This posting is a cleaner update of a posting that I've already posted yesterday about a rational to refuse some revelations, it contained many typos. I hope this is cleaner. However here I arranged it further to be more understandable. I don't know how to delete a posting. So I decided to re-post a cleaner draft here. Also I've decided to present it here both as a question and as a poll.

A rationale for rejection of some revelations!

If one makes a claim, then either that claim is presented in an objective manner or in a subjective manner; i.e., in the former manner the claim is presented in a way such that the truth of the claim can be arrived at by procedures that are not related to the personality of the claimer, like what we have for example with scientific and mathematical data which are judged to be true by matching them with reality or with some formal axiomatic background, and these matching procedures has nothing to do with the personality of the claimer. By Contrast a claim which is presented in a subjective manner, is a claim whose truth CANNOT be arrived at by procedures that do not depend on validating the personality of the claimer, this personal validation includes supplying evidence that the claimer is a person who speaks the truth and of him being a sane person, i.e. has intact perception and conceptualization, so his senses are not subject to errors of perception, nor his judgment is deceived by strong suggestion or mental illness. So subjectively presented claims relies for its truth on validation of the personal integrity of the claimer rather than on objectivity of the subject he is claiming.

I call this dichotomy of claims as: Objective x Subjective.

Now obviously from the above definitions, if a claim is presented objectively then we are to follow the above mentioned procedures that match the claim with reality (empirical sciences) or with the consequences of some predetermined formal setting (logic or mathematics). While to validate a subjective claim we are to follow procedures that are related to the personality of the claimer himself since we don't have any other means of reaching to the truth of what she\he is saying but by depending on her\him saying the truth and on her\him not being involved with perceptual or conceptual errors by mental illnesses or suggestions or the alike. So the procedures that validate a subjective claim are related to personal verification of the claimer.

So ideally a subjective claim is accepted ONLY after the personal verification of the claimer had been made! If we cannot verify his personal integrity, then the claimer is deemed as a STRANGER and ideally we don't accept subjectively presented claims from strangers!

To give examples of such subjective claims and situations, we are to take the Patient's acceptance of what his doctor is instructing him to do, as an example. Most patients (unless they are doctors) cannot verify what their doctors are saying on objective grounds, most of them cannot understand the diagnostic and the management background that derived their doctor to make them in a fully objective manner, because they lack that kind of sophisticated objective knowledge. So they accept their doctors’ instructions depending on their trust in their professionalism, and so from the patient's perspective his doctor's instructions are handled by him as subjectively presented claims, so the patient will demand some kind of personal verification of professionalism of his doctor, this is made by for example reading his doctor’s CV, or from knowing that he is registered with a known medical body, checking his certificates, and sometimes by actual successful prior experience with doctor’s management by the patient himself or by other patients, or general trust in the health system which did that professional verification. Imagine that you are confronted with someone in a journey and he told you that he is a doctor, suppose from some foreign country and you have no way to ascertain that, would you follow his instructions when those instructions are not well known medical facts? And when those can potentially harm you in case they were wrong? The usual answer is NO.

So the context is that if one makes a subjectively based claim, then if we can't objectively check it, then we are to accept it ONLY after we verify the personality and judgment of the claimer!

However there are indeed exceptions from doing such verification: the ones that I'm familiar with are:

1. If the subjective claim has no serious consequences
2. If it already agrees with prior views held by you, so no change results.
3. If another personal or body in which you have trust had done this personal verification for you, and if you think that this body has the ability to do that and you trust that body.
4. If you don’t have any other option but to accept that claim.

Let me explain those: for 1 we have the example of a totally stranger person who comes to you and tells you that whenever a football game is to occur he always guess the correct winner team and the correct lottery winning ticket. And he wants to sell you the winning ticket at a very low price. This is an example of a low risk situation were even if you accept his claim and buy the ticket and it turns to be false, you only lost a very small amount of money, so it is not a serious situation, so you may accept a subjective claim on the basis of gambling if there was no serious consequence.

