That's odd, because I'm trying to figure out which one you were using. You can't keep pushing the definition game back at me if you are the one asking questions and making claims.

I'm not writing a thesis. I've already told you that I'm not interested in this direction of conversation (primarily because it's irrelevant to OP's concerns, and because it gets bogged down in things that really aren't that relevant).

If the context is not sufficient for you to understand what I've been attempting to communicate in a relatively concise manner, then this conversation is being abandoned.

The name "Jesus" is less important that you are seemingly trying to make it. It's not a magic word. I could easily have rephrased my statement to omit Jesus' name, but it would have required many more words to explain something along the lines of substitutionary atonement.

Unintentional omission.

Sounds like religion to me. You create a thread challenging people to convert you to Christianity, and then claim you don't want a religion. I think one of the roles religion is to apply meaning to our meaningless existence.

It's pretty much a black box. Many Muslims don't have a western worldview to begin with, thus putting a significant distance between understandings from the beginning. You are free to conjecture whatever, but trying to pull a couple billion people and boil them down to a single sentence description, and then expand that to encompass something about how they came to their particular conclusion is a fool's errand.

I am content to make broad statements about broad collections of people, but I do not think it's useful to make narrow statements about broad collections of people.

What indication is there that you've actually tried looking, or that your way of looking is realistic? Can you expand upon your experiences in a way that would lead me to believe that this is something for which you've taken anything more than the most superficial glance to reach this broad-reaching conclusion?

The way that you've phrased things above, I think you're falling into the error of putting everything into an overly simplistic box.

Your resolution is overly simplistic as well. Certainly, culture plays a role. Certainly, psychology plays a role. But the level of analysis here is extremely superficial.

As noted above, I think your viewpoint is overly simplistic. So I feel no compulsion to try to resolve anything about it.

I suspect that you would end up being overly simplistic here, as well.

Why wouldn't I?

Sure, you can *ALWAYS* posit a non-God reason for something. Any experience that I have, any thought that I have, any action I take... You can always tell me that such-and-such did not need to reference God.

This is why I keep going back to asking the question of what you're looking to get from me. You want me to answer the question on your terms, but your terms are not sufficient for me to describe to you the experience. I say more below.

It depends on what you mean by "reducible" but essentially yes. My life does not have a "God" part that is completely disjoint from the "not-God" part. This is not different from the experience of "taste" being tied to the tongue, the nose, AND the thing that you're thinking about. (Yes, your thoughts can change your ability to perceive flavor. Even colors can change your perception of flavor.)

God doesn't "come in" in the same sort of sense that God doesn't "go out."

Holistic? Sure, I guess... though I don't think it's really the right word.

You ask me for more, but when I ask you what more you're looking for, you tell me you're not looking for anything. Can you see how this creates a frustrating cycle in terms of conversation?

I'm confused. Earlier you said an outside observer couldn't tell the difference between the experiences of a Muslim and a Christian. So what good would there be in "looking"?

But why are you positing a God reason instead of a non-God reason?

I presume you can come up with a good explanation for why it would not make sense to interpret what seems to be a relatively commonplace sensation of compassion on pink unicorns. So my question is why you want to interpret it with some reference to god. I am aiming to try and find out why you believe in this concept, and you have referenced this personal experience so what about it is relevant to the question of the veracity of god?

Do you think you have communicated, in anything you just wrote, what it is about this experience that has anything to do with god? You have indicated a few things that it is not. It is not a constituent component, it is probably not holistic either. He doesn't come in or go out. Okay fine. So what about this experience is indicative of god?

I certainly am looking for something. I am looking for some reason why you believe in god and are attributing all of this to god. I don't care what the nature of your evidence is or the nature of your reasoning. But it has to be something. What can you communicate in writing that is in the slightest bit indicitive that a god actually exists?

Look more closely at the words in context:

I do not reject the usefulness of observing people to look for differences in their experiences, and even to potentially learn about how they think about things. I'm saying that it's not really the right thing to do if you're trying to decide who is believing in the right God.

Because it is more consistent with my view of the world than the rejection of God's participation in that event.

Many Muslims do have a western worldview to begin with, in particular every muslim I have ever discussed religion with. (Toronto, a heavily multicultural city, fwiw). But I don't see how that has much to do with anything. Do you think Christians are a black box as well btw? As I say, any discussion I have ever had has not indicated a major difference between Muslims and Christians in why they believe as they do. My Muslim friends are just as happy to pull out the kalam cosmological argument as christians are and just as evasive when its flaws are pointed out.

There is a sense in which ALL people are a black box and it is hard to make much progress on figuring out anybody. But I don't see why muslims are a priori any different from christians or jews or buddhists or anything else on this.

