ipa68

well, thank you, Jobar!

emur

Luvluv,

You mentioned being an apologist one day. Will you be one for theism in general or for any particular God?

As stated above, your experiences are not unique to Christianity or to any religion for that matter. They in no way validate doctrine or religious specific practices. Every group from legalistic baptists to tongues speaking charismatics to Hindus to astrologers have such experiences. If your experiences are indeed divine, they argue only for an interventionist God, and not for any particular God.

Mel

luvluv

Family Man:

First, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate the respect you've shown my beliefs.

I have a few problems with this statement. One, from what I know of the self-fullfiling prophecy phenomenon, my experiences do not neatly fit into the category. I understand your incredulity regarding the notion that I did not expect to hear God speak to me, but it is the truth. It's true that I didn't actively believe that God speaking to me was impossible. I probably thought it was possible God would speak to someone who was important or who was in dire circumstances. I just didn't think God would find it necessary to speak to me.

Also, speak is probably the wrong word. I've only on very rare occasions thought that God was speaking to me in words. Other times, it was felt impressions. I only claim that God speaks three messages to me with any regularity: "Do that", "Don't do that", "I'm here". These are the same basic messages a parent sends to any child, and these are the same basic messages that God sends to His children.

I think that you will find the same thing to be true if you took a hundred Christians who were converted in their adulthood and asked them the main ways in which God communicates with them. Most Christians I know report of having their conscious awakened after conversion, and finding that they can no longer enjoy certain shall we say "less than Christian" activities without feeling a strong sense of conviction. I've heard it described as like one of those "AAAANNNT!" buzzers that go off on game shows when you give the wrong answer. I think that is close, but I've also felt a profound sense of prolonged just badness when I do certain things. To be frank, the first time I believe God communicated with me for me to know it was in His telling me not to do something.

This is another reason why I do not believe it fits the profile of the self-fullfiling prophecy. Even if it is true that I expect God to talk to me, I DID NOT EXPECT Him to tell me the things He told me. The things He told me not to do were very often things I had been lead to believe He didn't mind me doing, and vice versa. The most profound event of God's communication that has ever occured in my life involved Him telling me not to do what I believed He had been preparing me to do my whole life. I fought God over it for nearly 6 months. I finally relented, but not without some extremely harsh words in his direction and basically neglecting totally to speak with Him or have anything to do with Him for nearly a year. I said my prayer before I went to bed, I still believed in Him, but I was piping hot mad at Him. I wrote a lot of fiction which, looking back on it now, betrayed an extreme distrust of God and everything He promised.

One day maybe I'll give you the long version of this story, but suffice it to say that looking back on the opportunity God directed me not to pursue, I can honestly say that He was absolutely right. There was much opportunity for money and fame in what I turned down, but the project was against everything I believed in morally. I couldn't have brought my mother to see any of the work I was doing. God has since given me other projects which I like more, which are more in line with what I believe as a Christian and as a morally awake human being. I can honestly say that I would rather have what I have now than what I thought I wanted.

So, here is our bone of contention, Family Man. According to Clifford's rule of evidence, you have no right to ascribe my case to the category of "self-fullfilling prophecy" until you have sufficient evidence to do so. You are well within your epistemic rights to doubt my story, but to make the truth claim: "luvluv's beliefs are the result of self-fulfilling prophecy" you have to resort to your own personal faith (or negative faith).

You don't need evidence to doubt my claim, but you do need evidence to diagnose it, categorize it, or believe that it is false as a matter of fact. Otherwise, you are exercising faith in the same manner in which the theist exercises it, only in a negative fashion.

Without evidence, the statements:

I believe it to be true.

and

I believe it to be false.

Are epistemically equal. Both require evidence. So if you are asserting of my truth claim: "God talks to me" that you believe it to be false, you must provide evidence. Particularly if you are going as far as Jobar and diagnosing me, you certainly must provide evidence. You quite obviously don't have evidence about me, and you haven't even demonstrated any evidence from the reports of other Christians from which you might make an inference to my particular claim.

