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, 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.
You’re not tracking the conversation. I understand historiography is hard. That’s not what we’re discussing. I’m not talking about historical research.
I’m talking about a way to differentiate between imagination and reality. We have a robust methodology in science to accomplish this. It’s very clear and works. Can you guess what I’m talking about?