OP is falling for the kindergarten version of the sucker Jesus story. These are the level one conversion ploys employed by Christians and he thinks he's discovered the cosmological constant with them. The Strobel thing is as trite and passe as you can get and to him its an eye-popper. It's about like learning the opening move in chess and ranting that a miracle has made you a grandmaster. It's just like that. Well, you live and learn but this is as green as grass and its exactly what the religion counts on for converts.

Our ideas of success and failure are vastly different. Sure, a bunch of people from David Sklanskys (Mr. Logic himself) message board might disagree with what I’m trying to get across who cares? This post has 700 views. If less than 1% of the viewers become more open to God and let him into their lives as a result of my experiences, the posts were worth my time.

+1

One thing we can know for certain is that we can't trust our own perceptions. Since your new belief is based entirely on what you think you experienced it's completely unconvincing to me, and really shouldn't be to you either.

If I claimed that I'd experienced Allah whilst in extreme pain or ODing on a drug, how convincing would you find that...

Guaranteed less than 1%, so job well done!

7 is 1% of 700+ viewers. I would presume more than 7 people reading a forum titled “God Religion and Theology” are open to the idea of God. I was agnostic for many years. There is a God and he loves you all. I’ve been called crazy for some of my past poker hands. It’s no big deal.

Now that I think about it, that’s an excellent Lodden thinks question to ask. In a forum titled God Religion and Theology and a post of 700 views talking about a religious experience how many became more open to the idea of a God. I would wager the over on 7. Successful thread is any % > 0. Ie 1 person. Don’t mind me I’m saving souls.

Where's the pole?

BASTARD!

I grew up on these streets. I love this community enough to tell people here I have 100% faith in God and his plan. Maybe if you (naysayers) got shoulder tapped you’d be posting too.

You really don't understand what "subjective" means.....

You guys coming here to troll religious people is ridiculous, shallow and elementary. It is one thing to take a shot or two, especially in other forums, but to come here day in and day out to pull some pig tails and bully some grade school thinkers is so poignant. You really just come across like complete jerk offs

How is it guaranteed less than 1%? How could you guarantee that it is even less than 10%?

On a side note: Have you always been a troll, or is it a recent development?

Perhaps you are their role model for engagement on 2+2?

Ergo, Mighytboosh can't trust his own perceptions.

Since you can't trust your own perceptions, you not only shouldn't be convinced by his experience, you shouldn't be convinced by any of your own experiences either. Further, since we earlier established that "Mightyboosh can't trust his own perceptions" (see above), we can conclude that Mightyboosh can't even trust his perceptions that are informing him that he is engaging a poster on the 2+2 Forum.

Well, since we earlier established that Mightyboosh can't trust his own perceptions, we can safely conclude that Mightyboosh is a nihilist, since he can't trust anyone's perceptions, including his own.

Correct, and I don't.


lol, I don't take it this far because it's not useful to do so, but I always seek external methods of verification, studies, a reputable authority source, or more than one, something that can back up what my own perceptions are telling me such that I can consider that I have 'good reasons' to believe something.

I don't have any positions that are informed solely by my own personal experiences. Not ones I'd argue, anyway. I certainly would never base a belief in a universe-creating, all-powerful deity on something that I personally experienced (especially whilst on drugs). As trite as the 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is, there is some truth to that.

Nope.

It's ironic that I consider science to be the best method we have currently for the acquisition and interpretation of knowledge, but it's based on empiricism, which is basically what we can perceive with our senses, and we can't trust our perceptions, so an empirical ideal is impossible to achieve.

But... science is still a huge improvement on beliefs we hold simply because we want to...

Since you can't trust your own perceptions, then you can't trust your perceptions about external methods of verification, studies, a reputable authority source, or anything else you might add to the list. If you can't trust your own perceptions, then you can't have a "good reason" for anything.

If you don't trust your perceptions, then you shouldn't believe anything that requires the reliability of your perceptions.

That's a pretty extraordinary claim you just made there. What's your extraordinary evidence for it?


It's not ironic....it's literally self-contradictory! "Empricism is based on what we can perceive with our senses... which we can't trust."

If we can't trust our senses, it isn't an improvement at all.

Sure, I could be a brain in a vat imagining all of this or being fed it by an external source that's manipulating me, etc etc etc... I have no answer to that, because there isn't one. It's also not useful for making sense of what we think is real to say 'you can never know what's real'. It's just a pointless rabbit hole that doesn't prove that anything is real or not real.

What I can know is true though is that we can't trust our perceptions, they regularly throw up easily identifiable errors. The cognitive mechanisms for this are known and easily understandable, cognitive biases have a survival advantage so it's easy to understand how we evolved them.

And given that we know we can't trust our cognitive processes, we engage in methods to check our reasoning (or we should), we use logic to test our deductions, to try to ensure that we don't hold false beliefs.

What do you do to ensure that you don't hold false beliefs? Or is that not important to you? I'm aware that there are many reasons for holding beliefs and them actually being true might not be one of them

You can only know what's real if you can trust your perceptions.

If you can't trust your perceptions, how do you know they are "identifiable?" How do you identify them? Obviously not with your perceptions, since you've said several times they can't be trusted.
You can't know any of that if you can't trust your perceptions.

How do we know that our methods are valid if we can't trust our perceptions? How do we determine which of our methods are valid and which are not? Obviously not with our perceptions, since we can't trust them (or so you've asserted about five times).

That's, as they so, a short question with a long answer. What can I know? is the question that Epistemology deals with.

For now, I'll give a short answer which I will expand on later since its getting late here (3:55 am):

Without having all knowledge, something you don't know could contradict what you think you know. In order to know anything, you would have to know everything, OR have revelation from someone who does. Only God knows everything.

The above quote is from a tract by Sye ten Bruggencate. It's kind of a short version of what is sometimes called Revelatory Epistemology. Will expand on that later.

It is impossible to believe something that you do not also believe is true. (That's what belief means.) It would be nonsensical to say , "I believe that capitol of California is Fresno even though I think that Fresno is not the capitol of California.

It’s 2+2. I figured there’d be blowback. I’m trying to help here. Remember when I said I deal with lots of slander and defamation? Forum robots are lol this rolls off my back.

Anyways I’ll try to summarize. You cannot explain God with logic. I tried to be as logical as possible. If you got shoulder tapped after a prayer and then googled it and found a bunch of similar testimony, perhaps it would lead you in the direction of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

This.

If you Target now believe and it makes your life seem better, good for you.

OP is the one that came here, almost every reply is from an rgt regular. At least we are treating OP like an adult, whereas you are treating them like a child.

If OP is a thoughtful adult, they should welcome criticism of their claims. If OP is not a thoughtful adult, and is just here to proselytize, they will ignore the criticism, making the thread completely self serving and so deserving of ridicule.

PS I guarantee that theists and atheists alike think their claims are shallow.

It would be this simple if we were singular and if there were no cost to truth, but that is not the case. The default is for the aspect of self which has access to truth to be asleep. That is the default because the truth is painful.

The aspect of self which has access to truth goes to sleep out of compassion for the lower part of our self which has to bear the brunt of the pain. Not only that, but the truth seeking self distorts itself so as to deceive itself and conspires with the lower parts of self all in the name of compassion and sympathy.

Because of this, to seek truth means to betray yourself in a sense. You have to both be willing to betray and willing to feel the pain of betrayal. If not, then our beliefs will be influenced more by the lower part of self that is motivated by short term pain and pleasure.

Real question here: how did you come to the conclusion that the shoulder tap was from the Christian god? Couldn't it have been Allah, Shiva, Krishna, Odin, Zeus or any of a thousand other gods?