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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Dr. Emmanuel Wu)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Logic based on ... (start again again...) (CONCLUSION)
Message-ID: <906@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Apr-85 09:32:24 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.906
Posted: Wed Apr 17 09:32:24 1985
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> before you said that all subjective evidence was to be rejected because
> it was subjective. What good does it do me to present evidence if you
> are just going to reject it because it is subjective?  What I was trying
> to do is to demonstrate that your beliefs are no less rigid than 
> certain people that you were accusing of ``wishful thinking''. I
> didn't think that you had a shortage of evidence for the existence of
> religious experiences -- I thought that you had lots and rejected them
> all because they were subjective. This leaves a lot of people in a bind.
> You first reject all subjective evidence and then you say that there is
> no evidence.

Same thing.  What good does it do you, you ask?  None.  Because, as you
yourself seem to acknowledge, such "evidence" is fraught with fallacy and flaw.
The reason for being "rigid" is to ensure that flawed preconceptions do not
get "into the mix" that results in an (erroneous) conclusion.  It's that
simple.  The evidence, because of its extremely poor quality, is useless in
determining the realities of the physical world.  The nature of an individual
human mind, the goings-on inside a particular person's head, yes, such
experience is real to them and provides information about them.  But what
does itsay in relation to the world at large?  Let's take a very poor example
off the top of my head:  a child whose parent has remarried sees the new
step-parent, for whatever reason, as being cruel and mean.  Any punishment
by the new stepparent is seen as cruel beatings and abuse.  The child grows
up thinking that this stepparent has abused her.  Does that make it so?
That person may live with that perception of another person for the rest of
her life, but that doesn't make it so.  It's the same with ALL subjective
evidence.

> This doesn't help when you are overcome with a dread feeling and then
> discover that night that your best friend was killed at that time. It
> doesn't explain why you sometimes know that a friend who hasn't
> talked to you in weeks is on the other end when the telephone rings.
> It doesn't help when you are rudely shaken up walking through a park and feel
> that you are the plants and the trees and flowers growing beside you. 
> It doesn't explain why you suddenly feel like calling your mother, who
> you haven't talked to in weeks and that when you phone her you discover
> that her best friend has just told her that she (her friend) has cancer.
> It doesn't explain why once (and only once) you have cut a regular deck
> of playing cards and named 30 cards correctly. It doesn't explain
> why meditation sometimes works on migraine headaches.

Nor does it explain the other numerous times when you are overcome with a
dread feeling and then nothing happens.  Or the times when something does
happen that you had no "foreknowledge" of.  Or the times that you thought
of someone and they DIDN'T call.  All these times are just as statistically
significant as the times you mention, but somehow they don't counted into
the mixture, making the times you mention seem more significant than they
are.  About meditation working on migraine headaches:  I can think of a
number of very obvious physical reasons why relaxation of the brain and body
might just cause alleviation of pain.  But those explanation don't seem to
be of interest to you:  you are specifically seeking and assuming explanations
that are outside the realm because you WANT to believe in such explanations.
I won't repeat what that's so often called...

> Suppose you keep records and discover that you cannot account for all
> that happens by coincidence or chance. Then what? You still have
> nothing but subjective evidence which people can deny ever happened --
> but you might want to shop around and see if anybody else has any
> explanations of what happened. Suppose your subjective evidence fits
> descriptions of somebody else's religious experiences? Suppose you
> never even knew the first thing about that religion before you
> started having these bizarre things happen in your life. I would
> maintain that you had rather strong subjective evidence for the
> truth of that religion.

What does that mean "cannot account for"?  Are you seeking a particular
"accounting for" for the experiences?  Someone else's subjective evidence
matches my experience?  Perhaps we were both ingrained with similar notions
of what such experience would be like, based on teachings about religion
and/or deities.  Perhaps it stems from basic human instincts that are part
of our brain makeup.  Again, these explanations are not of interest to you.
Jump right to the "mystical" instead.

> But - the evidence is still subjective. And you always could be
> mistaken, along with a lot of other people. Or you could be lying.
> Your claims will never stand up to a persistent skeptic who is
> determined to believe that you are either lying or a victim of
> mass hallucination, or mistaken or a victim of your own wishful
> thinking. There is no way to avoid this. The best you can aim for
> is the understanding from the point of view of the skeptic that you
> are sincere.

The fact that even the most sincere will not accept the problems with their
own methodology of cataloguing the experience and analyzing it.  "No, it's
not based on those things you say, it's real because I say so and I'm sincere"
doesn't cut it.  The fact that they refuse to acknowledge the problems with
their own "evidence" is a form of "insincerity", though not what I'd call a
"malicious" insincerity.
-- 
"Wait a minute.  '*WE*' decided???   *MY* best interests????"
					Rich Rosen    ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr