Reality has to matter. It is the measure of the reliability and rationality of your beliefs. If you don't care about that, I don't know what to tell you. It's kind of pathetic.
:mrgreen:
That is all I care about! I have my ideas about reality and those exist between me and reality. I use the best forms I am able to navigate that reality. I thus don't worry if I need to correct my forms. I care about underlying meanings. You think you just exist no filter nor emtional bias? :thumbs:
If not and you do as I suspect, know full well you have bias then let us continue to discuss what constitute best forms out side both of our biases; otherwise, this is game of the pot that debating the kettle on blackness.
I can grasp the idea of the Force in Star Wars. But there's a difference between getting it conceptually and deciding that this concept has to be factually correct. I understand the Force. I don't think it's real.
If you can get God conceptually. Why then would do you express that any "natural explanation" for "statistical mystery" refutes God's existence?
what is the supernatural?
Beyond Natural. Encompassing: Extra demential -> within a psychological mentalscape which influences the physical word -> to the super-real word by which our is a simulation there-in….
Again, an abstract idea. Requires context. General in nature not specfic.
How do the religious know that the supernatural exists in the first place?
They don't. They compare and contrast the possibility of a non-supernatural universe with supernatural version. Most atheists even acknowledge a supernatural realm under some other secular heading. Supernatural was once a agreed term.
After all, they can't even define what it is, only what it isn't.
Correct hence uses of more specific distinctions like "heaven" and "earth" when outlining a spiritual idea. Did it happen on earth(real) or in heaven(in the absract).
You act as though for thousand of years people haven't been using and debating with these terms without this semantic confusion depite vastly differnt ideas. That is due to common reference and good faith. You need that if you're going to talk literal interpretations. Supernatural can be a common reference if you stop defining it as "the absurd".
They can't produce a single example of the supernatural for study.
How do you suggest we study it? We do it indirectly with the use stories or paradoxes and discussing the absract ideas at play. It works pretty good. If you have better method in the pragmatic sense I am all ears.
If you mean the specific form of supernatural often called magic. Yes it has within history been debunked. If you wonder the difference from other supernatual forms, magic says if you do X -> Y. Prayer/miraculous etc says if you ask X there is a greater chance of Y. We take literal claims of magic now frame it as common refrence: "magical thinking". A rational person might still however call something magical it is just assumed to be metaphoric.
eace
To be fair as I pointed out eariler: the modren relgious is still in a more general sense superstitious. Superstitious is not science. Superstitious is not rational in and of itself. One can be rational and superstitious. In certian contexts even rationally superstitious(it serves them). It is not a waste to split this into further distinction. I understand you find 'superstitious behavior' absurd. It doesn't stop it from existing. It doesn't make it absurd(outside your opinion) nor does it make the claims have any more credibility. To have meaningful dicussion it requires an examination of the facts. The facts are the
outcomes, the
motives, the
degree not the absruct comparable rationality of one axom transmuted to another. I sorry if you don't get that. Your loss.
