Question to religious types

[Gustaf]

I'm mostly with Realisticidealist in thinking that religious experiences can vary and reflect different sides of the same thing. And also that the same experience may not be interpreted as religious because a person doesn't accept religion.

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're getting at. Is your point that a personal religious experience is not a great argument to convince someone else of the truth of one's religious beliefs? Because that I would agree with. I view religious experiences as personal and only valid for myself - just like most of my emotional or psychological reactions to various concepts. I would never extrapolate my own experience to someone else, because they could obviously do the same thing back.

I can't say that I view it as dissonance or something that bothers me though. I think it might be helpful if you would elaborate a little on what you think the problem here is.

[Gustaf]

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're getting at. Is your point that a personal religious experience is not a great argument to convince someone else of the truth of one's religious beliefs? Because that I would agree with. I view religious experiences as personal and only valid for myself - just like most of my emotional or psychological reactions to various concepts. I would never extrapolate my own experience to someone else, because they could obviously do the same thing back.

That's the point I'm getting at (with you and jmfcst) -- why, unless you strongly assume the other "experiencers" to be deluded and/or lying?

I'm afraid I'm not really following - for me it's sort of a "why not?"

 

[Gustaf]

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're getting at. Is your point that a personal religious experience is not a great argument to convince someone else of the truth of one's religious beliefs? Because that I would agree with. I view religious experiences as personal and only valid for myself - just like most of my emotional or psychological reactions to various concepts. I would never extrapolate my own experience to someone else, because they could obviously do the same thing back.

That's the point I'm getting at (with you and jmfcst) -- why, unless you strongly assume the other "experiencers" to be deluded and/or lying?

I'm afraid I'm not really following - for me it's sort of a "why not?"

Because that's completely arbitrary, unless you have a reason to dismiss the other person's experience.  Say people are using the same methodology as you, so to speak, and coming to different conclusions, and you have no reason to assume your experience is more accurate than theirs (other than that they're your experiences.)  Does that not suggest some sort of subjectivity?  If you can "explain away" their varying beliefs, how could that not potentially "explain away" yours, if you assume others are sincere about their beliefs?

I've asked this of a half-dozen formal apologists or so, and the best I've gotten is some mumbled stuff about that constraining modal logic too much, but he couldn't explain what he meant.

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're getting at. Is your point that a personal religious experience is not a great argument to convince someone else of the truth of one's religious beliefs? Because that I would agree with. I view religious experiences as personal and only valid for myself - just like most of my emotional or psychological reactions to various concepts. I would never extrapolate my own experience to someone else, because they could obviously do the same thing back.

That's the point I'm getting at (with you and jmfcst) -- why, unless you strongly assume the other "experiencers" to be deluded and/or lying?

didn't I already answer that by quoting the verse, "Do not believe every spirit, rather test the spirits to see if they are from God.  Every spirit that doesn't recognize Jesus as coming from God in the spirit of the antiChrist"

so they dont have to be deluded or lying, rather they are simply deceived by demons who masquerade as coming from God.

You're still running into the problem I'm getting at above.

I'm afraid I'm still not following your point. I agree that other people using the same "methodology" (although I'm not entirely positive towards using that term) can come to different conclusions. Which is why I said I wouldn't use it as an argument to convince anyone (you will never see me saying "you should believe in God, because I've experienced His existence" because, as I said, anyone can say that for their own belief).

I just don't really see any of this as all that problematic? Of course, in some sense there is a point where I must contend that someone is wrong - if I think God exists and someone else doesn't I must consider them wrong. And to the extent that this is based on experience I must consider their experience in some sense to be wrong.

But I don't see this as extraordinary. Some people went to Nazi Germany and experienced the building of a great society for the future. Some people went there and experienced a horrible dictatorship constituting a menace to the world. I would argue that the latter experience was more correct. And I could take a gazillion other examples.

I sense that I'm probably missing something in your reasoning which is why I'd like for you to elaborate a bit more.

