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Your posts are sounding more coherent to me than my own. Very unfocused right now. Health of both my own and my daughter dominate my thoughts right now. I find the topic interesting, but unable to invest the energy into that it deserves, so will just bow out for now unless the language I am looking for to be more clear suddenly comes to me. Both of these statements are so, so true. (or maybe an unhappy face is more appropriate when we don’t understand this and think we are dealing with the same eternal truths) I would love to comprehend for myself as if I lived in that time the difference their understanding of what Truth involved made to their culture vs how our understanding has affected ours. I am not sure that is possible without actual experience, somethings cannot be truly understood with merely an intellectual understanding…knowing the words used but not the feelings attached to them.

I thought people were saying it was closer to 30%. Am I misremembering or just out of date? Definitely not keeping up with the news and research as much as I used to.

I don’t know about Scott Adams as I am spacing on that name…are we talking about the Dilbert guy? The rest were either demonstrated to be involved in criminal behaviour or were alleged to have been. Charlie Bird doesn’t seem to fit with any of those you have pointed out as behaviour critiqued so far.

Joseph Bishop did not do that. Nor Rob Porter. Nor Scott Adams. Nor Paul Adams. Tom Kimball was an former member. Okay. You may have a point. Thanks, -Smac

More mindreading and imputed motives. I have told you I am willing to listed to what you have to say. I have not. I can be persuaded on some things, not so much on others. Regardless of whether you could persuade me, I'd still like to hear what you have to say. Thanks, -Smac

Those people all publicly criticized the church and publicly put forth their views as correct, seeking to convert others to their perspective. Charlie has shared his life publicly but never set himself up as a standard for truth on the subject. The comparison between discussing the morality of his personal choices and the morality of the arguments others have made against the gospel and the church falls apart real fast in my opinion.

In the notes for the 1852 meeting, he also says (in the back and forth between him and Orson Pratt, who adamantly disagreed with him), “I may vary in my views from others, and they may think that I’m foolish in the things that I have spoken and they might think that they know more than I do but I know more than they do.” He clearly believed he was right, but he never invokes the idea of any revelation from God as the source of his rightness. Pratt brought up many times in his arguments that they could not deprive blacks from the rights to the priesthood based on color because God had not directed them to do so, and BY never contradicts him on that. In true BY style he just says "I'm right". I agree that scripturally the arguments against SSM are not well supported.

You aren’t persuadable. You admitted as much. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Why would I try and persuade you when the answer is “No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. ”

