No, my point is that personal experience is not the only source for answers when the questions being raised revolve around God and religion.
After all, eventually you are going to bump into others who, through a different set of personal experiences, are going have very different answers.
This thread was then created in order to explore these answers. Answers relating to behaviors that are chosen on this side of the grave as that relates to certain sets of assumptions regarding one’s fate on the other side of the grave.
As this is related to the answers that different folks give to the question, “Does God exist?”. As this relates in turn to their capacity to actually demonstrate that in fact their God [and only their God] does exist.
How is that related to the reason that I created this thread? And my reaction to Socrates and his ilk would be no different here. As would be my reaction to early European settlers and Native Americans. Whatever their particular narrative regarding morality on this side of the grave and their perceived fate on the other side, they had particular answers. And I would explore those answers as they relate to my own – answers rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. Rooted in particular historical, cultural and experiential contexts.
Exactly: How so?
How on earth would you [or them] demonstrate this to be the case? With respect to what particular behaviors in what particular contexts?
Or: What particular “visions” relating to what particular behaviors on this side of the grave; as that relates to what particular “visions” of the other side of it.
What I am prepared to do is to sit down with folks who have a set of answers before and then after their “vision quest”.
How are the answers different? And “for all practical purposes” how are the different answers more or less relevant in their interactions with others?
And how is that related to their “vision” of the part that revolves around immortality and salvation?
Is there really a “Happy Hunting Ground” where the souls of any number of Great Plains Native Americans go? Is there the equivalent of a Judgment Day there? Which particular Native American tribes get to say which particular vision prevails in which particular context on this side of the grave?
In my view, you won’t go there because you find no need to. As long as you can attach your own “peace of mind” to this “general description” of “spirituality” that you give relating to these “vision quests” that’s as far as it need go for you.
Or, again, so it seems to me.
But I will be the first to acknowledge that my own narrative here is no less an existential contraption in turn.
That’s why I always come back to the crucial distinction between that which we believe is true “in our head” “here and now” about these things [relationships] and that which we are able to demonstrate is in fact true for everyone now and forever.
In a vision or not.