, my letter will be met with extreme skepticism, as it should be. 

But you're right that there are probably lots of people running around thinking that they've had revelations. And in their cases nobody is testing them to see if they make sense relative to anything else. Millions of people working this way would be dangerous. 

I don't think I've ever met someone claiming to have had a revelation. When I lived in America though I remember people saying that something or other was "God's will." And not even inevitable stuff like a death in the family. I think my high school biology lab partner claimed it was God's will that she go to Oklahoma and move in with a guy she'd met two days before. In such cases, it's just another example of what is probably a human being's most skillful thought process: finding "reasons" to do what we've already decided we're going to do anyway. 

So, I agree with you that personal revelation, and people using that as justification for their actions, is a bad way to go about things. As with any other truth-claim, it needs to be scrutinized. And (I'll say this just to annoy certain people on this forum) we have to be fair to the official church structure: they don't accept claims of revelation casually. They even believe the devil can trick us with fake revelations.