Don't confuse brevity for simplicity. I offered a very brief one sentence overview of the kinds of considerations (cultural, psychological, etc..) factors that are predictive of peoples religiosity. If you want to go into considerable more depth the science, as far as we currently understand it, behind why people believe the way we do, that is a subject of a different thread.

But you ignored the main point. You have not seemed to even acknowledge that there is a tension with the idea that the personal experiences of muslims and christians (which you acknowledged both had) lead them to directly contradictory views on the divinity of christ. Why do you think this is the case that to Christians their personal experiences seem to confirm christianity and to Muslims their personal experience seem to confirm Islam?

So it's true because you want it to be true?

I am sorry, I thought it was implicit we were not working under the assumption of God's existence. If we accept God's existence, then clearly it is very reasonable to interpret any experience as being because of God. I had hoped that this experience was going to led some weight of evidence or reason to the hypothesis of God's existence.

It makes no sense for me to do so given my understanding of the world.

You're basically making the accusation "You believe X, explain why you don't also believe Y" when X and Y are totally unrelated. This is not far from the God=Allah type of statements you've made earlier.

Because the thing that I did during that time puts me in a certain position relative to God, and explicitly so. I didn't pray to the sun, or Zeus, or ancestral spirits. I was addressing myself to what I believe was God.

Take a look again at your redescription of my description:

See? You can *always* take any action that I've done and reframe it without God. I can't stop you from doing that. But in terms of the internal process (experience), I addressed myself to God. As the objective (external) observer, there are things going on that you can't see. That's just how it is.

Huh? I am certainly not positing these experiences as proof that God exists.

What do you want me to indicate? That God is "right here"? It doesn't work that way.

This is a completely different question and direction from where you've been heading. I'm not surprised, as most conversations end up coming down to a "prove God exists" challenge of some sort. I'm not in this example trying to prove to you that God exists.

I believe it's true because it makes more sense to me if it's true than if it's false. "Want to believe" is not playing any particular role here.

Edit: Nor does "want it to be true" play a role.

Again, you're changing this into a "Prove God exists" type of conversation. That is not where you started from.

Edit: Okay, not you, but this line of conversation. I was actually responding to asdfasdf. This was the prompt:

This seems quite clearly to assume that God exists for the purposes of the conversation. Otherwise, it would make the whole prayer conversation irrelevant.

This was the start: I thought we were trying to understand WHY you feel this experience is from God. I am thinking that your current answer is "because that is my worldview". As in, you say it is God because you already believe in God.

Since that is a vacuous conversation to have, I had assumed you thought there was some reason to interpret this experience as being Godly in some way WITHOUT the presumption that God exists.

edit: lol this is why i should refresh

I might be totally wrong here but I highly doubt asdfasdf was trying to imply we should assume god's existence. But yes we took this at exactly the opposite intent. I assume he will confirm one way or the other for us.

Please stop this. I have repeatedly clarified that I am NOT making anything remotely similar to this:

No, I wasn't saying we should assume God's existence (but don't think it matters much). Additionally, I find it quite deflating if Aaron's answer to "why do you feel it's from God?" is "because that is my worldview".

Thought so.

It is worth remember that this is why Aaron says he believes:
In this thread thus far he has utterly failed to indicate why his personal experience is at all indicitive of a god outside of presuppose the existence of a god.

It's true that it doesn't matter much for the conversation between us. From my point of view, if you ask my about a gift I got from a friend, I take the friend's existence as a given.

To try to bring us back a bit. This was the first part of my response:

In other words, there's not a clear "it" that I'm getting.

I recounted an event that happened relatively recently. I do not reconstruct my entire understanding of the world every time something new happens. The event that I recounted was not intended to be taken as an indicator that God exists, it was intended to simply be an explanation of how it is that I understand my interactions with God. The first part of asdfadsf's question:

My answer -- I can give you an example of prayer, and then explain what happens as a result of it. But I also note that the things I "get" are slightly more elusive to explain.

I still have no idea what this intangible is that you are getting with quotes. I have spent some time in this thread really trying to get what this intangible is, but I can't get it out of you.

Considering how this is allegedly at the core of your belief, this should be something of a problem.

You won't get anything concrete out of Aaron. He just keeps picking away at the semantics and goes off on unnecessary and distracting tangents, until you're exhausted.

I understand. It's just, there are things that happen in your mind, such as inspiration, having a concept "click", sadness when watching a movie, feeling inspired, etc. which, some of the time (I think you would admit) is not the product of God. Presumably you feel God also helps you with those things some of the time.

How are you determining the times when God is driving the experience versus not driving the experience.