Hi TL,
Yep, you were right about what I was interested in you responding to, and to be frank, I like reading what you write a great deal, so I was interested in what YOU had to say.
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If, however, the things I feel inside, the directions I feel I'm given, are not just imagination or subjective, then it's not just picking and choosing; it just might be the guidance of God's Spirit.
Very true. However, this is not really how you began the thread. You began by ststing what happened to your Mom that day in the office, and saying that a lot of such occurrences add up to something significant, even so significant that it may start to be admissable in court.
That's making a claim that you believe you can
demonstrate the actions of God in reality.
Belief and subjective feelings inside I have no qualms with. It's the former claim of yours and the like that must be rigorously examined.
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I could list a thousand circumstances that I thought were the hand of God. You could work at explaining them. Some of them would be easily explainable (50-50 chance).
Oh, I think I would have better odds than that.
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Others would be far more unlikely, and you could say that unlikely things happen to people, just by odds.
Exactly true.
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I can't calculate the odds of things happening to me.
It's not so much about the odds as it is about your selective memory. You remember the "hits" and disregard the "misses". Or, you attribute the good things or powerful things that happen to you to God's intervention and the mundane urge you had to scratch your backside you attribute to nothing at all. Or maybe you attribute it to forgetting to put the fabric softener in the wash.
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I can't judge my psychological stability when I had such an intense experience back in 1982 that I promised myself to God. Maybe I was just having an LSD flashback or something. (Actually, I didn't do anything like that often enough to be risking flashbacks, I don't think--just a statement in my own defense.)
You don't have to be unstable to be vulnerable to fallacies. In fact, the smarter you are, the easier you can convince yourself, because smarter people are better at recognizing and making connections.
Look, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm just making the point that the experiences that you have had are meaningful to you because of the connections you made to your emotions, with your very natural and human selective memory, etc. We ALL do this, all the time.
It's just that when you start claiming that you have something that would hold up in a court of law, well, I'm just going to grill you on it, you know?
In closing, I'd like to say that I think that doubt, in particular, self-doubt about what one knows is the best path to truth and true knowledge.
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"Evolution is a 'theory', just like gravity. If you don't like it, go jump off a bridge."