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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Professor Wagstaff)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Why does SHE believe...
Message-ID: <575@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Feb-85 18:35:54 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.575
Posted: Thu Feb 21 18:35:54 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 24-Feb-85 01:36:31 EST
References: <877@sjuvax.UUCP>
Organization: Huxley College
Lines: 45

>>I have met Him and talked to Him and experienced HIM in my life.
>>
>>Everything else outside of experiential knowledge is falling short
>>of a true relationship with God and obviously will not stand up to
>>attack.
>>
>>karen

>                  Tell us what he's like, Karen.  I'm not being a 
> wise-ass either.  I think that anyone who has been in the presence
> of the Almighty should share that experience with others. What does
> he look like? What did you talk to him about?
> 
> "Well, I didn't actually *meet* him. That's just a figure of speech."
>                                        [PREDICTED RESPONSE]
>   [DAVID IANUCCI - the dirty vicar]

Not true.  I don't believe that anyone who makes a statement like that which
Karen has made believes it to be a figure of speech at all.  To such people,
it is a genuine, very real phenomenon experienced within the mind.

> Then what WAS the experience, and how can you defend yourself against
> a charge that what you encountered was not, in fact, a transcendent
> Otherness, but only a projection of your mind?  I realize that these
> are not new arguments, but I'd  be interested to know what you have
> to say.

There's no obligation to defend one's perceptions against "charges".  It's
simply that the less complex explanation that it's a phenomenon INTERNAL
to the mind/brain (esp. given that the mind/brain is known to impose
preconceived patterns on such events) has been shirked in favor of a more
presumptive one.  Instead of a "charge", a question is asked:  "On what
basis?  Why?"

>      I will concur with you that to believe in [God,Jesus] for any
> other reason than personal experience is reprehensible. But I question
> the validity of the experience. 

So do I, as do many others.  And obviously, given our knowledge of such
phenomena, with good reason.  Attempting to ask those who don't question
its validity, those who accept it as "supernatural", to ask them why they do
so, is the crux.
-- 
"Right now it's only a notion, but I'm hoping to turn it into an idea, and if
 I get enough money I can make it into a concept."       Rich Rosen pyuxd!rlr