An example of 2 is when one comes to you and say that he reached a certain truth in some transcendental way, that you cannot of course ascertain in an objective manner, and the result is that you should be kind, help people, always support the weak and sick. The result here is already in agreement with morals that you already accepted before, so there is no problem with accepting this claim, because it has already been accepted before, you may accept his claims on affirmative basis.

An example of 3 is when you go to the doctor and you trust that the health system can and it did verify the professionalism of that doctor, and you have a trust in the health system.

An example of 4 is when you visit a country who doesn’t have good legislation on taxi drivers, that a taxi driver can suffer from epilepsy and yet he can escape the health system of that country and register himself as a taxi driver, so here you are in a situation where you don’t trust the taxi drivers in that country professionally speaking, they can have a seizure while driving and have an accident and you may die, so there is a risk in hiring a taxi in such a country, but suppose you are in a hurry and you must attend a certain meeting that your life depends on it, and you MUST go to that meeting and there is no other way but to hire a taxi to go there, and you don’t know any taxi driver that you can trust, still you must hire a taxi, even if that taxi driver tells you that he is completely healthy he might be simply lying? But even then you have to accept his claim, and hire the taxi, not because you believe it, but because you have no other alternative.

A part from these exceptions, the general rule is that if one makes a subjectively based claim that cannot be objectively verified then it is to be accepted only if there is a personal verification of the integrity of the claimer. If that is not present, then it is to be refused!

Imagine a person who is totally stranger to you, who comes and tell you that you must divorce your wife, abandon your parents and sons, for they are conspiring against you to kill you and take your fortune. Now the immediate response to such a claim is to ask him to present an OBJECTIVE evidence, i.e. an evidence that is not related to checking his personality, because the latter is not available to you, since he is TOTALLY stranger to you. Now if he presents no such objective evidence, then the rational stance for you is to REFUSE accepting his claim. Why because it is very serious (you will lose a lot if you accept it and it turned to be false), now the truth of his relies COMPLETELY on subjective basis which is trust in the honesty and sanity of the teller, and for which you have no evidence, because you have no account whatsoever about that person. So you must refuse his claim. That's obvious!

Another famous example of serious subjective claims are testimonies in court. In many trials the ONLY evidence that convicts a person can come from a witness to the murder. Now such a testimony cannot be granted (accepted) if we have no personal verification of the integrity of the witness. So if the testimony doesn’t lead us to an objective line of evidence that supports the testimony, then in this case the only tool to reach the truth is to have a personal verification of the witness, if he is known to consistently say the truth, and he is in no situation that push him to fabricate the testimony, and if he is mentally sane, then that testimony is the only way to know the truth of what have happened, and it is to be accepted. And if there is no personal verification of the witness, then his testimony would be rejected.

However it must be conceded that although refusing such subjective claims is the correct rational stance towards them, but that doesn’t mean that they are always wrong, for that stranger might have been saying the truth. The point is that even if he was saying the truth, your refusal was still the right and rational position you need to hold in this situation.

In other words: SERIOUS SUBJECTIVE CLAIMS MADE BY STRANGERS ARE TO BE REFUSED.

and to re-emphasize what I say, when I said "subjective" then I already mean it cannot be verified objectively, so it can only be accepted after personal verification had been made, there is no other way; and when I said "serous" I mean they are not of the kinds 1,2, above, and when I said "strangers" then we can't have a verification of their persona nor 3 is applicable to them, i.e. we cannot even verify their persona in an indirect manner. Moreover I’m assuming here that we are not in a situation where we are FORCED to accept those claims like in 4.

So we have a logical rule of inference being involved here:

Subjective claim -> Accepted only if the teller is personally verified
The teller is NOT personally verified
.............................................................so
The claim is NOT accepted.

This rule is similar to Modus Tollens.

Now what's the relationship of all of that to RELIGION?

