+Liquid Gardens Posted August 29, 2019 #351 Share Posted August 29, 2019 15 hours ago, Will Due said: At least the knowledge of having had a true spiritual experience is free of it being someone else's dogma. True, but the problem with dogma isn't where it comes from, it's that it's dogma. As soon as you accept someone else's dogma as your own it isn't really someone else's anymore, it's yours, so there isn't much difference. 15 hours ago, Will Due said: May I ask, who do you ascribe the knowledge of your personal experiences to? It's not simply a 'who' for me, and I don't assume that my memory of my personal experiences, which is all I ever really have outside of what I'm doing right this exact second, are flawless. Thus I hesitate to always refer to all of my personal experience as 'knowledge'. What I do claim is that if I make a claim of something I 'know' is true, my claim will reference things that have already been shown to exist. If you've read much of Walker you'll see him attempt to handwave past or ignore this distinction; he likes to compare challenges to him of 'show that you have had encounters with angels' to 'show that you really had pancakes for breakfast this morning', and since most people can't prove what they had for breakfast readily, he acts as if his angel claim is just the same. That is obviously not the case. To show that he had an encounter with an angel he has to show two things: angels exist and that he encountered one. For the counter claim, we don't have to show that pancakes and breakfast exist, just that I 'encountered' them for breakfast. That is not an irrelevant difference, there's a logical reason why "I have a pet housecat" and "I have a pet Cerberus" are not equivalent claims. 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Will Due Posted August 29, 2019 #352 Share Posted August 29, 2019 (edited) 15 minutes ago, Liquid Gardens said: True, but the problem with dogma isn't where it comes from, it's that it's dogma. As soon as you accept someone else's dogma as your own it isn't really someone else's anymore, it's yours, so there isn't much difference. It's not simply a 'who' for me, and I don't assume that my memory of my personal experiences, which is all I ever really have outside of what I'm doing right this exact second, are flawless. Thus I hesitate to always refer to all of my personal experience as 'knowledge'. What I do claim is that if I make a claim of something I 'know' is true, my claim will reference things that have already been shown to exist. If you've read much of Walker you'll see him attempt to handwave past or ignore this distinction; he likes to compare challenges to him of 'show that you have had encounters with angels' to 'show that you really had pancakes for breakfast this morning', and since most people can't prove what they had for breakfast readily, he acts as if his angel claim is just the same. That is obviously not the case. To show that he had an encounter with an angel he has to show two things: angels exist and that he encountered one. For the counter claim, we don't have to show that pancakes and breakfast exist, just that I 'encountered' them for breakfast. That is not an irrelevant difference, there's a logical reason why "I have a pet housecat" and "I have a pet Cerberus" are not equivalent claims. I will address this, probably later today because I'm at work right now but first, do you believe that thinking (by itself) is an experience? Edited August 29, 2019 by Will Due Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kismit Posted August 29, 2019 #353 Share Posted August 29, 2019 7 hours ago, joc said: Just sayin' Thank you 1 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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