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Ooh! Coming straight out of the gate with the whip going already! 🤣
I don't get into that fight on here because I generally like you guys and it's not going anywhere. The STEM people are convinced that Science Explains It All, us religious types have been in this fight once too often before, and we end up talking past each other. There's not much room for debate when one side lays out "yeah but just because you felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, that is more easily explained by [launch into neurochemistry, neurobiology, and psychology explanation]" as their standard of proof. I mean, I've had the "St Paul was an epileptic, ackshully, which is why he fell off his horse and hallucinated Jeebus was talking to him" stuff already, I don't need more of it.
As I said, I like you guys and getting into what is sure to degenerate into name-calling and mutual insulting of intelligence and sanity isn't fruitful. There are lots of better theologians, philosophers, and apologists out there online. I'd prefer to keep my powder dry for the really important fights to come (like the third season of Rings of Power, dropping upon us like Fat Man on Nagasaki in November this year).
You seem to be attacking straw New Atheists who mostly aren't actually here.
I have a lot of reasons to disbelieve in a Holy Spirit even while believing you and my mother are sincere (and not crazy) when you claim to have experienced it. I don't need a "scientific" explanation to debunk every single supposed miracle in the Bible. I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.
Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.
Feck it, and I said I wouldn't get into an argument.
But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.
I do accept that, but I think some people are very uncomfortable with the idea that one can be both, not either/or. A kind of Unitarian Universalist 'religious/spiritual' nice polite makes no demands of belief that will contradict Science Says? That's fine, but keep it in your pants, buster, when it comes to making real-world decisions.
Remember the furore over Francis Collins being an Evangelical and leader of the Human Genome Project, then director of the National Institutes for Health? Sam Harris remembers, as does P.Z. Myers:
Cool Buddhism-derived meditation for me, but not Bible-bashing literalism for thee:
Science doesn't "tell us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen." Science provides a methodology that tests the nature of observable reality.
If you tell me there is a God that exists that is outside any means of testing his existence, and you have spiritual experiences that no one who is not you can verify, science doesn't, strictly speaking, say "That's not real." It says "There is no way to verify that."
People can of course choose to believe in things that cannot be verified. I imagine if I had a spiritual experience that I was convinced was real, I would believe it was real regardless of whether it could be detected by anyone else.
Since I don't, however, and since such experiences fall outside anything explainable with what we know about the universe using observable and testable criteria, you can get offended that I disbelieve, but why should I believe?
I'm not saying you should believe. I'm saying people treat it not as "science says it's not verifiable" but "science says it's not real". And you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that".
Why should 'observable and testable criteria' be limited to what we currently have in our toolbox? This is the same "love is only oxytocin" reasoning that gets us tangled up in the same kinds of arguments about what is real/actual and why then it degenerates into "all that romance crap is stupid, Valentine's Day is only commercial opportunity, you don't love that woman, it's evolution acting on you to fuck her to spread your genes nothing more and certainly nothing special" kind of fighting.
I'm not offended, I'm just tired of the fight.
I'm not trying to fight! But what am I supposed to say to 'you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that"?
Let's say you say you saw an angel. I can:
It seems only (1) will not offend you. Problem: I don't believe in angels. You cannot convince me angels exist. What do you want from a non-believer that doesn't get your back up?
Love is at least a relatable experience. And we know humans experience emotions because even sociopaths do. Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.
Sure, but two out of your three options are based on "angels not real" and that's the position you're starting from, so we have nothing to discuss. This is not like "which recipe for roast chicken is best, let's test these three out", it's "there is no such thing as a chicken but I'll be nice and pretend I believe you can cook an imaginary bird".
Again, it's not about offence. It's about this is not an impartial, let's start from positions of neutrality so neither of us hold a strong opinion pro or con the premise "is the supernatural real?" exchange. You don't believe it is, I do believe it is, we're not having a good faith discussion of "we don't know for sure so let's lay out the arguments and see what gives us that delicious flavour of crispy skin and moist meatiness".
EDIT: Imagine that I respond to you with "uh-huh, now I'm not trying to trigger your over-sensitive, fragile little ego here, but come on now, how can you expect me to believe there are no angels? I can give you three options when you say you never saw an angel:
Do you think that is me being neutral on the topic of "do angels exist (the answer is self-evidently yes)"?
I am not sure where you got the idea I was claiming to be neutral on the existence of angels. I am not neutral. I do not believe in angels. Of course that is going to be my baseline.
So if we talk about angels and you tell me angels exist, what do you want me to say? The most respectful and charitable thing I can say is "I believe you believe." I mean, sure, I might be interested in why you believe. I would listen with what I think is an open mind. But open minded doesn't mean I'm starting with the premise that maybe they exist and maybe they don't. What else would you ask of me? I
I did not say anything like"I'm going to trigger your over-sensitive fragile little ego.' If you took that approach towards me, well, I'd assume you weren't really trying to discuss anything.
What I'm getting at is that discussions of this type, even on here, are not going anywhere except in circles. None of us are starting from the ideal scientific position of agnosticism until we have evaluated the empirical evidence.
So while OP can legitimately ask "believers, why do you believe?", we are not going to get any further than "so you are basing it on subjective experience", because either the philosophical and metaphysical explanations as to 'this is my chain of reasoning here' will be dismissed as irrelevant or even nonsense, or the whole 'okay yeah but Science' gets invoked as with you and "no way to verify it objectively".
Hence, "you say you saw an angel, well I believe you believe it was an angel" (but it was not so). Eyewitness evidence isn't, personal experience isn't enough, yet if I said I saw Joe Malone smashing the window of O'Malley's chemist shop and grabbing stuff out of it, I would not be interrogated on "well I believe you believe you saw that, but since you're basing this on nothing other than subjective feeling of signals your eyes sent to your brain, how can we ever know it was indeed Joe or that Joe was there?" grounds.
Some things are taken as a priori existing and possible, others dismissed as a priori impossible, and here we are back where we started.
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