Quote:
Originally Posted by Dilettante
You could make that same argument about anything, religious or otherwise; there's no escaping the fact that all claims "exist in the mind" and that there's no way to get to any verification without going through the mind.
You could say that it's only when I start arguing the veracity of my claim about George Washington being the first US president that a conflict arises with a claim that Bob Hope was the first president. After that, there's no option but to call the conflicting claim a lie or at least false.
But it would be kinda stupid to say that both claims were true just because we didn't argue about it.
Any claim, by definition, is an assertion of its own veracity.
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Sure, but only if you argue the veracity (or investigate it if that makes for a better word) will your claim be confronted with other claims that infringe upon it. I'm not saying that you will have to deal with the falsehood of your claim - by the nature of the claim, it will most likely never be false to you - but you will have to deal with the falsehood of other claims, even if only to declare your claim true (which is the entire argument, by the way).
A claim that Bob Hope was the first president of your nation can surely be an example of a similar imagination but since the first president of your nation did not exist in the imagination only, or, at least, existed in the collective imagination that we call reality, it has to stand in light of reality as well. That's where it'll fail, of course (although your Bob Hope claim can certainly remain as truth in your mind for the rest of your life - that's not a problem).