I was pretty sure, I mentioned this before, but apparently not. Cool Person jane_etrix recently posted a locked :-( entry on sunday, about her "aversion to doctrine" and how skeptical and contrary she was with regard to claims about people knowing G-d's Will. My reply to this part of her entry was:
Regarding the "how do we know?" question, you are also right in being so contrary and skeptical, considering that the vast majority of the world's religions and/or doctrines are the claimed result of Divine Revelation to single individuals (or at most VERY small groups, like the lucky-few Disciples who "saw the Resurrection of Jesus"). You would think that IF G-d had a specific Message to the World [Tm] that G-d wanted followed, then knowing how skeptical human nature is, G-d would know much better than to tell it to some single weirdo hiding in a cave, and expect the world to heed this "messenger". You would expect G-d and/or the Message to be revealed before a large group of people, making the divine source of the message clear, to all that were there. This in fact, in what we believe to have happened at Mt. Sinai, where G-d was revealed before an estimated two million people. Strangle enough, in further comments on that entry, I referenced this one (which is probably why I'm so confused about what I posted where, what with having so much fun simultaneously with jane_etrix, spider88 and yourself). I also addressed this (halfway through the comment) in that monster thread of spider88's that we first "met" in.
To summarize my point, we know the initial revelation of the Torah was true, because this wasn't some mystical event that some prophet experienced by their lonesome self, and now must convince us all. Rather, it was a clearly miraculous event witnessed by millions of people.
You could claim this too, to be a circular claim, because we know of this event from the Torah itself, but that would be ignoring the fact that we also know that millions of people accepted the Torah as Divine within the immediate time-frame involved (read those links mentioned in my comment to spider88). Even without this physical "evidence", we have other documents from the near time-frame, that indicate this was accepted doctrine. Let's see you fool millions of people in a short time-period of the divinity of a "religion".
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timeasmymeasure
Back to Square 1. ;-)
Date: 2005-06-09 01:59 pm (UTC)Regarding the "how do we know?" question, you are also right in being so contrary and skeptical, considering that the vast majority of the world's religions and/or doctrines are the claimed result of Divine Revelation to single individuals (or at most VERY small groups, like the lucky-few Disciples who "saw the Resurrection of Jesus"). You would think that IF G-d had a specific Message to the World [Tm] that G-d wanted followed, then knowing how skeptical human nature is, G-d would know much better than to tell it to some single weirdo hiding in a cave, and expect the world to heed this "messenger". You would expect G-d and/or the Message to be revealed before a large group of people, making the divine source of the message clear, to all that were there. This in fact, in what we believe to have happened at Mt. Sinai, where G-d was revealed before an estimated two million people.
Strangle enough, in further comments on that entry, I referenced this one (which is probably why I'm so confused about what I posted where, what with having so much fun simultaneously with
To summarize my point, we know the initial revelation of the Torah was true, because this wasn't some mystical event that some prophet experienced by their lonesome self, and now must convince us all. Rather, it was a clearly miraculous event witnessed by millions of people.
You could claim this too, to be a circular claim, because we know of this event from the Torah itself, but that would be ignoring the fact that we also know that millions of people accepted the Torah as Divine within the immediate time-frame involved (read those links mentioned in my comment to