Benevolent Creator God?

[LadyForCamus]

I’m certain Poca can support that claim. We have far more evidence for liars and delusional individuals than we have for any god, as I stated above. Confidence and certainty aren’t synonymous. I feel like you should be able to grasp that distinction. 

I agree, and I am not telling you that we should accept someone's claim of prophethood at face value. But if we systematically dimiss such claims - as poca is doing - then we are not just confident, but certain that no God ever communicated anything with us, and this wouldn't be very rational would it

And some people are demonstrably more wrong than others.

True. And since we are all wrong about something in reality, we are all delusional, which makes poca's criterion of delusion completely empty of meaning.

Sure, it could be. But in the absence of any evidence, or even a reliable method to make such a distinction, you have no good reason to believe that it is, and a well-evidenced reason to seriously doubt that it is. Yet you jump on wagon number one every single time.

The only method I am suggesting is to evaluate whether the contents of revelations could have come about from local knowledge. If they couldn't, they we should accept them at face value.

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So, you reached a moment in your thinking where you’ve realized that you can’t make an evidence-based distinction between a natural cause and a supernatural cause. Great! Bravo. I commend you.

Except that rather than appropriately adjust your confidence level in your belief to match what you’ve just realized, which would be the rational thing to do, you’ve instead decided to grasp at a fallacy and conflate the two causes so you won’t have to. You were so close, man, lol. If all experiences are from God, then what is the difference between natural and supernatural? Which one is god?

I am not very comfortable with this natural/supernatural distinction. If everything is from God, then everything that happens through natural means has the same "godliness" as religious experiences, including those of major belief systems. Again, the only way to make a difference between a message or an experience that we usually call divine is to assess its content and see if it's worthy of divine source, that's it. There is nothing else. We don't need some mechanism connecting the natural to the supernatural, we just need to make sure revelations didn't come from the local environment.

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I invite you to re-think this part of your statement.

Boru

Why? Should I allow for the possibility that a schizophrenic is capable of leading armies and convince military leaders that he is sent by God?

No. You need some way to demonstrate divinity as the cause. God either divinely spoke to someone, as you claim, or he didn’t. If you have no way of showing that he did, then neither you nor anyone else has good reason to believe that he did. You don’t get to use the details (“content” if you will) of a claim about a divinely inspired experience to prove the cause of the experience was divine inspiration. That’s question-begging as far as I can tell.