The Paradox of Revelation

Many religious believers, including both everyday followers and famed theologians, privilege revelation over rational inquiry and analysis as a method for attaining results and insights.

Yes, revelation is a noted method indeed, producing such famous works such as the Qur’an, the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Talmud, and many others.

But nearly all religious believers do not take the sum of these works together, but rather believe in them separately. Revelation produces many fruits, but most believers only choose to consume a select few products from this tree of specialized knowledge claims.

If believers really have confidence in revelation as a method of gathering information, why don't they take all of revelations' results equally seriously?

That is, if the individual believer is going to emphasize revelation over analysis, then what makes the revelation of Paul inherently better than the revelation of Buddha or of Joseph Smith?

Believers are forced to admit that revelation in and of itself is generally a poor method for obtaining results, producing contradictory and vague insights.

There must be some additional, exterior standard applied to the products of revelation to determine whether they have any merit as the basis of a belief system.

However, revelation shouldn’t even need to be sorted out in this manner, should it? Shouldn’t it just be “self-evident” if it is divinely revealed? Revelation by definition should not necessarily appeal to any exterior standard for its confirmation.

But revelation never really is self-evident, is it? It does require some exterior standard for evaluation as the basis of a possible belief system.

Thus the thousands of religions, and even the thousands of variations within Christianity! Revelation can produce claims, but it's lacking a mechanism to sort them out, to see if they're plausible or believable.

If you are a religious believer, and you are privileging revelation over rational analysis, do you:

(One) hijack rational analysis to try and provide some kind of support for your revelatory claims, which (by definition) should not need to be supported in such a manner?

(Two) admit that you have no way to evaluate any of your religious claims on the same basis as competing claims derived from revelation, therefore rendering any religious claims you may possess indistinguishable from religious claims you do not possess?

Strange Thoughts and More Like Them

The inner workings of the brain are something I can only contemplate given my severely limited knowledge.

It must be like some kind of machine.

I heard someone speculate once that there must be programs which can "crash" the brain, just as there as programs which can "crash" a computer.

I wonder what such a program would be like?

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There is an image which keeps re-appearing to me again and again, in several guises:

The lego constructions I used to build when I was very young: the elaborate manipulation of the bricks, followed swiftly by near inevitable destruction or implosion.

Numerous colonies of bacteria in a plate, consuming agar, reproducing themselves into oblivion.

A panel from the comic "Peanuts" when Linus spends a long time carefully molding a soap replica of a Navy clipper, only to see his creation obliterated by his sister Lucy.

Things arisen, things consumed, things destroyed.

And this visage repeats over, and over, and over.

What do I make of it?

I think that is a question for all of us.

Dear Christian

I am inclined to believe that atheists will never be able to conclusively prove that the generic “god” does not exist. I can’t foretell this, but it seems that there are too many obstacles and unknowns to justify such a belief.

However, I believe that I am fully justified to not believe in the god of the Bible, the god of the Qur’an, the god of Joseph Smith, the god of Scientology, and many other gods which we know of now.

In all likelihood, I cannot disprove the existence of these gods. But there are things of which I know now which to me make it highly unlikely that any of these gods would exist.

Is evolution true? Then I cannot take the Bible literally.

Is the Biblical revelation, and more importantly, the interpretation of Biblical revelation, inconsistent? Then I cannot take the Bible (or most forms of Christianity) seriously.

Is the mind a product of the brain? Then I see no reason why I should believe in the concept of the “soul”.

A metaphorical interpretation of the Bible is more or less fine until I start to doubt the coherency of Christian dogma. But the incoherency is more or less defensible or avoidable until I doubt the existence of the “soul”.

Then I must proceed in doubting the premises of Christianity, due to this continually evolving set of circumstances.

If, once I begin to doubt the premises of Christianity, I cannot defend them, nor convince myself of their meaning or relevance or application or even existence, then I cannot in good faith profess Christianity as my religion, and then I feel compelled to move on to something else.

I am not here to insult or denigrate you.

I just want to express my beliefs, my experiences, and my struggles. I want to illuminate the discussions of religion and faith and skepticism. I want to contribute to our knowledge. I want to engage others in intelligent, calm, rational argument.

I am sure that you want the very same things that I do.