subgenius wrote:your metaphor is inaccurate.
what i am saying is that I believe if you win the lottery you can only do so if you play...what you are saying is that you believe that one can win the lottery without playing.
and with that
the stronger proof is against you.
as for reasonable doubt, it has been provided countless time in countless places - your refusal to accept it does not render it false...but it does explain your propensity for "self amusement".
Point, being it is absurd to put pearls before swine.
You continue to amaze and amuse me!
In the first place, "playing this particular lottery" yields awfully uncertain, and a great many mutually contradictory results. I can think of no approach to discerning truth that is more unreliable than that one. Why, then, should anyone ever place any trust in it?
In the second place, I and many others tried this game for years without ever getting any answers that we could unequivocally attribute to anything other than our own imaginations and desire to believe--and, though you might call me a liar for saying so, I had a sincere and strong desire to believe. However, I eventually could no longer avoid coming to the realization that desire to believe makes one vulnerable to self-delusion and confirmation bias, and that the Book of Mormon and Mormon doctrine, in general, really had very little else (if anything) going for it other than my strong desire to believe it. When I stacked that desire to believe up against the enormous and growing evidence against LDS historical and doctrinal claims, and the evidence that Joseph Smith was a clever and charismatic con artist and sexual predator, that desire to believe eventually lost the battle, much to my initial dismay.
In the third place, what constitutes winning that "lottery?" To you, winning it is receiving divine, spiritual confirmation that the Book of Mormon is indeed true and that the LDS Church is everything it claims to be. LittleNipper and others seem equally convinced that they have divine confirmation, in answer to prayer, that the Book of Mormon and Mormonism are false and of the devil. You have been unable to come up with any reason that is even the slightest bit persuasive to conclude that your "spiritual" confirmation is more reliable than his, or Tobin's, or Albion's or that of any of the countless people whose spiritually confirmed convictions conflict with your own in any respect.
I still maintain that insisting that the religious/spiritual approach to discerning truth is reliable and effective is every bit as unreasonable as staring straight at the sun at high noon on a cloudless midsummer day and insisting that it is nighttime.