Hi again Dicky,
Sorry, but I don't get near a computer very often these days.
It is as you say (including your references to crude ad populum arguments in your previous post).
The cultural background of various 'mystical' experiences seems to be of prime importance. There are various claims made by evangelical groups that such and such an individual in the Amazon jungle etc. had an experience of Jesus before any missionaries got there, and only realised that this was an experience of the Christian god after the missionaries arrived and explained it to him/her. However, the evidence for this seems to be purely anecdotal, and filtered through the extremely biased narrative procedures of the evangelical Christians themselves. Even so, such experiences seem to be few, and one would have thought that if the Christian god were the true creator of all existence, he might have found a more consistent and fool-proof method of communicating his eternal truths to the whole of humanity than these hit and miss methods.
As you imply, the experiences of the divine seem to involve a lot of cherry-picking when it comes to finding correlations with the holy texts themselves. People seem to find the Jesus their they want to find, and pass lightly over the texts that don't agree with their revelations. You-know-who seems not to have much time for the purely Jewish Jesus revealed there, and passes straight on to the divine Jesus of the later 'high Christology' of John. Old freeminer seemed to claim an experience that convinced him that the whole of the Bible in every particular was true - though what mental gymnastics he had to perform to achieve this don't bear thinking about.
And of course, as William James' 'Varieties of Religious Experience' has shown, the nature of the very experiences themselves vary enormously in any case.
No worries, and thanks for the detailed reply. Yes, culturally-derived causal explanations seem to be essential to faith beliefs. You simply don’t find the Amazonian tribesman (or whoever) who independently has the Christian narrative, and nor for that matter do you find the Christian who’s independently been contacted by the gods of the Amazonian. Funny that.
I hadn’t heard of that, “
an individual in the Amazon jungle etc. had an experience of Jesus before any missionaries got there, and only realised that this was an experience of the Christian god after the missionaries arrived and explained it to him/her” before but it’s just priceless. Such arrogance (does it work the other way around too?), such idiocy (“we gave him the right answer, then he agreed with us”). Good grief!
It’d be interesting if a Christian here could tell us whether the remarkable co-incidence of the narrative most proximate to when and where he happens to live also being the right one (and the countless others being the wrong ones therefore) even gives her or him pause, but I don’t suppose any will. “He-whose-behaviour-cannot-be-named” certainly won’t, as I know from long experience.
As for cherry-picking, well yes. Essentially people get the gods they most resemble. Sweet little old lady? Jesus meek and mild all the way; nasty piece of work? That’ll be the vengeful god who “hates faggots” etc. I wonder if there’s a word for that, or for that matter whether anyone has ever believed in a god whose character is fundamentally different from his own?
Of course there are intelligent and nuanced Christians too (Wiggs talks occasionally about the signs and symbols of “God” for example, though I don’t really know what this means, and nor will he tell us) whose theology I’d genuinely like to hear about it, but most of the stuff here seems pretty crude to me.
