wordy

gurugeorge, I hope I don'y mislead you but I guess you would love to a text that Sam Harris wrote to Bhuddists? I don't remember link but he most likely has it on his homepage and forum or if he hasn't then his fans has it in the forum. Just ask them.

In that text he has very much same arguments that you have here above.

He wants us to have these experiences but to not create religions around them.

He coins this view "Rational Mysticism". I don't support it cause from my point of view it is too positive to claims they make in relation to these experiences.

I don't mind to have experiences or to do meditations or rituals or read poetry or sing and dance and play music that makes us enthusiastic or extatic even.

What I don't support is the extra-ordinary claims that one see reality as it is.

Only science has the means to make descriptions that are probable and likely. Our human interpretations from our own experiences are only wild guesses.

Chili

Not if you read Aristotle's "Posterior Analytics"
http://graduate.gradsch.uga.edu/arch...(analytic).txt

Here is the part you are looking for:

"further, no other kind of thought except intuition is more accurate than scientific knowledge, whereas primary premisses are more knowable than demonstrations, and all scientific knowledge is discursive. From these considerations it follows that there will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premisses, and since except intuition nothing can be truer than
scientific knowledge, it will be intuition that apprehends the primary
premisses-a result which also follows from the fact that demonstration
cannot be the originative source of demonstration, nor,
consequently, scientific knowledge of scientific knowledge. If,
therefore, it is the only other kind of true thinking except
scientific knowing, intuition will be the originative source of
scientific knowledge. And the originative source of science grasps the
original basic premiss, while science as a whole is similarly
related as originative source to the whole body of fact.


-THE END-

spamandham

I have no idea if there was a historical figure intertwined in the Biblical Jesus character or not. But, my assumption is that if there was such a figure, he was human, with no magic powers, no resurrection etc. I suspect John the Baptist, the Essene TOR, or possibly even Paul, are the historical "Jesus", though it's certainly possible a member of the sect of Nazoreans was the HJ.

If he existed at all, I do not believe he was the son of a god for the simple reason I do not believe in gods. Do you believe the stories of Vishnu? Of course you don't. For the same reasons you likely reject over 2000 known gods, I reject yours (if you have one).

spamandham

Would the same be true for all these purported gods as well?

http://www.godchecker.com/

gurugeorge

I don't think the "visionary" side of religious experience gives any truths, except in the sense I mentioned - that it's another way of delivering truths from the mind. In that sense, the utterances of these "entities" seen in visions (what they say, their laws, etc.) are just another form of creative thinking, like artistic creation (e.g. the creation of a story in literature), just a product of the mind, only it comes out in an unusual way (i.e. in a roundabout way through this odd mechanism, this ability the brain has to produce these kinds of visions).

The propositions produced in these visions may or may not be true, like any other product of the mind - they have to be tested against reality. (So "god" X tells you the world is composed of a round plate sitting on turtles all the way down? Test it.)

But I do think mystical experience strictly speaking (the kind of thing Buddhists talk about) does produce an experience of metaphysical truths that are absolute, mainly because they are tautologies (i.e. what is, is; everything exists; "the Universe is a Great Big Thing", as William James amusingly put it). These kinds of truths are incredibly simple, but being tautologies, they have the virtue of being necessarily true. It's just that in our habitual frame of mind we don't really take in or notice their truth.

i.e. what you see in non-dual experience is the truth that you are the Universe. No way of getting around it. There's nothing else here, no "you" that could possibly be opposed to all that is. Only you don't normally notice it or think of it. You think you are "wordy", a limited human being.

Of course people with different philosophies and cultures put it in different ways (the above is a Western, scientific way of putting it) - e.g. in terms of "God", "Absolute", or in Idealist philosophical terms - but it's the same experience of tautology, and it holds no matter what the composition of "you" or "the Universe" (God, Absolute, Mind, etc.).

This experience can be seen in some Christian literature (mostly in some Paul, some GThomas, some Gnosticism, pseudo-Dionysus). But the "visionary" stuff seems much more prevalent (also in Paul, Gnostics, pseudo-Dionysus).

mountainman

Have you read much about Shiva?

Condraz23

Hi SaguaroJen. I just used it as common parlance, similar to the way most people would refer to the supreme godhead of Hinduism as "Hare Krishna".

Aa5874, I think Christianity was once an obscure Jewish sect.

Selsaral

This is where I start on this issue. God, the creator of the universe wants to communicate with us, and all we are left with is the bible? Either God doesn't want to communicate with us, or was deliberately ineffective at communicating. Only humans trying to get other humans to believe that God told them to tell us stuff (usually for their own personal benefit) would communicate in this way.

Also, there's a historical core to all sorts of absurd mythical beings like Santa Claus. The historical core to Santa Claus if I remember correctly was an ancient Turkish religious figure. But that doesn't help us at all with the modern conception of Santa Claus.

spamandham

If you did not have a priori knowledge about the origin of Santa, but instead had only the myths to work from, would you deduce that the historical Santa was some ancient Turkish religious figure? I seriously doubt it.

On the few cases we do have of highly legendary figures for which actual history is known independently (like Santa), the process of peeling away the exceptional and declaring whatever is left to be the most probable historical figure, fails to give us anything even remotely resembling the real historical figure.

I don't understand how reputable scholars can apply such a technique to Jesus. Can anyone explain why it's deemed a valid approach?

By the way, I did not mean to imply you consider the technique valid for Jesus. Your post just got me thinking about the issue.

mountainman

I'll put forward an hypothesis spamandham. There are two separate
fields in academia, one called "Ancient History" and one called
"Biblical History". Both disciplines are funded, the latter quite
substantially. The relationship between the two disciplines
needs to be highlighted.

Reputable scholars in the field of ancient history would not be
drawn in to apply such a technique to an author of antiquity
for which little if any evidence (acceptable to Ancient History)
of their existence is available.

OTOH, "reputable" scholars in the field of "Biblical History" are
not following the same criteria as that used in Ancient History,
and until perhaps 100 years ago, the existence of an historical
Jesus was some form of "unexamined postulate" in the field of
Biblical History. They start with such a postulate, for better
or for worse, because of the tradition to do so.

Hence the different criteria for "validation". The only "validation"
incorporated into "Biblical History" is the unequivocable acceptance
of the authority of the "church fathers".

It should be noted that originally the term "fathers" was used
by Athanasius, and Basil of Caesarea with reference to the bishops
of the Council of Nicaea. [RM Grant, 'The Appeal to the Early
Fathers, 1960].

Read the above sentence a second time before proceeding.

It was Basil who extended the term to refer to the ante-Nicene
writers as well, including Irenaeus (Hello a3487), Clement of
Rome and Origen. Basil was one of the first to provide a list
of patristic authorities in support of theological argument.

The Ecclesiastical "Canon of Truth" was then developed by
the Alexandrian Bishop Cyril. For him the fathers write "under
the guidance of the Holy Spirit" and are therefore unimpeachable
sources of truth when disputes arise.

Hence the basis of Biblical History is authoritarian, whereas the
basis of Ancient History involves relational considerations of a
far greater scope, with no default "truth" published for
comparison.

I should no longer have to point out that the entire corpus
of prenicene "Biblical History" was tendered by one single
author in the fourth century. Hello Occam.