Is Jesus the Circular Messiah?

The experience is not reasoning but "I had a mystical experience about a guy named Jesus and so therefore I believe in Jesus" is reasoning. The point Brian is trying to make is that the reason their mystical experience centred around a figure called Jesus is because they had already heard about Jesus.The reason it is circular goes as follows:1: The Bible says it is true.
2: I believe the Bible is true and what it says is true.
3: Therefore: since I believe what the Bible says, and it says that it is true, the Bible is true.Circular reasoning, yes? Now, a simple conversion1: My mystical vision in my mystical experience assured me that it was Jesus.
2: I believe my mystical vision was a true experience {as opposed to hallucination or false memory etc} and that what was said in the vision reflects true things.
3: Therefore, since I believe my mystical experience/vision was true and honest and since the mystical experience/vision assured me that it was Jesus, it was Jesus and Christianity is therefore true.Further Brian is pointing out a circularity within that circularity:1: My culture heavily imprints Christian imagery into many significant life events.
2: I have a mystical experience (ie,. significant life event) centred around Christian imagery.
3: I continue the cultural Christian imagery drive.This isn't circular reasoning, though it is a nice little self-feeding process.

What about it? Comes under the cultural self-feeding process I described. What 'resonates' with people is statistically influenced by their culture.

I'm not trying to demonstrate that mystical experiences are never experiences about real supernatural entities. I was simply talking about how any given mystical experience is interpreted by the person who had it. That is: How does a person go from 'I had a mystical experience about entity x' to 'Entity X is therefore real' (and also what influences there are on causing.entity x being the subject in the first place)You cannot escape the clear fact that large numbers of people have mystical experiences, and the majority of those interpret it within their cultural framework which usually means 'religion'.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

If not all, then the vast majority of beliefs are involved in the cultural feedback scenario, obviously. How am I saying that everything is circularly reasoned though?

Clearly, philosophically speaking, that is the case. Since we are talking along such terms - any attempt to suggest that any given experience by any given person was the real McCoy is likewise doomed to failure. There is no way for you, for instance, to be able to with any confidence state that your own mystical experiences reflect reality rather than simply your internal state of mind one day. Indeed, perhaps it is the significant numbers of Christians who become Muslim are the ones who are statistically speaking having the the real experience - or all those people abandoning middle-eastern religions in favour of Buddhism are having experiences of actual mystical entities. Right, in Message 24 I mentioned that it is only a simple statistical bias - any given individual might be influenced in a different fashion. In Message 26 I expanded by saying that "You cannot escape the clear fact that large numbers of people have mystical experiences, and the majority of those interpret it within their cultural framework".We are all aware that some people are contrarian, some people are exposed to other world religions at just the right moment, and some people begin entirely new religions and maybe, just maybe, one particular grouping of them are having genuine contact with the supernatural (though we then are faced with the second impossible problem of sorting out whether or not the vision/experiences are created by a deceptive agent from another religion/belief system/culture or by an honest agent from the religion it purports to come from).

Likewise it would be hard to imagine an argument that would render a demonic entity unable to manifest a deception to a person that was as convincing as anything else that manifests itself to us. If LSD can convince someone they are under attack from trans-dimensional Nazis coming from a dimension where dogs bark like ducks...anything with supernatural power over the mind shouldn't have too much difficulty in convincing someone that their cultural beliefs are reality.When I am presented with an optical illusion, sometimes I am convinced that the lines are not parallel, the colours are different shades, or the shapes are different sizes. Fortunately I have a way of testing if my brain is 'playing tricks' (taking hard wired perceptual shortcuts) on my consciousness - I can measure the lines, the colours, the sizes.We cannot do this with mystical experiences, so an experiencer is left with a dilemma: Do I accept the experience as a rare real reflection of reality knowing that at least 70% of the world that chooses this path must be wrong when they do so OR do I simply enjoy the experience but lend it no more credit as to reality as my amusing experience of being convinced that parallel lines were actually converging?Granted, the acceptance of the experience may purely be reflexive or emotive at the time of a mystical experience and shortly thereafter...but if at some point a person chooses to reason why they chose to believe it, what is their reasoning process?

