I am not using one to hint at the other. I believe this mischaracterizes my post. If there is one word to describe my goal, it would be empathy. If I am allowed to use a term, theory of mind.
What I am doing is saying, the ontological warrant for believing in personhood is much closer to the ontological warrant for believing in God than you might think. Someone who wants to believe in a specific organized religion’s God is going to need a lot more warrants, but it seems that the biggest hurdle in believing in a theistic religion is in fact the theism part.
I am not trying to convert anyone (in fact I think “conversion” is impossible by reason and is in fact mostly just changing someone’s semantics). I am trying to detail a topic that I have thought a lot about, which is how allowing myself to treat more non-humans as persons was only an extension of my existing faith in personhood.
Regarding consequences, I consider that a separate issue from reality and truth. All consequences mean to me is how urgent a question is, not how good an answer is. I hold all sorts of beliefs, some more convenient or useful than others, but they do come from the deepest fiber of my being.
What I want you to consider, if you seek to understand, is this thought experiment:
Imagine if every time someone used the word “ghost” they were talking exactly about post-bereavement hallucinations. She says “Ghosts are real”, and upon examination this means exactly “Post-bereavement hallucinations are a meaningful part of my mind’s limited subjective experience”, whether or not she would agree with you if you put it in those exact terms. Is her statement “Ghosts are real” true or false? I would say it is obviously true. If you say it is false, it is because you insist on interpreting her statement in a naive literalist way relative to your own definitions of her words, instead of using an empathetic critical lens to figure out what she means.
This is exactly the sense I mean when I say “People are real” and “God is real”. These statements are among the most true beliefs to me, which is why I call my belief in God gnostic theist.
(The famous Sam Harris / Jordan Peterson “debate” has Sam criticizing Jordan’s views using this exact example, but I think he missed the point by assuming that people’s words mean what he thinks they mean.)
By your definition I suppose I am not gnostic theist and am in fact agnostic theist, but then we could just say I am agnostic about everything. But the key thing I want to communicate is that there is knowledge in my worldview, and by knowledge I mean a deep experience of truth. You can call it something else, but I call it knowledge.
______
I am glad for your replies so far. Best wishes to you, stranger.
Information about my faith, if you are curious:
I happen to consider myself a follower of the Way of Jesus, roughly a Calvinist trinitarian who is much less into Paul than most American Christians. Some people, atheist and Christian, disagree with the label “Christian” as applied to me. Others strongly agree with it, and would rather I use that instead of my more vague self-identification.
There is a lot of diversity of thought in what it actually “means” that the Christ rose on the third day. For me, it is sorta like “Christ” “rose” on the “third day”, which is heretical to some and the proper parsing to others.
I never really try to convert people to my exact beliefs, because people have their own good reasons for not believing what I believe. I want to make it clearer what underpins people’s beliefs, and how it is actually very similar to what others believe.
The people I talk to most about the nature of belief is other Christians, since to a lot of people the meaning of the sentence “There exists a God” is so obvious they can’t even imagine how someone could think otherwise. It is in fact the same nature of question as, for example, “There exists a black person”. Once someone experiences the personhood of a human with African ancestry, it is so obvious that it becomes transparent.
Imagine if every time someone used the word “ghost” they were talking exactly about post-bereavement hallucinations. She says “Ghosts are real”, and upon examination this means exactly “Post-bereavement hallucinations are a meaningful part of my mind’s limited subjective experience”, whether or not she would agree with you if you put it in those exact terms. Is her statement “Ghosts are real” true or false? I would say it is obviously true. If you say it is false, it is because you insist on interpreting her statement in a naive literalist way relative to your own definitions of her words, instead of using an empathetic critical lens to figure out what she means
Well… You could use different words for literal truth, metaphorical truth, useful fictions, personal mythology, etc, etc.
“Ghosts are real” is literally true. She is literally experiencing post-bereavement hallucinations as a meaning part of her mind’s limited subjective experience.
I am not using one to hint at the other. I believe this mischaracterizes my post. If there is one word to describe my goal, it would be empathy. If I am allowed to use a term, theory of mind.
What I am doing is saying, the ontological warrant for believing in personhood is much closer to the ontological warrant for believing in God than you might think. Someone who wants to believe in a specific organized religion’s God is going to need a lot more warrants, but it seems that the biggest hurdle in believing in a theistic religion is in fact the theism part.
I am not trying to convert anyone (in fact I think “conversion” is impossible by reason and is in fact mostly just changing someone’s semantics). I am trying to detail a topic that I have thought a lot about, which is how allowing myself to treat more non-humans as persons was only an extension of my existing faith in personhood.
Regarding consequences, I consider that a separate issue from reality and truth. All consequences mean to me is how urgent a question is, not how good an answer is. I hold all sorts of beliefs, some more convenient or useful than others, but they do come from the deepest fiber of my being.
What I want you to consider, if you seek to understand, is this thought experiment:
Imagine if every time someone used the word “ghost” they were talking exactly about post-bereavement hallucinations. She says “Ghosts are real”, and upon examination this means exactly “Post-bereavement hallucinations are a meaningful part of my mind’s limited subjective experience”, whether or not she would agree with you if you put it in those exact terms. Is her statement “Ghosts are real” true or false? I would say it is obviously true. If you say it is false, it is because you insist on interpreting her statement in a naive literalist way relative to your own definitions of her words, instead of using an empathetic critical lens to figure out what she means.
This is exactly the sense I mean when I say “People are real” and “God is real”. These statements are among the most true beliefs to me, which is why I call my belief in God gnostic theist.
(The famous Sam Harris / Jordan Peterson “debate” has Sam criticizing Jordan’s views using this exact example, but I think he missed the point by assuming that people’s words mean what he thinks they mean.)
By your definition I suppose I am not gnostic theist and am in fact agnostic theist, but then we could just say I am agnostic about everything. But the key thing I want to communicate is that there is knowledge in my worldview, and by knowledge I mean a deep experience of truth. You can call it something else, but I call it knowledge.
______
I am glad for your replies so far. Best wishes to you, stranger.
Information about my faith, if you are curious:
I happen to consider myself a follower of the Way of Jesus, roughly a Calvinist trinitarian who is much less into Paul than most American Christians. Some people, atheist and Christian, disagree with the label “Christian” as applied to me. Others strongly agree with it, and would rather I use that instead of my more vague self-identification.
There is a lot of diversity of thought in what it actually “means” that the Christ rose on the third day. For me, it is sorta like “Christ” “rose” on the “third day”, which is heretical to some and the proper parsing to others.
I never really try to convert people to my exact beliefs, because people have their own good reasons for not believing what I believe. I want to make it clearer what underpins people’s beliefs, and how it is actually very similar to what others believe.
The people I talk to most about the nature of belief is other Christians, since to a lot of people the meaning of the sentence “There exists a God” is so obvious they can’t even imagine how someone could think otherwise. It is in fact the same nature of question as, for example, “There exists a black person”. Once someone experiences the personhood of a human with African ancestry, it is so obvious that it becomes transparent.
Well… You could use different words for literal truth, metaphorical truth, useful fictions, personal mythology, etc, etc.
“Ghosts are real” is literally true. She is literally experiencing post-bereavement hallucinations as a meaning part of her mind’s limited subjective experience.