Reply #266: Ummm

[Stunster]

1. Lots of women, and some men, rarely or even never shave.

2. Most of the people in the world today are religious believers.

3. A great many religious believers believe that they experience God, in some way or other, on a frequent, or even a daily basis. Many of them claim indeed to communicate with God on a daily basis. Muslims, for example, pray five time a day, and my guess is that quite frequently they have an experientially rich sense of themselves as being in the presence of God.

4. A great many religious believers distinguish between ordinary experiences of God, and extraordinary ones.

5. All experiences, whether of God or of cutting yourself shaving or of anything else, involve interpretation by the experiencer.

Hence, there is a perfectly straightforward sense in which for many people, experience of God is more common, not to mention more significant for them, than is the experience of cutting themselves shaving.

As I said, it depends on your worldview, since that is the conceptual framework which determines how our experiences are to be interpreted. Different people have different worldviews, and hence different conceptual frameworks, and hence different interpretations. You, I imagine, have a conceptual framework that dictates that you interpret the experience of Muslims differently from the way they interpret it.

But all interpretation is internal to conceptual frameworks. Yours is to yours.

Different experiences can challenge our conceptual frameworks. St Paul reportedly had an experience that challenged his. Others have had experiences which have challenged theirs, including believers. But it's a two-way street.

All you're doing is begging the question in favor of a non-supernatural framework, which leads you to dismiss all reports of religious experiences as involving some kind of error. But there is a vast number of such experiences reported, and for all I know it may be a bigger number than the number of times people have cut themselves shaving.

And so I think that if there's a charge of 'utter bullshit' to be made, it's applicable to your ludicrous and question-begging conceptual imperialism.