Perhaps an important point of clarification is that I have one very good reason to dismiss the experience of someone else - they're not me. I don't expect my experience to have any value in their reasoning and likewise I'm not going to weigh their experience in my own reasoning.

[Gustaf]

Alcon, I'm not sure what you're getting at.  

I reject Scientology because it is made up totally out of thin air a few decades ago.  I reject Islam because it also was made up out of thin air around 620AD and conflicts with human recorded history.

what else is there to judge it by?

Do you understand my question about A and B above?  That's an instance in which I've removed all variables (like whether you think texts are historically valid), and just left the basic question.  I can clarify if you want, but that is what I'm asking.

But I don't see this as extraordinary. Some people went to Nazi Germany and experienced the building of a great society for the future. Some people went there and experienced a horrible dictatorship constituting a menace to the world. I would argue that the latter experience was more correct. And I could take a gazillion other examples.

I sense that I'm probably missing something in your reasoning which is why I'd like for you to elaborate a bit more.

...

Perhaps an important point of clarification is that I have one very good reason to dismiss the experience of someone else - they're not me. I don't expect my experience to have any value in their reasoning and likewise I'm not going to weigh their experience in my own reasoning.

I think your example is exactly my point.  Why would someone accept their own experience, and not question their experience when confronted by someone who they assume to be lucid and rational?  If there is a strong chance that psychology and/or incidental experiential difference accounts for the difference in perception, how is some (a lot I'd think) agnosticism not inevitable?

I mean, think about that in terms of the example you just gave, and how ludicrous it would be to deny others' experiences (granted, it would be hard not to see those experiences first-hand yourself, but even still.)  I just do not think that people behave that way -- except sometimes selectively, like with religion.

No, it's not that. It's just that you're oddly vehement about this. And insistent about its importance. So, you know, a case of finding words that fit. Those don't, actually, thus your seemingly genuine state of bemusement. Or if they do fit, they don't fit very well. But better than anything else I could think of at the time.

...

That would make slightly more sense, yeah. But, again, why bother to resolve logically your argument? It doesn't seem important to me. You seem to find it very important, which is interesting. Why?

I find it interesting because others' practices confuse me, and the discussion is intellectually stimulating.  You're on a web site where people spend pages upon pages picking over Census data and precinct results.  You find it remarkable that I'd be interested in the means by which people observe existence?

Maybe we just fundamentally disagree here? If I experience apartheid as horrible and someone else experiences it as great, why would I care about their experience?

I'm still a little confused by what you mean. I agree with you that in an objective sense the epistemological value of an experience is pretty low. But to me that isn't really in contradiction to faith - only to certain ways of using experiences that I've outlined above.

[Gustaf]

I'm a little confused by the side debate with jmfcst, and I don't see any response to Dibble's paraphrase, so I'm going to cut in back here:

Maybe we just fundamentally disagree here? If I experience apartheid as horrible and someone else experiences it as great, why would I care about their experience?

...Because you can accept both experiences in your decision-making process, while not having to compromise your overall conclusion.  This is a obviously not analogous, though.  Different results using the same methodology indicates one of two things: One, that application of the methodology has some level of subjectivity involved, which is grounds for some agnosticism.  Two, that the input is different, at which point you can evaluate the new information, as long as the source seems legit.  I think your South Africa example falls into the trap of assuming that #2 is impossible or impractical.  Which would make it completely OK to support Hitler on the basis you haven't seen Jews suffer with your own eyes, I guess?  This seems both logically arbitrary and dangerous to me.

(I haven't thought through this argument 100% formally, but I'm quite sure I disagree with your stuff on the modal logic behind empiricism, if you want to call it that.)

Now I'm sort of at a loss again. Of course I can accept that they have that experience without changing my conclusion regarding apartheid. That was exactly my point! Their experience does not necessarily have any impact on my view.

But the rest I feel I can grasp a bit more. The second option you mention is obviously irrelevant to what we're both trying to get at so I'll just ignore that part.

