Iambig is essentially anti-proselytisation and is fed up with people telling him stuff that he doesn’t experience.
It sounds like everyone around you is from another planet and has an entirely different culture and biology. If I found myself surrounded by hyper-intelligent slugs from another planet, then I would understand your point. Instead, I’m surrounded by men and women who are very much like me. Birth, food, drink, sex, sleep, pain, pleasure, disease, death. This is all understandable.
You are missing a couple of points.
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We are discussing the existence of tequila … not bottles that are marked ‘Tequila’. What’s in those bottles? You have taste it to make sure that it is tequila and not something else.
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We are discussing a context where tequila is not readily available in the local liquor store. We are in a place where it is not available. Someone who has tasted tequila is trying to convince someone who has not tasted tequila, that tequila exists.
Your focus on ‘demonstrating’ is a dead-end.
“When the wise man points at the Moon, the idiot looks at the finger.”
― Confucius
Yes, there is a lot of finger pointing going on.
I think that he is completely trapped by his intellectual contraptions. You can’t get him to drop the ideas that are holding him back. Even if you show him that, for example, demonstrability often fails even for routine matters, he still holds on to it.
He still keeps using the same approach that didn’t work years ago.
He doesn’t hold onto it but instead he is trying to force subjective vs. objective reality/morality cognitive dissonance within Ierrellus and yourself (he is failing to do so as he has not learnt to change his strategies).
I’d agree that Iamb appears trapped in his intellect and cannot give credence to experiential matters which he claims do not apply to his way of thinking. Experience is the bottom line; our definitions and distinctions rely on experience.
If you examine correctly, he does claim they apply to his own way of thinking.
I realize Iamb has acknowledged that a spiritual experience is available for others, just not for him. But his insistence that it’s all in the head degrades the actual experience. He wants objective proof of a subjective certainty. That could apply to our beliefs in science as being able to state objective reality. It can apply to our experiences with qualia. Changeaux argued that our ability to communicate exposes many experiences as common to “all reasonable men and women.” (“What Makes Us Think”.) It is from our common insights that we are able to communicate at all. In short, the fact that we can communicate shows that we have no radical subjective/objective divide such as would prevent you from understanding what I am saying to you. Reasonable men and women have and have had spiritual experiences.
On the contrary, what should be obvious is that assertions such as this can only be understood substantively in a particular context understood from a particular point of view.
And then the part where any disputes that occur either are or are not able to be examined, then described, then [possibly] resolved utilizing the tools of theologians or philosophers or scientists.
Evil? Where and when? Pertaining to what particular behaviors that precipitate what particular consequences?
Also, what is obvious to me is that we all come into this world with deeply rooted wants and needs. Some more or less amenable to “reason”, some more or less not. And that these wants and needs have ever and always come into conflict. And that those who come to desire one set of consequences are in fact prone to call those who want another “evil”.
So this couple kidnap an 8-year-old girl. He rapes her, while the woman stands by. Then the woman kills her by hitting in the head with a hammer which they had purchased prior to the assault.
To reduce that to “conflicting goods” or “we desire one set of consequences and they want another set of consequences” is disgusting. It is evil.
Well, look at it this way:
God [most of them] are omnipotent. And, in being all powerful, He could surely have interjected at any time to stop this.
He did not.
So, how evil can it really be?
Also, given that God [most of them] are omniscient, there is nothing that these folks do that He was not already privy to.
So, how can it be said that, for all practical purposes, they have the freedom to choose anything at all?
Philosophy hides the emptiness.
Right, like the gods aren’t invented to do much the same.
Reasonable men/women have had spiritual experiences but not all and it is impossible to communicate something to someone where no “similar” experience exists (the fault then lies with the speaker and not the listener).
There’s fault to be assigned?
If fault is emotionally loaded for you then consider the word error.
The word “error” doesn’t seem to fit either. In what way is an explanation of a spiritual experience to one who has never had such an experience in error? If you tell a child not to play in the street because he may get hit by a car, does it matter that the child has never been hit by a car?
If you have a rebellious child who refuses to listen, then you are error.
That’s way too simplistic.