If you have investigated the ACTUAL, SPECIFIC claims of other Christians and have found from the qualified opinion of psychologists to have been the result of the self-fullfiling prophecy, then you would have some grounds on which to make your inference. But if you are making an inference simply from the fact that you disbelieve other similar reports, that would be invalid.

The argument..

1) I believe other supernatural claims to be the result of the self-fullfiling prophecy.

2) luvluv made a supernatural claim.

3) Therefore, luvlulv's claim is the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

...is not sound. You have not established that your belief as regards your first premise to be a TRUE belief. Therefore the inference is invalid.

That's sort of backwards, isn't it?

Suppose I said "Unless you can prove to me that you're belief that I am suffering from a self-fulfilling prophecy is not a self-fullfiling prophecy (of yours), than I can be can't be confident that you are diagnosing me properly"?

I have every bit as much right to say this as you do. In honesty, Family Man, I've found you to be at least slightly hostile to the idea of God. It is therefore no surprise to me that you would be much more willing to believe that anyone who claims to have experienced God is somehow deluded than to believe that what they are reporting is true. Is this a stereotype of your position? Of course. Is your position that I want to believe in God so desperately that I would manufacture my own evidence a stereotype? You betcha. So that gets us kind of nowhere, doesn't it?

If we both held to Clifford's rule of evidence, my good sir, we would both have to withhold judgement on each of our statements. You would be more than justified in doubting my story, but that is as far as you could go if you truly base your beliefs on evidence. (Unless you wanted to investigate me or something, but that might get awkward). And I can doubt your openness to accept any answer other than the one which would support God's existence, but I can't claim to know this is the case honestly. (And I wouldn't believe that of you, anyhow.)

luvluv

cricket:

I don't know what it DOES mean, but I know it could mean lots of things.

It could mean that God is trying to get your attention through extraordinary circumstances.

It might mean that God is trying to shake your belief in absolute materialism.

It might mean that Jung was right.

I'm simply saying that to make the positive truth claim: "This means nothing" is to make a faith statement. You don't know that it means nothing, but inasmuch as meaninglessness is a window through which you view the world, you may see things as meaningless which do have meaning.

ipa68:

Well, you certainly couldn't conclude from such evidence that there was NO god. I said before that I think answered prayers are the worst form of religious experience upon which to base belief. God is not obligated to answer any of our prayers, even if He exists, so the fact that He answers some and does not answer others is not proof that He does not exist. It's only proof that He's not our servant.

There really isn't anything in the Bible (that I know of) which suggests that God will only answer the prayers of Christians. I think Christ makes the claim that it is only through Him that we will be saved, but I don't think that means that God cannot answer the prayers of people of other faiths. I can think of many good reasons why He would. (This is perhaps a conversation for another thread?)

It could mean that the ba'hai religion is correct. It states that there is one God but He manifests Himself in different ways to different people. I personally doubt this, but the fact that people of different faiths all have DEEP beliefs that they directly perceive or experience God is CERTAINLY not proof of atheism. It's better proof of polytheism.

I'm convinced that you can. It is not gullibility which enables you to think that there may be things bigger than you which you do not understand, it is humility.

Scottyman:

There have been times when I thought that the things which God were asking me to do were a bit excessive, so I did keep a track like this in my head for a while. God actually came out pretty well, but I was getting some false positives I think. That, also, is not unpredictable within the Christian worldview (we do not claim that God is the only spiritual being capable of directly communicating with us, though that's probably another whole bag of worms I didn't want to get into on this thread).

Ultimately though, I think it is useless. It falls under the SOA argument. How do I know, for every direction that God gives to me, that some SOA obtains which is better than the SOA that would have manifested if I had not done so? As a Christian, I have no grounds for believing that everything that God tells me to do is for my direct benefit. How do I know, if God tells me to wait half an hour before going to the store, that He is not thereby preventing a fatal car accident? There's really no way for direct experimentation of any kind to falsify the kind of religious experiences I am claiming given the SOA (state of affairs) argument.

emur:

Well, I like to think I am at least an amateur apologist now! I would be one for the Christian God.

