--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [Margovan wrote:] > > Curtis, Joerg's sanctimonious tone is certainly > > irritating but comparing him to the Mumbai terrorists > > is a little harsh.
Boy, I'll say. The notion of reincarnation seems to really upset the skeptics for some reason. <snip> > But your point about what the terrorists are > experiencing is interesting. I'm not sure we > do know what they were experiencing. I'm not > ready to assume that they just read something > and then decided to face death. We don't know > the nature of how they were "called" to this > mission. On the other hand, I really can't > assume that they did have some compelling > subjective experience that matches Joerg's > either. Whatever it was, it worked pretty well > as a force compelling enough to rise above a > fear of death. FWIW, in all the discussions about terrorism (including interviews with terrorists), I've never heard even a suggestion that terrorists have been motivated by some kind of subjective woo-woo experience. That just doesn't seem to be part of the lore, and the lack is in distinct contrast to, say, what some people who have slaughtered their children report--that they were given to understand by some higher power that the children were demonic, e.g. > But what makes it NOT apples and oranges IMO is > that it was a very strong compelling belief that > their actions were right despite the fact that > society as a whole believes they were wrong wrong > wrong. They had unplugged from civilization's "you > are full of shit" meter, and were acting on their > own compellingly intense beliefs. That's one batch of apples, but there doesn't seem to be a corresponding batch of people who believe they've lived previous lives and as a result have undertaken actions society believes are wrong. > So the bigger point for me is that humans are > wrong about all sorts of stuff but we have a > tendency (this includes me) to become attached to > beliefs and mistake their intensity for > epistemological solidity. I think you really have to make a distinction between a belief adopted from external sources and one generated by powerful subjective experience. Not that the latter is necessarily any more valid than the former, but you can't use the same kind of epistemological analysis that you do for externally acquired beliefs to evaluate them. We don't really *have* an epistemological approach to evaluating profound subjective experience. > we shouldn't be too satisfied with what we think we > KNOW. What's interesting is that, as Barry has pointed out, Stu is at least as certain that there is no such thing as reincarnation as Joerg is that there is, yet you don't go after Stu.
