Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
Yes, history and theology are indeed quite fascinating.
How would we go about differentiating fact from imagination?
It’s very hard considering that the knowledge is decentralized unlike mainstream religion. What I’ve been advised to do, is consider the origins and context of what you’re looking at first, compare it with other documents, analyze your observations, use critical thinking, talk to people who are researching the same things, and overall, just keep an open mind. That doesn’t mean that you accept everything. It means that you should just consider the possibility.
It’s not hard and it doesn’t have anything to do with being decentralized. In science we have a very robust mechanism for separating imagination from reality. I’d be happy to explain what it is to you if you’d like. It’s the reason we have satellites and are able to have this conversation. :)
Your method on the other hand does not convince me. You said “analyze your observations, use critical thinking, talk to people who are researching the same things” etc. Let’s say two persons meet to determine the truth about a matter. They each use:
- critical thinking
- research
- analyze observations
- keep an open mind
- compare with other documents
but they come to opposite conclusions on a topic. So qualifiers alone are clearly not enough. It’s missing a fundamental piece that’s essential to differentiating if a hypothesis is true or false. Do you know what I’m referring to?
Yes, I know. It’s also really hard because we’re mostly dealing with just really old texts, and word of mouth. Take for example the emerald tablets of Hermes Trismegistus. A popular alchemical text from thousands of years ago. They have been translated into a wide range of languages from Ancient Greek, to Arabic. The original tablets are lost. With every translation, it got misinterpreted, and misunderstood. In some cultures, some things in the tablet were not accepted, so they got omitted. For example, the transmutation of metals into gold or silver. Adding on how most alchemists like to use coded language when writing instructions, your left with a mess of translations that say different things from each other, with no way of telling which is the most correct translation.