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To: betty boop
But Patrick, you continue to evade the very point I'm trying to make. The revelation, the "spiritual nature," is trying to tell you about the very shape of nature itself, of the Universe.

I'm not evading the point. I just don't get it. Perhaps the problem is that I've never received a revelation, so I have no experience of such matters. That severely limits my ability to see what you see. All that I have to go on is what people tell me, and that's not the same thing as personally experiencing what they experience.

131 posted on 04/06/2005 7:43:11 PM PDT by PatrickHenry (<-- Click on my name. The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: Alamo-Girl
A fine evening to you, A-G! You don't want much here; just that we recreate the entire body of the field of epistemology within the confines of an FR thread. Great heavens - I have a shelf of books on the topic and it's nowhere near enough.

I take my guidance here from Kurt Godel - within each logical system, and what we are describing here is largely that - within each system of sufficient power a statement may be made that is true and yet unprovable. This being the case, any attempt to describe "knowledge" categorically is doomed to fail in the face of knowledge that may not be reached through the strictures of the logical system through which it is described.

Another way of saying this is that while God may be unlimited in this fashion, human knowledge is not only limited but provably so. That need not be a cause of frustration - the bounds are as wide as the world and within them we may operate to the limits of the very formidable tools we have been blessed with. But it is a call for intellectual humility. And to me at least it is a hint that the limits are there to remind us of that.

136 posted on 04/06/2005 7:54:13 PM PDT by Billthedrill
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To: PatrickHenry

It is difficult to see how revelations can lead to anything but conflict. If two people to have conflicting revelations, how does one choose which (if either) is "correct"? If one chooses, then the choice method is a superior method of gaining knowledge than the revelations because it can refute one or both.

In practice, we always make this type of judgement. Joan of Arc had (or claimed to have) a relevation that led her to slaughter a bunch of Englishmen; Andrea Yates had (or claimed to have) a relevation that led her to drown her kids. Both were treated (by history if not by the clergy, in Joan's case) as if they acted on their own.


331 posted on 04/07/2005 1:49:48 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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