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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Professor Wagstaff)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: what does it mean to talk to God [a brief attempt at an answer]
Message-ID: <735@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Mar-85 23:07:50 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.735
Posted: Wed Mar 20 23:07:50 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Mar-85 04:53:43 EST
References: <893@topaz.ARPA> <2635@mcnc.UUCP> <660@pyuxd.UUCP> <4048@umcp-cs.UUCP>, <711@pyuxd.UUCP> <5297@utzoo.UUCP>
Organization: Huxley College
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>>The fact that you can no longer really tell when I'm telling the truth
>>about these things, these "experiences", should give you a taste of
>>your own medicine:  this is exactly how YOU sound to the rest 
>>of the world.  One can only wonder why you don't sound that way 
>>to yourselves.  For just as I might have wished you to believe in
>>my experience, you wish yourself to believe your own.  [ROSEN]

> Rich, if you think that the people who talk to God don't already understand
> that they sound weird to the rest of the world, then you need to do some
> reading. Every single mystic I know of comments on the difficulty of
> expressing what has happened.  [LAURA]

First off, we're talking about the people on this net who have claimed that
their subjective experience was not based on known phenomena such as
imposing preconceived patterns onto the experience, but was "real".
Both the refusal to accept the fact that their brains do such things AND the
fact that such people would deny similar experiences in others (similar but
different in image and meaning, according to them) are at issue here.  Second,
the fact that it's unexpressable doesn't make it "mystical".  And third,
I thought we talked in private letter about the "you need to do some reading"
tone.

> Religious experiences are very difficult
> to write about. The reason that mystics make a certain amount of sense
> to each other is a commonality of experience. There is something in
> mystic experiences which seems to be common, no matter what faith the
> mystic has. It is also the case that mystics seem to draw closer to a
> common set of beliefs -- though by no means into an easily separable
> ``universal religion''.

Why do we seem to be skipping over the question "Were these 'religious' or
'mystical' experiences?" so quickly here.  The fact that they have things
in common is not surprising, since a lot of human perception is held in
common (e.g., non-color-blind people all recognize blue as blue...)

> There is no way that you can prove that a mystic experience is only
> wishful thinking. It is definitely one theory. I tend to reject it, though.

It seems more like you tend to jump to the conclusion of the mysticality
first and then reject the theory because it contradicts the conclusion you've
jumped to.

> Too many people have ended up having mystic experiences when
> they were not really seeking for them.

I hardly think that's a criterion for determining mysticality (unless you
already assume it to be so).  The way the events are interpreted afterwards,
whatever may have taken place, seem tinged with preconception.  Not really
wishful thinking in an active sense, but wishfully believing certain
preconceptions afterwards.

> Why do you reject subjective experiences out of hand like that? More
> importantly, why do you ``hunt them down and kill them'' :-) rather than just
> ignoring them as having no relevance to you?

1) Because the nature of the experience is hopelessly unreliable.  Take the
example I often give, of seeing someone you know on the street and then
suddenly realizing it wasn't them at all (and asking yourself "What could have
made me think that that was so-and-so?  It doesn't even look like him/her...").
(Perhaps because some pattern of movement/image matched a pattern you associate
with that person in your brain???)  Would you go up to such a person that you
thought you recognized and INSIST that he/she was (a few seconds ago) the
person you know?  Of course not.  The same chain of faulty patterning occurs
all the time.  So how can one take such an experience as anything but fraught
with flaws?  2) As I've said before, when a certain group of people would like
to see a certain moral code imposed on other people, and when such people are
gaining strength precisely because they feed on the preconceptions, the wishful
thinking, the indoctrinated expectations of the general public, it is more than
necessary to show such things for what they are, lest we all get our brains
shut off by those who would have it that way.

By the way, I must ask:  your last question (and much of your other recent
writing) seems to be very defensive.  Why do you ask that question, which
you never seemed to ask before when I asked it of the Christians and others
who offered the notion of such things as viable evidence?  Is it because now
I'm examining your own assumptions and preconceptions?  As I said to Tim,
just because you're not Christian doesn't automatically make you somehow
immune from having your beliefs examined with equal fervor, even if that means
we find that you're making similar flaws in reasoning.
-- 
"Which three books would *you* have taken?"
				Rich Rosen	ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr