rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Professor Wagstaff) (02/20/85)
> Well, since everyone is answering this question publicly I will too. > There is only one reason and ONE REASON ONLY to believe in Jesus. > I have met Him and talked to Him and experienced HIM in my life. > Each person must have this experience for themselves to become a > christian and to believe. Now obviously I had to have some amount > of faith to seek to meet Him. [KAREN] It's somewhat ironic that "Karen alias larryg" chose to respond to *my* article on Merrill's answer to the original question. Especially since she fails to address (and, in fact, deliberately ignores) every point I made in my article. Where I analyze Merrill's statement in terms of belief stemming from assumption of the existence of god first and analysis later, Karen not only fails to address this but also deliberately does exactly what I claim that religious believers are doing without reference to my own statements. Where I mention the problems of subjective human experience and the inaccuracies therein, she literally revels in it, claiming such subjectivity as the very source of her "evidence". This is what I mean by the round robin argument technique. Any number of people join in in a discussion. Those on the non-religion side of the discussion make a number of points showing the fallacies in subjective "evidence", assumption before analysis, etc. As if to say "I don't care about anything any of you have said", someone out of the blue retorts with a response (usually either a lengthy "rigorous proof" or a short and sweet note) that simply re-asserts the claims that had already been overdiscussed (and shown to be quite non-evidential) as the reasons for their belief. It's like you spend a week discussing something with another person who claims some unusual mathematical principle based on his reasoning that 2 + 2 = 5, you describe why 2 + 2 *isn't* 5, only to hear at the end of the week "Wait, as long as you believe 2 + 2 = 5, then I'm right...". > Just like one would if you have heard about President Reagan or > Jeff Sargeant or Rich Rosen. I would set off on my journey to meet > them based on faith. When I would finally meet them (if they really > existed) then I would KNOW them. > Everything else outside of _e_x_p_e_r_i_e_n_t_i_a_l _k_n_o_w_l_e_d_g_e is falling short > of a true relationship with God and obviously will not stand up to attack. There's a very big difference between subjective experience and actual knowledge, and simply juxtaposing the two words to form something that for the circumstances you describe approaches oxymoron-hood does not work. > Do you assume that your mother exists therefore her existance is > based on your assumption? No, she exists, period. How do you know that? Since one isn't capable of observation and analysis at birth (at least not enough so to retain and catalog observational information), one is simply told that it is so. In fact, as Mike Huybensz (?) mentioned, adopted children may accept this information on faith where it actually isn't true. The woman that they are told is their mother is not. More importantly, human beings all have mothers, so one is not making an assumption when one seeks one's mother---you should (under normal circumstances) have a mother. *Should* "we" have a god? Why? Because all human beings have a mother? It doesn't follow. In contrast to saying "she exists, period" based on verifiable observation, one can only say "it exists, period" (in reference to a deity) based on presumption, since there's no evidential reason to do so. I had mentioned to someone in net.religion.jewish, after Karen went on some sort of evangelistic mini-crusade there, that I recalled that she mentioned that she was a Jew who converted to Christianity, and that *she* was convinced, and thus was trying to convince others. This person responded that she in fact sounded quite UNconvinced, and perhaps that her attempt to convince others was also an attempt to convince herself. It's beginning to sound that way. -- Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts. Rich Rosen ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr