It's really quite difficult to know how to take your views. Sometimes, they seem quite elitist. The vast majority of people who struggle for survival on this planet will never "know God" because they will never have the change to experience God. In fact, far too many of them will simply die too young to have ever gotten there, and it doesn't seem (to me) that this has any significance to you in your world-view. This seems to suggest you've created a god-experience for yourself that feels, to this observer at least, smug and self-satisfied.

As a "humanist," I can't be satisfied imagining a god that has left everybody to either figure out this purportedly "most important truth" all by themselves, or not.

On the other hand, this notion of "self-revelation" is very troubling. Some understanding of how the mind works would help you understand why I find it so.

The only thing that we can "know" is what our minds tell us. How we perceive the world is 100% a function of how our minds interpret the transduced electrical signals from our senses, combined with our stored memories and the built-in processes. (You may wish to see Baars on this subject).

You can see when this goes awry, for example, in people who have temporal lobe seizures, or even who have their temporal lobes electrically stimulated with a probe. What they perceive becomes completely real to them, and this becomes just as true in people who are suffering from various kinds of mental illness, like schizophrenia that can produce delusional states.

What all this means, of course, is that once something has been "revealed" to your mind, you cannot not perceive it as true and real -- whether it is or is not. And these "revelations" can be as different as night and day from person to person.

You, angeleyes and RevKelly all seem comfortable with the idea that whatever is "revealed" to you will be known by you to be a real revelation, one way or another. But the evidence is that this may quite often be simply untrue. And the consequences can be truly devestating, as witness the religious wars, persecutions and so on throughout history, all based on the differences between this and that person's "personal revelation."

Surely you must see what I'm getting at here. If by "revelation" you mean a personal understanding or view of how the world is, that would be one thing -- and I'm perfectly comfortable with that. But if by "revelation" you mean some truth that has been provided by God, then when these truths come into conflict, and cause the kinds of savagery and destruction that have occured throughout history, and still occur today, then to that extent it is inconceivable that these are truly revelations from God, however convinced the individual who had the revelation is that they are truly God's revealed Word.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Great post Vivamis! I agree totally. We are all just as capable as anyone else. I believe this is one reason meditation is so important. When Jesus went up to the mountain I believe he actually was going inside himself, to the centerpoint where we can all connect with that wisdom that is inherently a part of us. Revelation is a personal thing which we are all capable of.

Dear E.H.,
What I see in Angeleyes and in Rev. Kelly and in a few others here on this forum is the innocence of a child. It is not blind faith, but a faith based on divine revelation. I don't expect you to see it, how could you, since it does not exist for you? It is always as we believe, so we experience. I don't see any of us that have been revealed the Truth in any kind of danger, we are guided and protected as we believe. It is very freeing to believe in a higher power than us. Those that follow blind, believing in a person or a book more than in God within themselves can be lead astray, because there is no foundation, they have built there faith on knowledge (sand) rather than on understanding.

I wonder often why you only see the lack in religion; I see the same lack in many other things of this world. Can a doctor be trusted? Can we believe a doctor to tell us we have only 3 months to live? What does he know of the power of belief? He might be a professional in his trait, but he knows not all. What about a scientist? Is his "result" not what he seeked to find?

What are you seeking E.H.? Validation for your belief, or someone to prove you wrong?

__________________
May your awareness be perfection

What am I seeking? I'm seeking knowledge about the world I live in. I'm seeking ways to understand how I can contribute to it and thrive in it. I'm seeking to understand what it is that makes other people tick, and that allows so many of them to do the things they do. I am seeking to understand the hatreds that so many in this world, and especially so many who espouse religious values, express towards so many others. (You can go back over my 1200+ posts to discover what some of the results of those hatreds are, if you'd care to take the time, but the result throughout history has been an absolutely appalling waste of human life and happiness.)

I can understand why you wouldn't get that. Seeking knowledge would not be useful for you, in your own view, because your posts indicate that you clearly believe you have all the knowledge that you need. This is a typically religious viewpoint, and one that I find frankly deplorable.

Science seeks evidence without certainty. Religion seeks certainty without evidence.

I have just told you that I question because I am not certain. You have told me that you are certain, and therefore don't need to question.

But, I wonder, did you notice that you blithely ignored every real point I made in my post? That too is typical, and I didn't expect otherwise. Don't answer the questions, mislead, go off in a new direction and hope nobody notices. Make the ownership of the conversation your own, so that nobody else's points of view need be considered.

I'll discuss that further as we proceed.
And you don't imagine that there ought to be even a little growing up? Would you hope to keep your children innocent of everything, leaving them with nothing to turn to should you suddenly not be there anymore? Or would you ask them to begin to develop their own understanding, their own accountabilities, their own viewpoints, their own persons? (Actually, I've known parents who didn't want their children to stop being children. It is a form of child abuse that is just as damaging as many others. I know one woman today who now cannot take care of herself since her parents passed away. It is most pitiable.)
I think you fool yourself sometimes. This is one of those things that you absolutely ignored in my post. You CAN NOT KNOW whether a "revelation" is divine or not. There is no possible way for you to tell. There is an immense amount of science to demonstrate exactly that, I pointed you in the direction of a tiny bit of it, and you ignored it. It doesn't fit your certainty, and therefore it is useless to you as evidence.

