Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!lll-crg!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,net.religion.christian Subject: Re: Tim Maroney's questions!! (Why do people belive in God) Message-ID: <1139@hoptoad.uucp> Date: Sat, 27-Sep-86 19:25:42 EDT Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1139 Posted: Sat Sep 27 19:25:42 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 29-Sep-86 03:10:38 EDT References: <2573@watdcsu.UUCP> <2759@rsch.WISC.EDU> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley Lines: 70 Xref: linus talk.religion.misc:284 net.religion.christian:4759 I really don't have the faintest idea what questions of mine this is supposed to refer to. Care to enlighten me? In article <2759@rsch.WISC.EDU> planting@rsch.WISC.EDU (W. Harry Plantinga) writes: >When a person sees another person, he (or she) assumes or "knows" >that there is another person near him. In fact, however, he cannot >*prove* the existance of the other person--he cannot prove that the >appearance is not an illusion. The point is that he has had an >experience from which he concludes that there is another person >nearby. This experience is trustworthy because it is almost never contradicted. Anyone with you at the time will see the same person, and future meetings by other people with the same person will confirm their meeting with you. This is not the case with respect to contact with deities. If the universe were so constituted that meeting a person was, like meeting deity, a highly questionable experience, in which one had only subjective feelings of contact but no outside corroboration, and in which the person allegedly met could not state to any other person at what time and place he or she had last met with you, then we would hardly have the same absolute confidence in our meetings with people. >In the same way, most (many?) Christians believe in God because >they experience Him. For many Christians, the experience is just as >compelling as the appearance of another person nearby. It's not a >mental defect that causes the person to believe in God, it's a correct >and natural response to experience. Many Christians *don't have a >choice* about believing in God any more than a person has a choice >about believing there's another person in the room when he sees him. Nonsense. In my own pagan invocations I have many times had contact with what appeared to be pure and transcendent beings, a feeling of contact that was, if anything, far more vivid and compelling than my current contact with you. This does not mean that I am unable to treat these experiences with skepticism, once I re-activate my intellect. I do not believe in non-human sentience on the planet; I believe that the experience of such was largely conditioned by my expectations of encountering apparently sentient beings. When I was twelve years old and privately foreswore Catholicism, one of the two chief insights I had was that my own religious experience proved absolutely nothing about the correctness of any doctrine derived from literally interpreting it. If I had been raised a Hindu, then I would have experienced Vishnu rather than Jesus. This caused me to over-react for a few years into dogmatic atheism; since becoming eclectic I have since experienced both gods, though you would say the experiences contradict each other. (Actually, what you would say is that I experienced Satan both times; this is presumptive to start with, and therefore throws aside your supposed basis in repeatable experience. It also ignores the issue of how you know that what *you* have experienced is not Satan....) You will note that for me to accept your viewpoint would require that I accept that your religious experiences have somehow been superior to mine. On the other hand, for you to accept mine only requires that you grant that our experiences have been equally valid. >I sometimes even wonder if *everyone* experiences God, and either >accepts him or rejects him. It would certainly explain the venom I >see in this newsgroup . . . I don't understand. There is venom on both sides, and you have explained it on neither. If you want to see where the greater venom lies, I suggest you compare the tone of Ken Arndt (the sole resident of my global kill file) with that of any non-Christian poster, including such supposedly terribly venomous posters as myself and Rich Rosen. -- Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot {ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp) hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)