What believers experience also depends what they are exposed to. A child growing up among members of the KKK will learn THAT is a deep experience that God endorses.
That's not what I mean by a deep experience. That's just cultural programming and the experience of life lived through that programming. That is by definition a shallow experience. It is the unexamined life. By deep experience, I mean something that breaks free from that. I mean something authentic and transcendent to that.
Who are you to tell them otherwise just because you had different deep experiences? It's all "eye of the beholder" where it comes to belief and experience.
While I appreciate relativism, I do not agree that all truths and all experiences and all opinions are equal to each other. That is a naive view of the relativism of postmodernist realization. Some opinions are in fact better than others. Some experiences are in fact more expansive and more insightful than others.
But now the question becomes how does someone know which is better than others? By good arguments of logic and reason?
What allows a person to step back and consider the moral issues? It is both conscience and reason.
Ah, but now you have added something experiential to the mix beyond reason. By conscience. And yes, I do agree that reason can play apart, but if you don't have the depth of wisdom through experience, all you have is a good sounding, self-justifying logic argument.
Even the KKK can support their worldviews with reason and logic too. It just may not seem reasonable to you. See how that can go both ways?
Habituation of belief and bias is easy when a person feels pressure to conform to social norms. Look at many of the Jan 6 rioters, some show regret and admit they were duped by Trump and disinformation. They could not think through consequences when they acted. Yet some others re still convinced trump won and should be president, even though they are in prison for their crimes. They don't learn how their beliefs are untrue. Humans are willing to believe in untrue things.
That's right. The primary motive for the things we believe in are not logic arguments. I argue this point all the time. As the saying goes, logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
What makes you an absolute arbiter of what is true for all?
What makes you think I see myself that way? Is there anything in any post I've ever made that gives you that impression? Why would you imagine that?
Others have their own experiences and they have different exveriences of what is true. You disagree with those who use reason to assess religious concepts even though they experience reason as a very effective tool to discern true from false. You might find your exveriences useful for your persvective, but how can you rely on that as a way to judge whether others are experiencing truth as you see it?
How can I rely on my experiences as a way to evaluate the truth of what others claim? I would say I can trust them because of the depth of those experiences, but I never view them as absolute or the "final arbiter of truth for all others", as it seems you imagine. I hold my beliefs and ideas with an open hand. I recognize that others may in fact be talking about the same thing as I am, but just through a different framework or belief system.
But to try to tie this in with what I said above, how can we know what rings true or resonates as truth, if not through logic arguments? How can we say one view is 'better' than another, and not all views are equally true and no one can say anything is more true or a better view than others? The short answer to that is "what works". What bears fruit.
So back to the KKK example you mentioned, or "hate your neighbor" philosophy. How can I say that is wrong? By the fruit it bears. I very much see my views as informed by both Buddhist thought, and Taoist thought. Let's look at the idea of Tao here for a moment.
The Tao, or the Way, is the way of nature that is in balance. What works, in other words. To be out of balance leads to error. It leads to problems. It leads to unhappiness and suffering, of ourselves and those around us. In fact, if you look at all the world's Wisdom traditions, that is what they are about, using their own systems of language and metaphors and symbols and practices to try to get us back into harmony with this Way. Same thing in Buddhism. Same thing in Christianity.
So the KKK. Do their beliefs and practices lead to Peace in themselves and with the world? Does it bring forth life and love, or death and suffering, anger and malice, and so forth. "By their fruits you shall know them". By the lack of balance, by their imbalance, by their suffering, you can discern the truth of what they say from the error of it.
So do I rely upon my deeper experiences of this Balance, or the Tao, or God, or Nirvana, as a way to judge the truth and veracity of truth claims of others? You bet I do. Logic and reason can make some mighty fine arguments to justify a pile of poo as good meal for one's dinner.
Unless you have some objective method it is your word against theirs. Maybe
@DNB is right afterall.
