Saturday, June 9, 2012

A Sense of the Divine...

"A sense of the divine" does not constitute proof of the existense of divine beings.

I have that sense myself.

I feel it as a sense of connectedness, this Alan Watts video tickles it in me.

Read William James or Sam Harris.

I had a good philosophy teacher: he taught me the informal fallacies and kicked me out the door with the admonition to ask questions and think.

One of those questions is that of epistemology: how do you know what you know?

That sense can just is also called the sense of the numinous;

2) a surpassing comprehension or understanding; mysterious." http://dictionary.reference.com/
It is far older than the thundering Levantine war king of Sinai.

The fact that you, I and maybe everyone else has that sense does not say anything about how you, I or anyone else learned what we think we know about it.

You also have a sense of sight, but how did you acquire knowledge about the things you see? You did not know what the objects you perceived were until you were taught either by experience or other people once you were capable of understanding them even on a pre-verbal level.

The fact that you have a sense of hearing does not tell you what a sound signifies or a word means; that is learned.

The fact you sense the numinous says nothing about the properties or nature of what that sense perceives.

How did you come to identify that perception with an eternal, personal, omnipotent, purposeful, conscious being?

It does not follow.

In the same way the idea that some people must rule others is learned, the idea that something must rule everything is learned.

Neither the state nor gods exist except as ideas in people's minds.

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