On what basis then can a person discriminate between scripture? IOW for what reason would you forego getting mummified even though the Book of the Dead expresses its importance for gaining an afterlife? Or, perhaps better asked, how do you go about ascertaining which scripture is the right one to look at?
there are a variety of arguments for discerning the hierarchy of religious principles within what's available
in short, it boils down to two considerations
- discerning the result of different religious practices and the hierarchical significance (emancipation, piety, wealth, long life, facility to fulfill one's desires, mystic powers, etc etc are all fine, but how would you place them in terms of level of importance)
- discerning the ontological implications of oneself, thing's related to oneself (ie this world and everything in it) and god (for instance if the body is ultimately a temporary designation, one could question whether any eternal benefits can be drawn from it by merely treating it in a mechanical condition in either its states of living or death - eg "If you undergo ritual X when you are living/dead you get eternal life")
You could say that one decides by looking at how many adherents it has or how many claimants to qualification there are. If we were to go by that then surely christianity would be the way to go?
Clearly therefore it can't come down to numbers.
philosophical and moral issues are not resolved by vote
my issue was that there is not a shred of philosophical or moral issues to even begin to
approach (outside of the rhetorical arguments of atheists)in regard to pink elephants, et al
The distinct problem here is that your general argument precludes you from saying anything until you are "qualified". As a result of that you have a lot of scripture to be going through. You can't, as per your argument, say anything about that scripture until you're qualified in it.
having a hierarchical model, as illustrated earlier, enables one to navigate between higher and lower religious principles
And even then, if the end result is nothing you would need to ascertain that it is the scripture that is wrong and not just you that has applied the methods incorrectly. But as you'll argue, any high school dropout can claim he did study correctly, but that the thing he was studying was faulty.
one could have a faulty hierarchical model - and that is the topic of religious debate (at least in india) - namely philosophy
therefore religion without philosophy is the absence of a sound hierarchical model - and admittedly that seems to be the trend of many contemporary abrahamic religions (for instance I think it was thomas aquinas who institutionalized this organized persecution of bodies outside of christianity) .... and that also tends to be the model of theism that you model your atheism on too
You could listen to those that claim to be qualified but how do you establish that they are qualified, (when you are not and thus can't say anything)?
we may not be qualified but discerning qualification is possible
if it wasn't, there would be no way to know who was a qualified lawyer, mechanic, doctor outside of their hearsay
I would assume that you'll try to argue emotional states, but that establishes nothing more than an emotional state. If a certain scripture mentions being free from wrath, and this person appears to be free from wrath, it merely establishes that this person is free from wrath, it does not attest to the validity of scriptural claims, (gods, heavens, souls or "zombie messiahs").
these "emotional" states are indications of material contamination (sometimes it is referred to as the presence of "false ego") - IOW a sense of "I" that has a false foundation) - possession of false ego is what qualifies us for material life ( the reason we are in this world is because we have the strong desire to expresss ourselves "falsely" - namely we express ourselves through lust, through wrath etc etc)
the default position of coming free from this state of false ego is to be enlightened - IOW there is no question of being free from false ego, unless one is a properly qualified theistic practitioner
hence statements like this ....
For one who has conquered the mind, the Supersoul is already reached, for he has attained tranquility. To such a man happiness and distress, heat and cold, honor and dishonor are all the same.
As an example: How would being free from certain emotional states indicate that "..no sooner had she ducked into the pond, than her husband turned her into a porpoise—she was the very first porpoise that ever swam in these waters." (Guiana Indians) this is true?
animism, polytheism and monotheism can also be placed in a hierarchy
the fact that there is very little room for philosophical discussion in animistic religion (because there is very little information about the ontological status of things in this world) indicates that validating/invalidating claims is not their major discipline - nevertheless, the discipline of becoming free from false ego remains a potent discipline for making spiritual advancement
In short what does your 'normative descriptions in scripture" actually amount to? Being free from certain emotional states does not attest to the validity of the claims in that scripture in any way whatsoever. There is something seriously amiss here for you to contend that such a description is the "foundation of evidence" for anything other than an emotional state.
the point is that being free from false ego is the qualification for being a thesitic practitioner - it doesn't matter whether the system be animistic, polytheistic or monotheistic (although there are good arguments that suggest getting completely free from issues of false ego is not tenable outside of montheism). If one is not free from false ego, one can not be a transparent medium to spiritual discourse and will simply elucidate according to one's conditioned nature (according to one's lust, wrath etc)
kind of like there are certain qualities a student must exhibit in order to learn something from a teacher (eg studious, attentive in class etc) - it doesn't matter whether one is doing a PhD at Oxford or learning times tables under a tree in a third world country - the issue of qualification aside, Oxford university and a tree in Kenya can also be placed in a hierarchy (you stand to learn more at Oxford than under a tree in Kenya)
As a final bit of interest given your arguments I would like to mention the word 'evolution'. I have seen you whine about evolution a bit and so would like to ask what qualifications you have in relevant fields. Without qualifications, and given that it has evidence and "foundations of evidence", are you not being a complete hypocrite when talking about it negatively or demanding that science needs to do more to convince you?
I don't over ride the finds of professional archaeologists - I don't even question the logical soundness of the models they construct out of those findings
what I do question is whether these models can be held as indubitable claims to which all other claims must be subservient since they are outside of the standard of science - namely falsification (and this is also a standard established by professionals too)
(IOW I don't argue that satan buried dinosaur bones to bewilder the atheistic or that the current understandings of how the eighth millennium BC moved into the ninth millennium BC has technical problems - I argue that it is all theoretical and outside of the practical fields of science)
