What you want to know about Christ.

I'm curious about something, iano.Suppose you walk along the sidewalk one day and a great white glowing unicorn appears in front of you. Totally amazed, you call everyone else around you to come and see the unicorn. The thing is everybody that's there insists that he sees no glowing unicorn at all. But the unicorn is right there in front of your eyes. So, you decide to prove to everyone that the thing is real and is right there in front of you. You walk up to it and tries to jump on its back. To your surprise, the creature appears to go right through you, or rather you appear to go right through it. Any attempt you make in physical contact with this creature fails because your hand would go right through it.After a while, people get bored and begin to leave. The crowd is dispersed. But the unicorn is still right there in front of you. You can still see it. It's still right there.Is this experience real or not?

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

It is to me. It is not to everyone else. Their perception of what constitutes reality contains no unicorn. Mine does. If we assume for simplicities sake that one set of perceptions is right (they could both be wrong) then either set could be right.That a crowd observe (or in this case, don't observe) the same thing says nothing about the reality of that observation - it just means that this crowds perception of reality happens to coincide. They all perceive reality in the same way. Which doesn't mean the reality they perceive is any real-er than anothers.

In other words you believe that there is no distinction between psychosis and sanity.Or maybe sanity is really just the average insanity of the majority.Hey man, don't Bogart that joint!

Its bubbles all the way down.The crazy sit in their own bubbles, thinking the area inside their sphere is reality.The sane sit outside those bubbles looking through the skin of the deluded's bubbles - watching them in their delusion.The sane sit in a bubble thinking the area inside the (often empirically demonstrable) sphere is reality.The saved sit outside that bubble, looking through the transparent skin at the "sane" in their delusion. Watching them in their delusion and trying to burst their bubble.The saved sit inside a bubble. The skin of the bubble is called God. By his own testimony that skin is infinitely thick..perhaps God sits inside a bubble. But I suspect not. Maan

More nonsense.The questions posed in MANY posts in this thread, most lately in Message 239, still remain.Do you have any response other than jabberwocky?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Actually I don't know how anyone could answer this question concerning a faith in an invisible deity.It is an interesting question.If Ian were to say "I know it is God because whenever I pray before buying a lotto ticket I win big!" And if indeed this is true - then is it God? or a demon just trying to lead him astray? Don't really know.This is why I beginning the believe that faith in some invisible (anthropomorphic) deity without substance is bad thing at best and perhaps immoral.

Well, I think that there is at least a possible answer, but it is one that many, particularly "Born Again" types, dislike.The answer is to test the message against reason, logic and reality. It cannot tell you for sure if it is God, a Demiurge or just your own conscience, but it can test the message.The next question is usually, "If the content is valid but the source unacceptable, should the content be accepted?" Personally I say "Screw the source."

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

The claim (mine or anothers) of an experience of God can have but one real source. The main categories Schraf posed were:- The experience is indeed sourced from God
- The experience is sourced from some supernatural being who is not God
- There is no supernatural aspect to it and I'm imagining it. I am the sourceAll options are possible but only one of them is real. She asks how can I tell which of the possibilities it is. Ergo, she is asking me which how can I tell which possibility is the real one. If I can tell which is the real one then I can tell what is real. Ergo she is asking how I know what is real. This is what you asked: ..and this was my answer. This answer did not include a reference to my 'mantra' - although I mentioned that in response to a later part of your post.The answer I did gave (which illustrates your question as poorly framed) shows us that people don't "interpret" their reality - they just assume their reality is the case. PS: don't err in supposing that empiricism verifies reality. The experience was real because I experienced it. The question is which of the options was behind the real experience. If you are simply assuming as you do so as to reduce the number of options from 3 to 2 then you haven't actually done anything to garner a different answer from the time when the options were 3.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

That's not true, of course. People compare their "reality" with other people's personal perceptions to make a composite "collective reality".Rational thinking depends on being able to show reasons for your conclusion. Showing reason depends on being able to communicate your perceptions to others. Empiricism doesn't "verify reality". It fine-tunes our perception of reality.What people are asking you, I think, is why you trust your own perception of reality over the collective perception of everybody else. When one person has a "reality" that differs substantially from the collective perception, we call that mental illness. I don't think you've shown how your perception of reality (with respect to "spritual" experiences) differs from mental illness.

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“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place”
-- Joseph Goebbels
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Presumably these people of yours first assume their reality to be the case. They would need to do that in order to be sure that the other people they are comparing themselves with actually exist. Fine so long as fine-tuning is not necessarily taken as moving our perceptions any closer to the actual reality. Given the amount of people on the world who have one or other spiritual outlook (and thus perception of reality) I wonder who forms your "collective perceptionists".Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Yes. We, as a society, do assume (if you want to call it an assumption) that people exist. We also assume that experiences can be communicated between people by way of evidence. We also assume that the experiences are "less real" if they can not be verified by evidence. Empiricism doesn't "move our perceptions". It takes our conclusions closer to the best approximation of "actual reality" that we can ever know. That smells like a false dichotomy - spiritual outlook or no spiritual outlook. The fact is that people with almost any spiritual outlook can subscribe to and contribute to the collective knowledge of reality.It isn't spiritual versus non-spiritual. It's rational versus irrational.

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“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place”
-- Joseph Goebbels
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Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
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The one seeing the unicorn would be having a real human experience. It doesn't make the unicorn real but the experience is and is a valid experience, not to be confused with insanity. That is just a judgement.
The ones not seeing the unicorn are having a different experience but also valid. It doesn't make the unicorn unreal because they do not see it. This can't be judged as sanity.
Every human experience is valid. None should be discounted.

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Every human experience is valid. None should be discounted.

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So, when someone says that God told them to kill their children, is that a valid experience that shouldn't be discounted?We shouldn't prosecute or consider this person insane, since they said that God Himself gave the order?

Um, ok. Does this mean that there is no such thing as insanity or psychosis?

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Disclaimer:

​

Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

​

He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

Hang on, you are jumping the gun. I meant the 'experience' is valid. That is, the 'experience' of seeing a unicorn is valid. It cannot not be a human experience.
Given your scenerio, I would hope that if someone had the 'experience' of god telling them to kill, then the 'experience' would be treated as valid and the person helped before a killing occurs.
Hasn't 'god' ever given the order to kill? I wonder where the idea came from?