angelo wrote:GrahamH wrote:Destroyer wrote:GrahamH wrote:
Tolerance / acceptance is mentioned, but where does "being genuine" come from? Accepting some experience "is real", or not, is not really about jucging if the person is genuine / honest. It's about whether their belief is justified by evidence and reason.
Genuine is just another word for real, Graham. This is what the OP is all about: accepting other peoples reality, as being genuine to them. It is very easy to explain that having such a tolerance would be trivial and provide us with no information at all about what is reliable and what is not. But that is what the OP has presented to us here.
OK, "being genuine in their reported experiences" suggested something else. "Genuine reports" are not contentious. People have unusual experiences and they report how they seemed to them. Those reports being accurate reflections of objective reality is the controversial point.
Others are being genuine, but are they correct or mistaken?
A schizophrenic would think his/hers delusion are real. In fact most religions originated from these people. In those superstitious times, what would a naivete think if a delusional person told him/her a god gave them a messege for mankind!
How about "demonstrate your god is real"?
Extraordinary evidence and all that.
I doubt it actually requires schizophrenia to have a religious delusion. I'd say it only needs a cognitive illusion (c.f. optical illusion etc but more about how you interpret what's happening than seeing, feeling or hearing something that seems real.
You can find plenty of fairly normal people who think "everything happens for a reason" and put some effort into making up reasons for coincidental events. Sometimes they attribute it to unseen conscious agency (e.g. God) They don't need a hallucinations of a burning bush to do that.
jamest on this forum thinks he (and everyone else) is god acting out worldly experiences (your subjective mind is actually One God having experiences of being you without simultaneously experiencing knowledge of being God. This belief has led him to preach his gospel of "One God" for years. I don't suppose he is Schizophrenic. More likely just caught up in grandiose ideas and fighting the good fight.