How do we know?

Hangdawg has his own proposal up on what looks like this topic though he goes into it at greater length. I wondering if two topics will split up the debate/discussion and make it more difficult to develope?lfen

A spiritual war as an explanation for unreliable information? All unreliable information? Is your notion that humans would not disagree on anything except for this spiritual war?This is an interesting apologetic approach. I have my denomination and I preach the Bible, the true understanding of the Bible. Some one asks me well, folks at the other church do or don't believe in the trinity, or think this passages means something a little different. And I say to my congregation in defense of my doctrine. There is a spiritual war going on. Satan and his minions are using subtle disinformation compaigns to distort the truth, the truth I've told you and everyone would clearly agree on if it were not for the unreliable information spread by the opposition.Can you at least see why I get so frustrated with religionists, and in the context of this forum with fundamentalist Christians. All science is simply because we have not conquered Satan and so we have to deal with unreliable information? As long as we hold to the Bibical view this makes perfect sense although Xtians argue endlessly about the trinity and all kinds of stuff. This is just rhetorical manipulations to maintain control and power in a community.I specifically get frustrated with you at times because I find you have the intelligence and insight to see through this stuff and yet you keep coming back to it. I can accept a viewpoint that sees spiritual war going on in a metaphoric sense. Certainly there is unreliable information, but it's not a single thing. It's not Christianity is right and all disagreements are due to unreliable information promulageted by Satan in the spiritual war. That is just too simplistic, it reduces the universe to an understanding that is easy to grasp precisely because it is a holdover from primitive explanatory mythical thinking that is easier to teach than science and so is easier for mass education, literacy is not even necessary. But though it has profound emotional impacts on people and I believe emotions are very important what they don't do is establish facts. Emotions tells us about ourselves, our functioning, our needs in a subjective sense.lfen

Why can't we? Your position doesn't seem to be that of a logical positivist who might say that the word "god" doesn't refer to anything therefore we can't make any meaningful statements that contain that word. I could say for example that I'm 12 ft. tall. Measurement would prove the statement false but I don't see what prevents me from saying it.Why is "YOU" (PaulK) evil?lfen

Yeah, I know there is no NEED, it's just a desire on my part, and I tend to get over passionate about things at times. I'm not sure why I sometimes feel as strongly as I do, comes from wanting the world to be different from the way it is I suppose. That is one of my hinderances.I finally decided to add an avatar. Whaddya think of it?lfen

Dawg,This thread was about how we know, but I'm thinking we should back it up and look at what knowing is. I'm thinking along the lines of UG Krishnamurti and Wittgenstein, or at least my poor understanding of them. I'm thinking that knowing is knowing how to do something. That we can never know what "Spain" is, but we can know how to get to Spain from where we are, how to speak Spanish, how to identify the Spainish flag, etc.From this point of view we can look at knowledge as how to do something and how to get results from doing it that we might want. So faith is not seen as "true" but as more or less effective to deal with X. If X is disease then I'd say within the last 50 to 100 years science and medicine are more effective than faith is healing a long list of diseases.Getting to heaven is a different order of doing but because the sentence structure is analogous to "how do I get to Carnegie Hall" the old joke kind of gives a clue, still no one claims to know where Heaven is located in the Universe or if it is located in the Universe.
So I would assert that knowing about heaven has it's value in knowing how to reduce anxiety about death and dying.Enough said for now. Are you interested in a discussion on this?lfen

Hi Dawg,I'll give it some time to simmer. Study well and good luck on finals. Hope you get a well deserved break over the holidays.lfen

I'll propose the thread.lfen

Hangdawg,I agree but I also have to ask who can not be moved by the awesome example Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, etc set for right living? I can answer that specifically: Buzsaw seems unmoved by anyone but Jesus or others from the Judeo Christian Bible and in fact denigrates other religions by claiming they were created by Satan.And Buddha had decades to teach so his thought is much better documented, and Ramana again had decades plus his words were being written at the time not handed down orally for decades or centuries.Many Hindu's, certainly Ramakrishna and Ramana to name two, accept Christ as an incarnation of God. It does seem rarer that Christians respect the deep spirituality of the Eastern religions.I will say having grown up in a small town that I have a severe allergy to what I think of as intolerant fundamentalism, although the church I went to as a child was a very tolerant Episcopalian church.what I appreciate about Buddhism and Ramana is that they point to a source of knowing within rather than a written source of knowing without. They also have a sophistication that seems lacking in Western culture until the developments of semantics that understand the map is not the territory and that language can only do so much. Zen puts it succinctly with the saying that Zen is a finger pointing to the moon, don't mistake the finger for the moon.lfen

Ah, yes of course! and which ONE was it again? But how many illusions, imagined delusions, etc are there? How many models, approximations, theories? I'm going to say concepts aren't reality, and to the extent that we use language we aren't dealing directly with reality but with a multiplicity.But wouldn't it be true to say that the reality of many people is a series of illusions, day dreams, fantasies? So it that sense fantasy is the reality for many. lfen

Oops, I've inadvertenly wandered into Berkley territory. A quick google couldn't find the "tree in the quad" ditty and I forget how it goes exactly, but winds up God sees the tree so it exists. But I wasn't talking about reality, I was talking about what people take to be reality. So far we only know bits and peices, and I'm now adding the concept of abstraction to this. Is all we know abstractions from reality?lfen

Hangdawg,Ah, you and Bencip19 are both providing me with excellent thought stimulating material but at such a busy time of year!I don't know if there is a problem or not but it's apparent to me that personal experience of gravity refers to our organisms experience of gravity and also our experience of dropped things, falling of self or other seems obvious.What isn't obvious to me is what you are referring to as personal experience of God and how or when do parents or Sunday school offer beliefs that we adopt as children out of confidence in the adults in our lives? Could you amplify your statement. It seems to me that our belief in God first comes from cultural transmission.lfen