Every single one of the things you mentioned are claims, not evidence. Maybe I can rephrase my question:
When I buy a delicious Share Size Snickers bar at the 7-11, I see on the package that it claims that the bar weighs 3.86 ounces. It feels a little light to me; I am skeptical of the fact that this particular Share Size Snickers bar weighs what it claims on the package. My options are:
- Take the weight printed on the package as the truth and don’t question it any further;
- Put the bar on a scale and measure its weight independently, to confirm whether the weight is correct.
With regard to religion, you appear to be doing only #1, and I’m asking how I can do #2. What are the tools and evidence I can use, akin to the scale, that are independent of the religious text (= the Snickers wrapper) and can show me that your claims are valid?
The same question could apply to emotions. How do you put it on a scale and measure it’s weight? As a sufferer of mental illness myself, the same question applies there: how do you put mental illness on a scale?
Yet, well before the advent of CT scans and other medical wonders, people didn’t doubt the existence of emotion or mental problems.
They may not have known the cause, but they understood them based on their experience and the effect on behavior.
Emotions can’t be seen, but you can see the effect they have on a person. In the same way, no, you can’t put Spirit on a scale, but you can see it’s effect in people’s lives and feel it through experience
OK, so it sounds like you’re freely admitting that there is currently no test, evidence, measurement, or other way that you can show the truth of your claims.
Edit: Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen what you’re talking about regarding seeing a spirit’s effect in people’s lives, and I definitely haven’t felt it myself.
Therefore, I claim that while I believe you are being honest and genuinely think you feel a spirit, it doesn’t actually exist, and instead you have been indoctrinated into a cult (which you freely admit you were born into), and that indoctrination has programmed you to believe things that don’t actually exist. I’d like to find a way to determine which of us is correct. How do we do that?
Obviously you can’t prove it one way or another. That’s the whole point. Are you new?
