quote:
If I see a shadow of a flower, and believe that is the totality of the flower, I may not be entirely correct in that belief, but it doesn't mean that the flower doesn't exist. It merely means that I have not yet grasped the totality of the flower's existence, only a limited part.
What if you're actually looking at the shadow of something entirely different that looks like the shadow of a flower. A tad tenuous to base your life around isn't it? Hey! That cloud looks like a flower.
In the end I'm with troubleshooter, I'm not going to base my life around shadows and ideas, while there is nothing solid I'll err on the side of caution and work with what I know, anything else is opening yourself up to irrational thought.
And that's just the point. Even if you don't know what is making the shadow, you can't say that what has created the shadow does not itself exist, merely because you can't prove WHAT is making the shadow.
Also, one cannot unilaterally say that spiritual thought is irrational. We may not be able to prove it, but you can't prove it's nonexistence, either. You can scientifically speculate on something that you can't measure or sense, but until you can say for a certainty that there is not an intelligence/deity out there, it's just as much of a theory as believing it is.
And if you were erring on the side of caution, you'd be a believer