It is not. Biology is not window dressing. Distinctions in the law are not window dressing. Reasons that would be irrelevant to address. Because see above. Well, okay. How you think this comes across as persuasive eludes me. You're not the first advocate to dodge substantive reasoning, to fail to present any of your own, nor summarily dismiss - without evaluation or any substantive reasoning - perspectives which diverge from yours. Again: I think the "Bigot!" schtick is so frequently utilized because it's all you've got. I can articulate a reasoned basis for my position. I don't think you can, either that or you are so immersed in your own worldview that you cannot accommodate the possibility that viewpoints divergent from yours might be reasonable. So you retreat to name-calling. It's also "bad" because it is biologically incoherent. It's also "bad" because the legal basis for creating a constitutional "right" to same-sex marriage was quite poor. Same-sex marriage and behavior are also "bad" insofar as it categorically lacks procreative capacity. These are also "bad" not just because "God said so," but also because we know what the divinely-intended purposes of sexuality are, and those purposes are wholly absent in same-sex couplings. These are also "bad" because they sever the institution and concept of marriage from its procreative aspect. And so on. You have no obligation to defend your position. At all. I am persuaded that you are avoiding this because you do not have a coherent rebuttal to the points I raised previously. The "Bigot!" schtick is all you've got. Yes and no. As a sexual ethic, I value informed consent. I am upfront about this. I entirely agree with you that "informed consent" is a very important principle. I sure would like too see more than one sentence about it. For example, I addressed consent in my previous post: BCA is a crime-floor, not a sexual ethic. It answers “when may the state lock someone up?” It does not answer “what is sex for, and what does it do to the people who use it?” The Law of Chastity answers the second question. That is why BCA looks spacious and ends up thin. Consent does not address adultery, as there are injured parties who do not consent to the behavior (innocent spouse, children). The Law of Chastity does address adultery, and quite well. Adults differ in power, money, fame, sobriety, trauma, and desperation. BCA treats a yes extracted under those conditions as morally sufficient because it is legally sufficient. The Law of Chastity does not. It puts sex inside a public vow before the night, so the weaker party is not left to negotiate in private with someone who holds the job, the apartment, or the audience. Consent can be yes and still be a bad bargain. An ethic that cannot say “bad bargain” has nothing left but procedure. If the only question is consent, then sex is a preference-satisfaction device. That is why BCA is equally hospitable to casual hookups, paid sex, adult incest, open marriages, and whatever else two adults invent next year. It cannot rank them. It cannot say why one form builds a household and another burns one down. In contrast, the Law of Chastity is teleological: sex is for binding a man and a woman and for the possibility of children and for strengthening their marital union. Narrow on purpose. BCA is wide because it is empty. BCA treats pregnancy, infection, and attachment as optional or merely incidental side effects, to be managed with technology after the fact. They are not optional in the design of the act. Unwanted pregnancy and abortion are downstream of a rule that separates sex from the only relationship prepared to receive a child. STI risk rises when the number of partners rises; that is epidemiology, not Victorianism. Pair-bonding and jealousy are not programming errors. An ethic that calls the predictable wreckage “the hookup culture is pretty terrible” and then keeps the rule that produces it is not serious. The Law of Chastity does not have these flaws. In the end, nobody actually lives “anything consenting adults do.” People still condemn cheating on them, revenge porn of them, the partner who agreed to exclusivity and then didn’t. They use thicker rules for their own kids than they preach in public. BCA is the public slogan; covenant, loyalty, and “don’t make me raise this alone” are the private code. The Law of Chastity is at least candid: it states the thick rule in daylight. The Law of Chastity is harder for some people than for others. BCA is easier for everyone in the short run and then outsources the cost to spouses, children, clinics, and the next partner. Difficulty is not unique to chastity. It is unique to pretending that a harm-principle floor is a map of a good life. BCA is a usable test for what the state should criminalize. It is a poor test for what sex is for. It counts only the yes of the people in the room and ignores the spouse who was not asked, the child who may be created, and the household that has to absorb the aftermath. It cannot distinguish loyalty from appetite, or a covenant from a transaction. It therefore licenses adultery so long as the lovers agree, treats infection and unintended pregnancy as technical problems, and has no inner reason to prefer a faithful marriage to a sequence of consented nights. The Law of Chastity is narrower because it is answering a different question: sexual relations belong in a public, exclusive, man–woman marriage ordered to union and to children. That is not “discrimination against consent.” It is a claim about the purpose of the act. BCA refuses to make that claim and then wonders why the culture built on it is brittle. "This" being what? I agree. "Consent" is an end unto itself. "Additional reasoning" undercuts it. Meanwhile, the myriad shortcomings and harmful effects of this "sexual ethic" are huge. I do. And the scriptures. And my own reasoning. And my assessment of biology, sociology, the law, and so on. So on the one hand you try to limit my perspective to "Because God said so," but on the other you fault me for having substantive supplemental and additional grounds for disagreeing with same-sex marriage and behavior. Could you elaborate on this? You seem to be contradicting yourself. Since you have not even tried, I guess we'll never know. The "Invincible Ignorance" Fallacy: This occurs when a person refuses to provide evidence or engage in an argument because they claim the other person is completely closed-minded. By declaring that "you wouldn't change your mind anyway," the speaker creates a position that cannot be tested or disproven. It is a preemptive strike to avoid defending their own stance. It is not. It is. It's right there, in this thread. Along with your various posts not engaging any of it. I've had various women agree and disagree with my on various topics. I think I work hard to address arguments presented to me. Here, you have not presented any. I do listen, I just don't always agree, and I don't silence myself in the face of your "Bigot!" schtick. Why it's bad. I also think fornication is bad, both because "God says it's bad" and for other, observable and apparent reasons. I can even lay those out substantively. Individuals. Sex attaches. Outside a vow it attaches people who have not promised to stay. That produces a familiar list: used and discarded, comparison shopping, anxiety about the next person, infection, pregnancy with no household ready for a child, and a habit of treating the body as a short-term instrument. Even when no child and no disease appear, the habit is still the habit: intimacy without loyalty. Families. Marriage is the institution that turns sex into a public responsibility for whatever sex may create. Fornication keeps the pleasure and disregards the responsibility. Children who arrive anyway are more often born into instability—one parent, serial partners, split attention, split money. The next marriage, if it comes, starts with a body already trained to leave. Parents cannot preach “wait” with authority they did not practice. Society. A culture that treats sex as a private hobby still bills the public for the leftovers: fatherless homes, abortion as backup contraception, STI clinics, and a dating market that rewards intensity, punishes dependability, and skews toward the incredibly damaging "hookup culture." Marriage rates and trust fall together when the main path to sex no longer runs through a household. Consent between two adults does not pay those invoices. The Law of Chastity is the short form: sex belongs to husband and wife so that union, children, and loyalty stay in the same room. Fornication is the same act with the room removed. You could address arguments and reasoning. You don't. Thanks, -Smac