That leaves the first one. Which seems to crash down into the exact same discussion that I think you and I had like 3 years ago or something.

Because to me the experience is "subjective" in the way everything is subjective. If someone were to experience that 2+2 did not equal 4 that still wouldn't really change my view on the issue. (I'm trying to go for poorer and poorer analogies as this discussion progresses).

You seem to think that most people come to most views by objectively assessing facts and you don't understand why religious people use subjective experience to arrive at faith but I disagree on the gulf between the two being that wide. (if this summation is grossly unfair and distorts your position, just correct me...)

[Gustaf]

Their methodology might be reasonable for themselves but not for me. I mean, if we talk about solving a mathematical problem by using derivation, that's a method that everyone can use. If someone else derived the same function I derived and got a different local maximum, then, yeah, I would question my answer (actually, I'd be more inclined to question the other guy's answer, but I'm arrogant like that). But when we talk about "experiencing" something that's rather different, imo.

What I meant when I said the second point was irrelevant was basically that it's kind of obvious that new information should matter to one's evaluation. If I didn't know there were death camps in Nazi Germany or segregation in apartheid South Africa and someone else did know it isn't surprising that we might reach different conclusions. It doesn't seem like a relevant case for what you're trying to get to (at least not if I understand you correctly). Because I don't think either of us see it as problematic that people might reach different conclusions if they have different facts to begin with. I didn't mean to be insulting or anything - I felt as if you included that as a "oh, maybe you meant this" and I wanted to make clear that I didn't because that would have been stupid of me.

It seems my poor analogy did do some good then. If I understand you correctly you're saying that there is a spectrum of cases - at one end you have my analogy where everyone agrees on what is true - and if someone doesn't that person is insane and can be ignored. On the other end you would presumably have something where many people disagree and where you couldn't ignore somebody's opinion. And you think religion belongs at that end.

I'll just present my tentative view on this and perhaps it will make it easier to see where we disagree.

To me a cognitive process typically starts with some type of input in the form of observing things in the world*. Then we put this together and evaluate it to form an opinion.

The opinion might of course be changed by new information. If I had the opinion that all people were white because I had only seen white people and then I suddenly see a black guy, I'm likely to change my position. And if you could convince me that you saw a black person I might change it as well. But, as I said, that's sort of obvious so it doesn't seem relevant to me in this case.

Then we have what we might call logical inferences involved. This is really where you might be influenced by someone else's opinion. If there are logical leaps or inconsistent beliefs in my belief structure someone else might alert me to this, challenge me and cause me to change my conclusion. Say, if I alert you to how you can logically derive the importance of respect for human rights and the dangers of racism from the atrocities in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.

Now, there is still some room for what you might call normative disagreement. We may agree that the Nazis killed a lot of Jews and that they did this because they didn't believe that all humans have rights regardless of race. But maybe you think that's a good thing (you Nazi scumbag!). That might be called an "experience".  Your experience of genocide or racism might be "yay, let's go for it" There is nothing necessarily invalid about the methodology here because there is no methodology. It's just an experience. That you experience it definitely doesn't seem relevant for my experience (at least not necessarily).

But then there are also cases of where there is no (or little in the way of a) logical chain involved. That 2+2=4 is sort of close to that. Most people, when confronted with basic math, simply buy it. It appears self-evident. They, one might say, directly experience the truth of things like identity.

Experiencing the existence (or non-existence) of God seems similar to my mind. Just like experiencing the self-evidence of every human's right to freedom and security.


*Meant very broadly and may well include Platonic inner contemplation

[Gustaf]

Hello all -- Sorry, we're moving into finals and I've had a new, nasty ongoing insomnia problem.  I don't want to take the risk of making a fallacious argument or because irritable because of this.  I'm getting to it.  Thanks for your responses.

Yeah, sounds like you need to calm down and sleep.

Finals>meaning of life, after all.

[Gustaf]

I kid, I kid.