Yes, the specific argument of religious experience is not really one that can work only for the Christian (though in my view various religious experiences are not all that problematic for the Christian worldview). I would probably never use any argument from religious experience except as a justification of my own faith. I am just defending their veracity, not claiming that others should believe on the basis of them. As I said I think the main point of them is to help the person who already believes. I've got other arguments to use for attempting to persuade people.

Ivo

This was posted a while back by Ockhamite:

Has anyone read "Healing Words" by Larry Dossey. Apparently, there is empirical proof of the efficacy of prayer, and it's the best-kept secret in science.

It's a while since I read it, but as I recall the conclusion seems to be that prayer is only effective 20% of the time, and it doesn't seem to matter to which God or God's you pray.

Mind you, having read it I remain agnostic.

Biff the unclean

Luvluv I can't help but notice the number of times the word "humility" comes up in your posts. And the importance you set in there being "something greater" than you. So I take it the meaning you are attributing to the word is humbleness, modest, lowly

I can't help but recall my boyhood in Cork, Ireland where all we boys and girls were set in rock hard pews and the Arch Bishop came to say mass for us. He walked past the carved marble altar and climbed to the ornate mahogany pulpit carrying his gold crook and wearing white satin and a bishops crown. When he got to the top a spot light reflected off his jewels causing all of us to squink and squirm where we knelt. He spoke through a PA system so his words echoed from the raftered ceiling. When we were allowed to get off of our knees and sit His Holiness gave us a lecture on how important it was for us to have humility.

Humility is not a virtue it is a failing. It is what seperates the sheep from the shepherd, the serf from the free man.

luvluv

Biff:

Then what is your problem with your Arch Bishop?

Humility is a virtue. Humility is not having a low opinion of yourself it is trying to maintain an objective view about yourself. I do not underestimate my abilities, I am confident in them. I am also confident in the abilities of others, and I am realistic about mankind's abilities as a whole. I know I am something special, but then again so is everybody else. I also know that we aren't much in comparison with the universe, not even collectively, and certainly not as individuals.

Humility is a virtue, inasmuch as people who do not have it do not have very good relationships with others. Do you like being around people who think that they are smarter than everyone else? Or better looking?

The opposite of humility is pride. Pride is comparative. A prideful person is not one who thinks he is beautiful. Humble people can believe this about themselves. But a prideful person thinks they are better looking than anyone else. A prideful person is not one who thinks he is smart. But one who thinks he is the smartest. Pride is a matter of comparing yourself to everyone else constantly, and of finding yourself coming up on top in all the comparisons (even when an impartial observer would say you do not). A humble peson is realisitic about his gifts and his faults, his strengths and his weaknesses, and he doesn't think they make him any better or any worse or any more valuable than anyone with a different set of strenghts and weaknesses. He doesn't think that he can make judgements that are outside of his ability to make. He doesn't claim to know things he can't possibly know.

He doesn't say things like "I know there isn't a God." Or "You have to be gullible to believe in God." He believes that it is likely that other people are as capable of interpreting their experiences as he is of evaluating his own. Therefore, even if he believes them to be ultimately mistaken, he doesn't claim to know this as a fact.

Hope this helps.

Biff the unclean

So the humble person is the person who doesn't tell you that you are spouting a lot of baloney, then.

Okay...

So whatchadoin at a place called Internet Infidels ranting on about God then?

luvluv

I don't understand the question.

Clutch

Do you believe that the email offers of massive returns on small investments are genuine good-faith offers of a business opportunities? No? Present the evidence that you have collected to this effect for each kind of email offer. Oops! You haven't amassed any such evidence? Then I guess your beliefs are unwarranted...

Look, of course I think your view is wrong, me being an atheist and all. But that's simply beside the point, which is whether your personal experience is evidence for your view, whether right or wrong. I have listed a range of factors known to render personal assessments of event-significance thoroughly unreliable. If you insist that you personally keep track of potentially falsifying events as well as apparently confirmatory ones; that you carefully note and take account of regression effects; that your perceptual and evaluational faculties are not tweaked by top-down cognitive nor motivational effects... then fine. That would make you the one in a million. But of course, from my perspective, it is by definition more probable that you're one of the other 999, 999 -- and unaware of it.