Feel free to define "religious claim" however you wish.

If the claim is unfalsifiable, it is true. And if the claim is falsified, or morally unpalatable, it is misinterpreted/allegorical/etc.

by their fruits?

(I'm thinking there are definitions of "religious claim" for which this is problematic but given the general question this seems like broadly the best general answer to me)

I define 'religious claim' as 'cookie dough ice cream.' You distinguish the true from the false by tasting them.

Or perhaps there is a crab (a magnifcrab, indeed) who plays propositions as music on his flute, and the pleasing ones are true.

Since this is your thread, I think you need to define it.

No. The main thing learned from the last thread I started on this subject is that the theists of RGT have no consensus as to what constitutes a religious claim / spiritual truth. So it's better if each theist has the freedom to answer as they please.

In the eastern tradition in Christianity the ability to distinguish true claims from false claims is generally referred to as discernment, and it's considered a gift from God. Which is to say that there really isn't a methodology in the sense of a procedure that can be generally carried out by anyone interested. There is instead a culture that emphasizes seeking guidance from a spiritual director. This is intended in recognition both of the fact that discernment is from God, but also as a means of humbling oneself by being obedient and not following only your own will, the benefit of which is considered to be as important as knowing "the truth" in a lot of cases.

Edit: It's probably worth interjecting here that I think I'm oversimplifying too much in implying that there is no means of discerning truth oneself in any case. There's just not a "Methodology" with a capital-M that is universal and works the way science does. However prayer and fasting have been considered useful for this purpose since antiquity.

As far as a methodology for determining which spiritual elders might possess discernment, in most of the hagiographies about such people their gifts are demonstrated via their impact on the lives of people they interact with, and sometimes by clairvoyant statements where the elder is said to have told someone about some personal issue before they could have known about it, or by miracles. All of those are pretty common in stories about spiritual guides in Eastern Orthodoxy.

It's such a different world view that it's difficult to fit it into the kind of framework you seem to have in mind when you speak of spiritual claims or truths, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

I also feel like as far as having a consensus part of the problem is even apart from spiritual truths or religious claims, it doesn't seem easy to me to describe propositions, truths and methodologies for evaluating truths in any context, at least not if the aim is to be logically rigorous, consistent and complete. The allusion to Godel, Escher, Bach (The Magnificrab, Indeed) seemed really apt to me for that reason.

And I suppose although I was intrigued I kind of gave up on trying to tackle it when the other thread diverged from the original topic before I could really start thinking about it. Which is probably for the best, since it's such an old topic of philosophy and I'm woefully under-educated anyway :P

From Varities of Religious Experience - A Study In Human Nature by William James

Is Mystical Consciousness Authoritative?
1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
3. They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.

Non-Mystical States Are Not The Sole Arbiters Of Truth:
Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.

"What is the methodology for distinguish true religious claims from false"

If they're in it for the money it's false.

"If people believe something, they can believe it - but others shouldn't be forced to believe it based on this alone?". Pretty much the only thing you did was slap on the term "mystical state" and "non-mystical state" - and those terms are the only thing in that piece of text that are notable.

Let me guess in advance: We can't determine if there is a mystical state via non-mystical states?

There is nothing about method is this quoted text. It is just restating the argument I find unjustified - that there are special 'spiritual' ways of discerning truth. We are forever hearing screeds about "the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe", but almost never any direct examples of such truths, and even less so for a robust epistemic methodology for same.

Same methodology as for all other claims.

Agree with well named concerning the gift of discernment. Also, one dummy-check on any claim is lining it up with the Bible. Like, if someone says that God is calling him to murder his own child, then obviously that is... ummm... hmmm... well, let me think on this some more.

But what about if a man claiming to be God says he killed some kids because they made of his baldness?

Crazy? OK. What about if he said he was a prophet?

Fact? OK.

This is harder than I thought...

Negation is the closet answer you can get, however I'd prob argue that methodology cannot touch truth in any way as it is formless.

It depends on what you mean by “robust epistemic methodology.” For instance, I don’t think anyone can claim to ‘know’ that God exists, that we survive our bodily deaths, that Jesus is God, that Christianity is true, etc. But, for me, that doesn’t mean one isn’t entitled to ‘believe’ any of the aforementioned are true. I mean, that’s the whole thing with faith—belief in the "un-known." So I don’t see belief, in a religious context, as a degree or type of knowledge in a strict epistemological sense. In other words, religious belief is an assent to truth, but not a proclamation of truth.

This seems like a pretty false distinction. As in, if I assent to truth, I am expressing some agreement with some claim. How is that not precisely a proclamation that some claim is true?

Yeah, I'm not asking how one can know that a claim is true in a sense that is focused on the "know" part of the question. If you define religious claims as things that are assented to rather than known then the question still stands as "how do you determine which claims should be assented to and which shouldn't".

This is only moving the question up a level: what is the method for distinguishing collections of religious claims (e.g. the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, Scientology: 8-8008 etc) in terms of truth?

Just to be clear, and unfortunately I'm not sure how to ask this without sounding sceptical, but when you say 'discernment' are you using the standard definition "noun: The ability to judge well"? If so, you seem to be just restating the question and then conceding there is no methodology for it.

I might return to this later, but as the previous thread on this subject ended up in a very long (though interesting!) semi-derail between you and OrP and I think I have a decent handle on your views, I'm going to skip over it for the moment.

Yes, I think I was explicitly saying that there is no methodology of the sort you are asking about, at least in eastern orthodoxy. I also think this shouldn't be too surprising given that we're talking about spiritual truths, and given how Christianity speaks about "spiritual" things and truth in general.

Both are very connected to God and man's relationship with God in Christianity, and that relationship is understood primarily as being mysterious. The greek word for the Sacraments of the church is mysterios. It's not just the truths themselves that are taken as mysteries, but the entire process of drawing near to God in faith, because it is a process of Grace that is directed by a fundamentally mysterious and unknowable entity, i.e God.

With reference to the bolded, I don't wish to constrict the possible types of methodology, but as a loose working definition I guess I would personally mean something similar to an algorithm: a series of steps to follow which lead to a result, in this case, the confirmation or denial of a claim. This shouldn't be too restrictive imo. There's no reason something like the following could not be considered a methodology under my definition:

1) Allow the holy spirit into one's heart
2) Pray about the claim
3) Receive the answer.

Not to suggest that the above is what I think you or anyone is doing exactly, just that I'm making no demand that methodologies presented ITT have to be directly analogous to the scientific method.

Would you say therefore that acceptance of religious claims is non-rational? For clarity, I tend to make a distinction between non-rational (not able to be explained by reason) and irrational (kinda the same, but pejorative and suggestive of bad reasons). E.g. I consider my dislike of cucumber to be non-rational, but not irrational.

I think acceptance of at least some religious claims (and, in my estimation probably the most important ones) is non-rational. I say "some" just because I'm sure there are claims that count as "religious" which could be investigated scientifically or logically or whatever.

Although it might be more correct to step back and say that I think the entire question is sort of wrongly motivated. The purpose of religion in my view is not to allow for the categorization of claims by truth-value, or even the acquisition of knowledge really. Certainly that is something that religions do, I think primarily via dogma, but dogma isn't really the goal of religion, nor is a systematic theology or anything like that. Rather they are a practical means to an end, which is love and union with God.