All Revelation based religions depends on accepting "serious subjective claims" that are made by totally "stranger" beings. The prophets of those religions often say that they heard their teaching from "Angels" that they saw and heard, and that those angels revealed to them those messages from God. IF we accept those prophets as good persons who always say the truth who were not deceived by some mental illness or suggestion or the alike, then those prophets would turn to be witnesses to some extra-terrestrial experience, and thus they'd constitute some kind of empirical evidence to the existence of those extra-terrestrial beings who called themselves angels. In that case the beings whom they (the prophets) had encountered, who told them that they were angels carrying a message coming from the Creator of the Universe, those who identified themselves as "angels", those are examples of TOTAL STRANGERs. We have no means of verifying their persona whatsoever, since they are actually not even humans nor are they any kind of terrestrial creatures that we have experience with, so there is no possible way to verify their personal integrity, not only that, even the prophets to whom those beings had spoken, even those prophets cannot have any way of verifying the personals of those so called angels, because the prophets are just humans, and those angels are not humans, and moreover it is those angels who were the ones who guided those prophets, they have more knowledge, they can even change their appearance, so the possibility that those beings were not saying the truth is there! We don't have any apriori logical or philosophical argument that grant their integrity, nor do we have experiential evidence with them that point to their honesty. So the possibility that those beings were lying about their true identity is there.

Are the claims of those angels "serious". The answer is YES!. Since any sentence whatsoever that is said in the name of God (i.e. that God had revealed it) is of course serious matter, at least its belonging to God is itself a very serious matter. Now those angels are speaking lots of things related to detailed regulations of various aspects of human life, including morals, legislation, wars, social affairs, worship etc.. and we don't have even a shred of Objective evidence about most of what they are saying in all those aspects really, all of which are dam serious aspects. So the only way to accept their claims is to accept what they said about themselves, i.e. to accept their own personal account about themselves, which is of course not in any sense a kind of personal verification, since they can simply be lying about who they are. So those are subjectively made claims that cannot be objectively verified, they are dam serious, and on the other hand we don't have any possible way to verify the personal integrity of those so called angles, and we are not forced to listen to them.

So the rational stance that humans should adopt in response to such revelations coming from such stranger beings is first to see if they can be objectively verified, and those claims that cannot be objectively verified then they are to be refused, since there is no personal backing for them, and they are presented in a subject manner, and they are dam serious claims, and we are not enforced to believe in them. So they are subject to the above logical inference rule. So:

They must be declined!

The real problem is that if we say that there should be a God who created this universe, and that it is the only God, then saying that those stranger beings (i.e. the angels?) are speaking his words, makes it even a more serious claim, that it really ought to be rejected outright as not coming from that God. Since it is not imaginable that such a ONE God would ask us to adopt any solely subjectively presented account about him that comes from strangers? Otherwise we'd be saying that this God is demanding us to adopt an irrational approach to him, which cannot be. This is a strong pointer against those revelations.

So the correct way to approach God, is for us to be honest about how much certainty we have in his existence? So we must not claim that we have full certainty about that. The second is to approach him by what we think it honestly to be good, and refrain from what we honestly think is bad, to the best that we can tell, and to concede that we might not be correct in telling those always. Not to go and impose on him (GOD) our own human based expectations and figure him behaving according to our preferences.

Obviously God didn't send any revelation, but that is not a proof that he doesn't exist, and that he doesn't care about us. No! he can still exist and be caring about us, even without sending any revelation, the relationship is very personal, and individualized, it need not be universally the same for all people, and it is God who decides what he do, not our own ideational casting about what he should do. It is how we should approach him, not how we think he would approach us. I say we approach him in the best of what we know it to be good. And leave the details about God’s plan of life, death, and existence to him, since we have full trust in him.

So the correct approach to God is from below (us) upwards (him), and not the opposite way the "angels" of those revelations are conferring.

I need to note here that not all revelations are angel based ones, some have their human figures receiving direct revelation from God. However, the same argument applies, since the source of those inspirations themselves is as questionable as the angels' integrity is. Who said those inspirations were coming from God?