Quote:
Originally Posted by outback  You don't have to find them. They already came, delivered their message, left some books (with lots of symbolism) and they are done. |
Ok, but many others came with messages, too. How did you know which ones were prophetic, and which ones weren't? That's what I'm trying to ask. I mean, I can drop some symbolism about loving your neighbor and tell you it came straight from "the source." Does that make me a prophet? (also when you say "already came" does that imply that we've seen the last of them, already? If not, don't we still have the issue of identifying new ones?)
It seems like group consensus is all we've got... lots of people said X was a prophet, so X must have been speaking universal truths. It just has to resonate with enough people to qualify? John Lennon the prophet?
All I've personally got to go on, is that something resonates with me as "deep thought." That's not enough to call something a Universal Truth. Seeing that lots of other people agree with me that it's a "deep thought" isn't enough to be sure of universality, either... that's just induction, on top of an assumption that we all understood the symbolic statements the same way.
But what are the chances of that we all see it the same way? Consider how many people misinterpret the "prophetic" texts and mis-use them (at least from my perspective that's what they are doing... from their perspective I am the one that's wrong about the "universal" truths.) That doesn't feel very universal.
I'm amused that objective realists complain of pseudoscience in SR discussions. But, when I ask how they identify the universal truths they believe in, the first response I got was: "because things work out..." Now I hear that they come in the form of symbolism from prophets, the identities of which I must take as axioms, I guess. I'm not saying that those are bad or wrong perspectives. I just expected something more exact, after all the SR criticisms... :-)