It sounds like that because that's exactly what is happening.

...and so what . This is a discussion forum where we voice our opinions .

Sorry, that's just not true.

Like I said earlier, Biblical exegesis is not cut and dry. Christians do have a basis for making arguments for our doctrine, you just haven't bothered to learn about our explanations. The great majority of Christian denominations do agree on the basics of doctrine.

Any religious text is open to interpretation, so naturally some people are going to get it completely wrong(those "Christians" who deny the deity of Christ), some are going to get it partly wrong(Roman Catholicism), and some are going to get it mostly right. The only way to find the truth is to investigate it, and weigh the arguments of greater minds who understand the context, history, culture, and language better than us laymen do.

We can't put the Bible under a microscope to find the truth, which upsets a lot of atheists.

This post was edited by IceMage on Aug 17 2015 10:11am

Atheists and theists have a different relationship with truth.

I can only speak for myself though, and my opinion is that truth is relativistic. I think Einstein was right but I don't think his ideas have fully hit the street yet.

There are no constant and objective truths.

This post was edited by Skinned on Aug 17 2015 10:25am

I understand that.

What I really can't understand is the amateurish eye rolling that goes on when someone else believes differently.

Whether you believe truth can only be found using the scientific method, or that truth can be found through reasoning and evidence, or that truth cannot truly ever be known... what's with the intellectual superiority nonsense? I grew out of that stage before I left high school.

Maybe they have no real sources of pride than their ideology. What is worse is that they see "truth" when it is ideology and deny it is any kind of ideology to begin with.

Yeah man, full circle. Beware the Masters of the Truth, they are to be held suspect always.

I'm a cynic, I hate everything initially and it either grows on me or doesn't. I haven't always been this way. I think PaRD has something to do with the change. And social work. It is traumatic sometimes just helping others through trauma and it wears on you.

This post was edited by Skinned on Aug 17 2015 10:33am

What about the truths of phenomenology?

Husserl did his best to smuggle essentialism into modern science using his eidetic reduction, but his explanation for it is really underwhelming. He is one of the most overrated philosophers of all time. Sartre kind of skewered everything he did throughout The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness as doing the same thing that Hegel did in his philosophy of Absolute Mind, which is bring essentialism back into philosophy, even though it is incorrect, smuggled through other ideas (eidetic reduction, Hegelian dialectics, Absolute Mind, etc).

People tend to accept Husserl's work out of convenience as it helps them with their own under-explored presuppositions.

So no, they aren't true. Even if they were true they would be contingent on a human subject or any subject, or through a cognitive process and not 1:1 relationship with reality, and therefore are subjective at best anyway.

Honestly, I'm not sure how much farther we can go than Kant as far as identifying the structures of the mind, priori vs posteriori knowledge, etc. We will need to be close to actually creating an AI or have a different understanding of intelligence altogether, which is something that may just never happen.

This post was edited by Skinned on Aug 17 2015 10:59am

Sorry for not being clear, I wasn't referring to Husserl's work or the philosophical movement, but rather in general the truths of consciousness.

We have direct access to the true and fundamental nature of conscious experience and so one cannot be wrong about what their conscious experience is like when it's being experienced.