What's wrong with have some subjective method, as I desribed above. If one is deeply skilled and experienced at something, why do they need an external authority to tell them that when they see someone doing something they know from experience leads to imbalance that they actually know what they are seeing?
I wrote "ow about the God that the 9-11 hijackers thought was so real that they died for it?". How can you reject this when it is a fact? What are you rejecting here?
I wasn't rejecting the fact of what they did. I was rejecting their justification for it as valid or authentic. It is invalid and inauthentic logic arguments to justify bad beliefs and bad actions.
How dedicted are you? Are you as certain in your beliefs that you would die for them? If not then it seems to me they were more faithful than you. They were more certain than you. Do you really think they didn't believe they were doing God's will?
I've said countless times in countless posts that I hold my beliefs as provisional. I find them useful, until I need to grow, modify, or abandon them. My beliefs are not the substance of my experience. They are merely ways to try to explain or talk about it.
It does if you have no foundtation in understanding what is true about how things are, and what is illusory.
To me the true foundation is personal experience. I hear so much religious arguments citing the Bible as the source of all truth, yet I do not hear any actual personal experience or insights at all. Beliefs are the substance of their faith. And the same thing holds true for those who turn to Science and logic arguments as the foundation for their faith, the source of all truth to them.
What does experience really show? If all one has is logic arguments, or bible verses, and no experience, they don't have any real substantive claims at all. They just have beliefs or well crafted arguments. But as the slogan goes "Where's the beef?"
You refer to a God as if it exists, but what evidence do you have except feelings and what you learned from other religious people that any gods exist?
I don't not refer to "a God" as if it exists. I'll keep repeating this until it becomes heard. I do not view God as an object, a being, an entity, a creation, or a thing. God is Ultimate Reality, and is not separate from ourselves. I cannot speak of God and consider it as I might a cat or a dog. "A God" is never language I would ever use, nor have used in any discussion.
Now, to answer your question, "what evidence do you have except feelings and what you learned from other religious people that any gods exist?" I came to realize the reality of the Infinite Absolute through a direct experience, not through "feelings", and certainly not through anything I learned from other religious people. I only joined a religion after having a spontaneous Satori experience when I was 18m seeking to try to understand and grow in myself what I had been exposed to in that abrupt pulling back of the veil of reality experience. I was not religious nor raised in a religious family. It was not in that context I had that experience.
So that experience is absolute evidence to me of the reality of that. It was not conceptual, nor an intuition or a feeling of goosebumps or silly warm fuzzies. It was a massive and total shift in consciousness itself.
Is that evidence to others? Not on its own, of course. But one could argue if one looks objectively at the data we have from modern researcher who study these higher states of consciousness reported the world over, and compare the descriptions of those experiences, then you can see a pattern to them. But I would never argue as you claimed, that this is evidence of "a God", per se. But it is evidence of a culturally independent realization of an Ultimate Reality, and all the rest in our mythologies are pointers to That, by whatever name you wish to call it.
If you were never exposed to the idea of a god would you have invented it yourself?
No. As I said, it's not an idea. That said, I called it "God" because of what others named it. I did adopt that word because to me it can be used to desribe the ultimate, infintie, and timeless nature of it. But I certainly can use Buddhist language as well as Emptiness, or Nirvana. Or Taoist language of the Tao. Or, other words I personally like are the Infinite. The Source. The Ground of Being. Spirit. Void. Wellspring of Life, Being itself, Love, Light, and Life, and so on and so forth.
Point being that God is a word that for me describes it, yet I can use other words as well, none of which capture the reality of it. "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao". That is truth.
We don't need faith to understand that Trump is corrupt and poses a threat to the future of the USA and global relations. Faith is what his followers feel because despite three indicments he is not losing the lead among conservative voters.
No that is not faith in the context I directly explained as a religious faith which is directed to matters of ultimate concern. Faith that your car will start, or faith in that moron Trump, has nothing to do with what I was clearly explaining.
