Three people can see the same truth and interpret it in three different ways. Preconceptions can cloud judgement. Things can have the illusion of being what they are not. People can be deceived, people can lie. People can project onto experiences that which is not there. Some people have agendas. Some people want to be the center of attention and so they make more of an experience than what it really was.
Some Christians take everything in the bible literally because that’s all they have ever known, and so they reject evolution just because of that, no-matter how much evidence is available…forget the fact that the church said it’s okay to agree with natural evolution. Most Christians think a good God would burn people in a literal lake of fire as just punishment for unrepented sin, and i would disagree with that for logical reasons, but because a saint had a vision of fire or because they see lake of fire written in the bible, nothing i say matters. Forget that it’s not even dogma. Even if i have provided irrefutable reasons for thinking that such a view is problematic, i’m the one that’s wrong…It doesn’t even matter that i also believe in hell, just not their version of it.
Atheist philosophers know that goal-direction exists in the physical world and that things consistently function for a specific purpose in relation to a greater whole.of which they are a part (most notably our own brains), and that some experiences we have evidently have intelligible and meaningful ends like the desire to survive; and yet they feel compelled to reduce everything to a non-teleological natural explanation even though it makes no logical or intelligible sense of what we experience. And we are both looking at the same evidence. But apparently they are the more reasonable ones because all they see is physical objects.
Clearly I’m a bit off topic, but the point is there is contradicting experiences and contradicting interpretations all over the place with just normal everyday experiences let alone in the topic of religious experiences. I think this is one of those questions where you either assume everybody is wrong, or accept that at least one person is right. I dare say that the correct answer is the one that makes the best rational sense of reality. Someone having a private revelation and wanting to share it with everyone is fine, but we are ultimately left at the mercy of that persons interpretation, and then it’s a question of whether you trust that person to reveal something as it truly is, and even if the person is not insane there is still a qeustion of whether or not that vision is merely symbolic of a higher truth or literally the actual truth.as it really is…
I am not saying we should never take something on faith or trust, but we should also try to make rational sense of these things so we don’t get led down the garden path…
