This is an interesting reply. I’m focusing a bit on this:
In a way, I certainly experience such a compulsion for finding and sharing truth, and so I can’t not agree. Yet,
I think some of this is accurate, yet the absoluteness of your point seems dubious to me. My experience of finding shared understanding (ideally of god’s truth, even if the point of the truth being god’s is not of much direct significance/relevance) is in listening to others to hear their implicit framework, and use their understanding to find a connection to mine, then use their language to invite them there. Some limits are obviously that it can’t be forced, but also that when such invitation is accepted, it is only ever partial and one step at a time (as is my own understanding of things).
I’d be curious to hear how you think of my point so far, (despite that I feel I’m still missing something), since I think your reply could help enlighten what I might not yet see. And also, could you clarify what “the role of faith” means to you?
@jared123456 Your misunderstanding is in not realizing that sharing one’s experience is fundamentally different than sharing the things of God. When you are sharing your experience, you are sharing what is understood to be subjective to you as a being, it is unique to you. When you share the things of God, you are sharing something that is without yourself, and resides in objective reality.
You are the authority of your subjective experience, because it is your experience. You are not the the authority of the things of God, so when you endeaver to share the tings of God to someone else, you are limited by the rules of the language you are using, including rules derived by social constructs such as culture, subject, and various understood frames of reference.
(This reminds me of my point we arrived at in your previous thread on this topic, that point of the experience of non-individual-ness. Tangent aside…)
You say:
But, that is not representative of what I understand. And I’m not quite sure why you would say otherwise. I guess you probably tried to explain it in the rest of the comment, yet it is still not clear to me. When you can, could you make a quote or two from my comments, and use those to explain this point?
And briefly, to explain some of the difference in my understanding, from what you’ve misconstrued my understanding to be: one’s experience can enable an opportunity to learn some truth, a shadow of the things of god, and one can attempt (as we discussed) to share and explore experience with others, such that all gain further insight into such truth, (which does not come from us, ie. one can’t directly share the things of god).
@jared123456
To expand upon the difference between sharing one’s experience is fundamentally different than sharing the things of God, we are probably going to have to take a step back and cover some fundamental ideas underlying those concepts.
We will start with “I think, therefore I am”, the “first principle” of René Descartes’s philosophy. Descartes was rooted in doubt about the reality of what one’s senses showed them and rejected past reasoning. Even thoughts from when one was awake could be false, just like dreams. But Descartes reasoned the he couldn’t doubt that he existed because he was thinking. He concluded that “I think, therefore I am” was the most certain truth.
Confirming that one’s self exists, we can determine that one has a self, and can perceive that there are thing other than the self, outside one’s self. We also find that everything outside of the self appears to be independant of the self. In the “outside of the self” we find and aquaint ourselves with the “others that claim selfhood”, and we stumble into the ideas of subjective and objective reality.
In such a context, we can see that “objective reality” is anything other than the self that exists is independent of any conscious awareness of it (via perception, thought, etc.).
Now subjective reality is the existence of what exists in the self, and what exists in each self is different than what exists in every other self.
As far as is commonly held, everything that exists, exists in objective reality, but what every self experiences, exists in subjective reality.
Furthermore, the Holy Spirit exists in the believer, which for all practical purposes, the Holy Spirit exists in subjective reality.
Like Schrödinger’s cat, the Holy Spirit exists in a state of quantum superposition, where it simultaneously exists (in believers) and does not exist (in nonbelievers).
Ok, I will stop there, as you may want me to clarify and expand on some of these ideas. Once we do that, I will continue and I can explain the difference between sharing one’s experience and sharing the things of God. We will also expand upon opur discussion of the role, or lack thereof of faith in science.
@jared123456 The difference between sharing one’s experience that is fundamentally different than sharing the things of God comes down to that in the perspective of the nonbeliever. One is sharing of something that exists, and the other is sharing of something that does not exist.
Due to the fact that conventional modern scientific knowledge has explored and incorporated the knowledge of self, and the subjective experience that the self has, sharing one’s own experiences with others, while subjective, consists of discussing things that are accepted to exist.
Because the Holy Spirit is not in the nonbeliever, its quantum superposition resolves to the nonexistance of the Holy Spirit.
Due to the fact that conventional modern scientific knowledge has not explored and incorporated the idea that the Holy Spirit is something that does exist, there is no practical difference between the Holy Spirit, and something like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This also means, that while many of those engaging in scientific endeavours might still have some sort of faith or belong to a religion, faith as a concept currently cannot be incorporated into modern scientific knowledge or practice.
Since faith is considered to be belief in something for which there is no proof, and it is generally not testable, it is therefore anathema to science.
Reminds me a bit of the red pill blue pill from the matrix.
If I may, it sounds like you’re approaching the sharing of things of god in a direct sense, and observing the impossibility of that. Yeah,? and continue if you’ve more, perhaps on faith?
please continue, thanks!