You'd have to have the benefit of having the creator of the universe also manifesting themselves to you before you'd be in a position to judge which is truer. But then again, what if you've been visited by two different supernatural beings, one vastly more convincing than the other (or perhaps the latter one simply makes you think they are more convincing - it'd be far easier than actually being more convincing). It assumes that the creator of the universe was capable of such an act. But it is not clear that a hypothetical demon clearly cannot do that. What if the creator of the universe imbued the demon with such capability or what if there is no creator of the universe?And besides, how would you be able to tell the difference between absolute knowledge and the delusion of having absolute knowledge. In both cases you are as sure of the knowledge as anyone ever can know: it's just that in one condition you're actually delusional. That's why crazy people are convinced of crazy things. They really think these things are true. But you just made up this state, which we can never be sure we are in, and we can never know who has the capabilities of rendering it, or whether or not said knowledge has to be actually true. We perceive that our perceptions can fool us. If our perceptions cannot fool us, then we have a paradox since our perceptions tell us our perceptions can fool us. Clearly then, our perceptions can fool us. Yes, there is a reliance on our ability to perceive because in order for us to experience the manifestation we have to perceive it. If we do not perceive the knowledge, then we are unaware of it. Once we are aware that we have the knowledge we have to question whether the knowledge is correct or not. If we are completely crazy, that will be impossible and we'll just accept the delusion and any further tests (even tests that make no sense or are in no way related to demonstrating the truth of things) will either be ignored or be twisted to be believed to confirm the delusion.I have many absolutely convincing mystical experiences. In one it was a Christian flavour, I felt an overarching fatherly love spread throughout the universe with a hint of fatherly reproach and forgiveness. I felt looked after. I knew absolutely that everything would work out.I felt several buddhist mystical experiences wherein I felt close to nirvana my mind the centre of a terrible ravishing whirlwind. I knew at that moment that the attachment was the cause of suffering and that I was no longer attached and free from suffering and that one day I would forever feel the joy and bliss of this moment.I have had others too, Islamic, pantheistic and atheistic. Which moments of feelings of absolute knowledge and wonder should I trust as being the true? Chronologically they all felt like the previous experience was but a fancy and that this one was a true divine moment.Your 'absolute knowledge' is nothing more than a feeling one gets associated with all similar states of mind including drug or technology-induced ones. In fact, if you are convinced that something is absolute knowledge I'd wager that was a good sign you are hallucinating in some fashion since it is massively characteristic of strong hallucinations and delusions...many hallucinations are just visual or auditory. Many however, can completely convince a person that something they are experiencing is totally true including concepts that are simply surreal nonsense. The feeling is akin to a pressing, almost crushing weight of absolute TRUTH to whatever gibberish the hallucination is trying to foist upon you.Why would one rely on God's ability to do anything anyway? If you come into the religion via the mystical experience - how can you rely on anything a God you don't yet believe in can do? I smell circularity here, don't you?How do I know? Because I had absolute knowledge it was the truth. But how do you know it was absolute knowledge? Because I was given absolute knowledge? How do you know you were given it? Because I had absolute knowledge that the absolute knowledge was given to me. Round and round we go Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Why does it make a lot of sense? Why does one particular entity seem to predominantly make sense in areas where said entity is ingrained in the culture? Why go from 'it makes sense' and jump to 'choice of belief'? Is it because a religion that shapes, and is shaped by, a culture is obviously going to 'make sense' to someone of that culture?Your avenue of thought seems to come under the 'circle of cultural reinforcement' hypothesis brought up earlier in the thread. I'm in agreement that it isn't circular reasoning, the reasoning has flaws of its very own.

Well there is no need to do anything that is needless. However, there are many reasons why one might speculate on the origins of beliefs. For example, if one was engaged in a debate about the origins of beliefs. It is also useful to study how humans can come to believe such radically different things so that one can insulate ones self from poor thinking. Even the believers of the most popular religious belief have to concede that the method of 'mystical experience of a cultural icon' leads to about 70% of people believing something that must be false. Clearly your belief is not based on the scientific method: that isn't the problem. The contention is that the rationalisation process behind believing in certain things is largely or entirely based on philosophically or logically flawed reasoning. Are you conceding that your belief is based such flawed reasoning? You mean, why *some* people find the agnostic position logically and philosophically more sound? Phat - you can leave yourself psychologically open to believing whatever comes to you without critically analysing the reasoning behind it if you like. Meanwhile some other people will analyse said beliefs, conclude that there is significant fault with any reasoning used to justify said beliefs and then point that out hoping to rescue people from their own mental shortcuts by giving them the analysis.If we didn't do that, the world might still be filled with ideas that 'made sense' like slavery or having a church with strong or total political power.