And the remark that "as we believe, so we experience" is beyond childlike. It's foolish. How many people woke up this morning believing they would be diagnosed with cancer this afternoon? Most of those people who are diagnosed today will tell you, in all honesty, that they believed they were living right and it wouldn't happen to them. How many kids (like me) believed that their parents would try to kill them, and that they would live their entire childhood unloved in the care of strangers? It happened, and it didn't happen because I believed it would happen.
Jim Jones was the recipient of his own private revelation. 900 people, believers, including children and Jones himself, died in Jonestown Guyana as a result. Marshall Applewhite was the recipient of his own private revelation. As a direct consequence, 39 men and women, believers were found dead in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Fine, you are not in any danger from what you believe. But many people have been, and many people are still, in danger from what some people believe, and believe just as strongly and completely as you do. They -- just like you and me -- could not and can not distinguish between what comes into our minds from outside and what our minds generate on their own.
And you are believing on the basis of possibly no understanding at all, but on what could very likely be misfirings of any number of neural circuits. You cannot tell for certain, any more than Jones or Applewhite could. You can only believe, as Jones and Applewhite did.
I often wonder about this trust/lack-of-trust issue. I can't help but recall that, when Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square, the cardinals and Vatican officials didn't rush him to the high alter in St. Peter's Basilica but to the Gemelli Hospital, and all those untrustworthy doctors there -- even though it was much further away. You can say anything you like, but those actions do seem to me to speak volumes about whether they were going to trust the "power of belief," or the doctor who knows nothing about it.

They went with the doctor.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Dear E.H.
The reason why I don't answer your questions are because they are not your real questions. You are seeking either validation for your belief or for someone to prove you wrong. I am not going to give you either, that is why you continue to knock. You don't get that the real question is : What does it serve you? Is your life so great that everything is fulfilled? You believe you don't have enough knowledge, but I tell you: you have too much. The more knowledge, the more baggage to get rid of. Truth is in the simplicity. Become a witness and life becomes a bliss.

__________________
May your awareness be perfection

Meaning no disrespect, but that was fatuous bumph!

And please remember, it is not for you to decide what my real questions are. Have you ever met me? How well do you know me? How well do you understand my background, my beliefs, my knowledge, hobbies, likes, dislikes, needs? I don't permit the love of my life to tell me what my questions are or are not. You are not even in the running! Either answer my questions, or don't as you see fit. But don't tell me what I really want to know. I can formulate the questions to which I want answers with the best of them.

And you don't answer not because you have something to offer me that you don't think you should -- that I should find for myself -- but because your simplistic belief system doesn't deal with the difficult questions. As you yourself have said, you admire others because they are childlike. Children ask "why is the sky blue," but never think beyond to ask "what the heck is blue, anyway, and how does a blue sky affect the way we humans think about it?"

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

If we were talking about scientific revelation (or artistic, literary, or anything other than religion) would you be more comfortable with that? The descriptions of the revelatory experience are very much the same:

Whether it involves the nature of the world, God, philosophy, life, love or any other area of our existence, we all have burning questions which may lead to a sudden flash of insight, transcending the paradoxes that couldn't be overcome by rational thought. The nature of both revelation and the peak experience is distinct enough from "normal" thinking that most people attribute them to some kind of higher consciousness.

Now, if a scientist has a scientific revelation, why wouldn't a spiritual seeker have a revelation about the nature of God? After all, the spiritual devotee is usually the one seeking this kind of experience in the first place and has guidance and the willingness to practice meditation or prayer to still the mind's usually business. You may prefer the scientific version because it can be backed up by physical evidence eventually, but artistic works, inventions, or other revelatory insights aren't always validated right away, nor would we necessarily have an account of what came via revelation and what didn't. Furthermore, a revelation of religious significance can be validated by the experience and insight of others, by further reading and meditation, and by progressive revelation. (Most of the sudden insights I've had have been validated over and over, though they would certainly be rejected by alot of religions).

No doubt people have perverted religion and misconstrued it's message. I think that says alot more about the people themselves and not the nature of revelation, or the nature of God. Consider this quote:
My question to you is: should we blame the phenomena of personal revelation (or the scientist who had it) for the evil of Hiroshima?

I don't believe that God can be contained in a book either. I also do not believe that God chooses who He speaks with. I think we make the choice. We are accontable for our own revelations and how they compare with the world and the generation we live in.

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"There is one thing that organized religion is not qualified to teach and that is an individual's purpose."-GOD

We'll discuss this in more depth as we go, but first, I must point out that "scientific revelation" is actually a process that is becoming increasingly well-understood, and in any case, can always be tested after the fact. This is not true of religious revelation. There is no test for hell, or heaven, or any of the myriad other counterintuitive assertions that are made about God, the soul, or any other religious matter. That is part of the definition of religious. Once something becomes known and demonstrable, religion is no longer required to support it. As to art and literature, I would not call those "revelation" so much as creation. They are creative acts, making the artist a sort of "god" over what he has created. And in any case, we do not take art and literature to be true claims about the nature of the world as it really is. Religion makes claims about this world and usually some other world which we have no access to, and explicitly declares these claims to be true, however undemonstrable they are.

You are failing to see what to any mind scientist would be blatantly obvious. Wiles himself says that he had been studying the problem for years, and then even longer after he discovered his initial error. How much actual data -- real knowledge -- do you think that the various parts of his brain (linguistical, numerical, visual-spatial, graphical) do you think he had accumulated? Once again, I direct you to Baars' Global Workspace Theory to see how the mind actually works on problems like this. We all have these flashes of insight from time to time, but they are always based on new connections within the brain of things already known. The insight, however wonderful and magical it feels, is usually the product of a new arrangement of the known, viewed from a different perspective in the "theatre of the mind."

In other words, it was already there. It was not fed in from some other, external, spiritual source. Not even by his spirit guide from Xanadu.