You confuse domains. There is certainly a domain for strict reason, weight and evidence, an objective stance and platform. And that domain very certainly requires work and sacrifice. And with those tools one certainly comes to 'agreements reached with others provide the objective ground for true knowledge about the world we live in'. And this is very much as it should be.
(Except that, in fact, you have no knowledge at all. All you have, Hobbles, is assembled facts. Assembled facts, like so many stones. You have no knowledge about the world, no interpretive knowledge).
But the sort of relationship, or spiritual knowledge, or knowing of other orders, and the sense of relationship, love, service of higher ideals and the possibility of articulating higher ideals, is out of the realm of scientific measurement. It is stuff of another category altogether. And I'd imagine it is outside of your scope completely.
What I allow myself is demonstrable and replicable.
Of course, that is clearly obvious, and completely fine by me. Yet to understand religion, connection to others and connection to a Whole, requires a different use of the mind, different sources, and the enunciation of different possibilities.
Makes perfect sense to me. The predicates that you establish and hold to with a certain force would allow you no other option.I have no care or interest in your internal world, as it appears the meanderings of a mad-man.
And so I reverse the assessment and suggest that - possibly - the delusion and the deluded mistake may be yours. In any case you have no right, nor power, to apply that label to others. That's why I asked quo warranto: by what authority? As Obvious Leo clearly indicates: The assignation of madness is part of the project. This is linked to the project of a New Definition of Evil, something she (he?) and others seems quite involved in.
This is not about you and me, Hobbles, this is about greater ideas, and the ideas that have moulded our world and civilisation. I know you will grasp so little of this but as there are others reading here I thought to include this.
Waldo Frank wrote in The Rediscovery of America:
- This is no wonder, when we realise that at its simplest the sense of the whole is the sense of self. All that William James has said about the mystical experience may be applied to the experience of self. Man takes himself as a whole, long before he takes the world; he knows himself as whole, ages before he knows such terms as brain, heart, soul. His sense of self is not irrational, but pre-rational; not ineffable save that it comes before all words and thoughts. It is the forever past-present, forever (when one seeks to know and to express it) retreating nucleus of feeling that introduces knowledge and expression.
Now there are certain men who know the unity of the Whole of Being - including, of course, themselves - in the same way that a man knows the unity of his person. These men have been called the mystics. Their sense of Wholeness, without abandoning the personal which is its core, reaches beyond it. Since they are called mystics, it is well to call their sense of the Whole mystic sense.
This sense is universal. It is pre-rational, like the sense of personal wholeness. It is ineffable at the outset, also like the sense of self, in that it must precede self-expression. But it is in all men; else science, art and religion would be illegible pages. The mystic (like the scientist and the artist) differs from other men only in degree. He articulates what men sense, else his articulation would be aloof from men's need. The true mystic is he who, with his life, expresses the cosmic self, in a way comparable with personal self-expression. To contend, as James did, that the mystic experience is finally ineffable is nonsense: from the Upanishads to Blake to Whitman, high men have expressed and talked of little else.