A conversion by a highly educated and very decided athiest just
seems to be an unusual occurance to me.
Not at all unusual ... if he has an experience that
... compounds the emotions of love, fear, dependence, fascination,
unworthiness, majesty and connection.
That is how the anthropologist, Roy Rappaport, described a numinous
experience. He also said that it is "utterly convincing."
The latter is very important. People try not to be fooled. But if
they have had an utterly convincing experience, that means they
believe.
A numinous experience is an internal experience. Unless you know you
are crazy, what you feel internally you think is true. A numinous
experience is usually interpreted in terms of the person's culture,
what ever it may be. Thus a person brought up in a Hindu culture
tends to interpret his or her numinous experience as a Hindu, a person
brought up in a Moslem culture tends to interpret such an experience
as a Moslem, and a person brought up in a Christian culture tends to
interpret a numinous experience as a Christian, even if overtly, ahead
of time, he or she was not Hindu, Moslem, or Christian.
The only other kinds of experience a person has that are internal are
based on reasoning, observation, or experiment. (Experiment is a
variety of observation. These other kinds of internal experience
create beliefs that can cross cultures.)
There is another way of gaining knowledge, of learning truths, that
has nothing to do with this. It is reasonable for children and
necessary for adults: hearing (or reading, copying ...).
Children can expect that their genetic progenators, their parents,
want them to succeed. So children have good reason to accept the
information that parents provide. That information is hearsay -- it
is not what the children have reasoned, observed, or discovered by
experiment, but what they have heard. (They may well think of it as
knowledge they know culturally, rather than knowledge they heard,
since they learned so young. Book learning -- this message -- comes
under this rubric.)
Also, in a paleolithic band -- in the environment humans evolved --
children could also mostly depend on friends of their parents to want
them to succeed. The parent's friends would nearly be as believable
as parents. They would not have quite the same interest in others'
children succeeding, except that those children would be important to
the band some day. That meant that the children would become
important to the parent's friends. So children would most likely
believe them, especially if they were leading people in the band.
(But they would not believe them as strongly as they believe their
parents.)
As a practical matter, adults lack the time to discover everything by
reasoning, observation, or experiment. So grownups too must depend on
what others say. This is a key notion.
Knowledge either comes from internal experience -- numinous, reason,
observation, or experiment -- or comes from external experience, what
others say, hearsay.
As far as I know, fundamentally, those are the only sources.
(I am not speaking here of con men and other crooks, but of people who
sincerely believe in the knowledge they relate to others.)
--
Robert J. Chassell GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