Except that unlike the prejudicial priesthood ban against blacks, there has never been ANY claim of a revelation from God prohibiting gay marriage. As long as we're exchanging hypotheticals in this thread: If the Church were to publish a clear and unequivocal revelation affirming the parameters of the Law of Chastity and the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, would you accept it? I find it interesting that you have never condemned the substantial majority of Black and Hispanic Californians who supported Prop 8. Were they just being prejudiced? Also, I have laid out a fairly substantial list of propositions and explanations as to my assessment of the Church's teachings about sexual behavior. You, like SU, have not addressed that at all, and instead just go with "prejudice." I can't get on board with comparisons to chattel slavery, as there are orders of magnitude of differences there. Chattel slavery was a hereditary legal status: people were property, sold, whipped, denied personhood, literacy, family integrity, and citizenship. Jim Crow added state violence, lynching, disfranchisement, and a color line that followed you whether you “acted” or not. Same-sex attracted people in the United States have been mocked, fired, beaten, and in some places criminalized for conduct. That is real. It is not two and a half centuries of a racial caste that treated human beings as livestock. Pastors who filed against the Michigan analogy put it bluntly: no other class, including people with same-sex attraction, was lawfully treated as property. Calling disagreement about what marriage is “the new slavery” reads, to them, as theft of a unique historical wound. See, e.g., here: Black pastors protest: Gay ‘marriage’ is nothing like the Civil Rights struggle Race, in the American system you are apparently talking about, was noted at birth, marked on the body, and enforced by the state regardless of behavior. The civil-rights demand was: this person is a citizen; stop using ancestry to deny the vote, the school, the lunch counter, the marriage that already existed (a man and a woman). Redefining marriage asks the law to treat a different pairing as the same institution. Traditional Black church teaching—shared with much of historic Christianity—already constrained everyone’s sex life (no adultery, no fornication). From that view, saying “two men may not marry” is a rule about the ordinance, not a racial caste. Equating the two collapses “who may enter an existing institution” with “what the institution is.” The civil-rights story, in Black churches, is preached as deliverance from a specific evil, with a specific canon (Exodus, the prophets, King). When a later movement borrows that canon to settle a debate about sex and kinship, some hear: our dead are being used as props. Fred Luter’s line was typical of that register: gays already had the rights of free citizens; enslaved people did not. Comparing the two is, in that view, insensitive to what Black Americans actually lived through. After Obergefell, the fight moved from “let the clerk issue a license” to “disagreement is hate,” corporate Pride, school curricula, and sometimes explicit “this is the new civil rights.” For people who already thought the slavery comparison was a stretch in 2014, watching it supposedly become moral "common sense" in media and HR training makes the insult feel current, not archival. Thanks, -Smac

No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. Ding ding ding. The rest is just window dressing. I have plenty of additional reasons as well. Plenty of reasoning over and above religious sentiments. Biological. Sociological. Legal. And you aren't addressing any of it. Reasons that would be irrelevant to address. Because see above. It's bad because God said so. Why would I waste time discussing made up reasons that don't impact or shape your world view at all? It all boils down to God says its bad. So are yours. We each of us "make up" our reasoning and analysis. Yes and no. As a sexual ethic, I value informed consent. I am upfront about this. If you show me evidence that some sexual practice is in line with this, then that will persuade me one way or the other. I'm not trying to slip additional reasoning in. You on the other hand value your perception of your church leader's interpretation of god's will. But then you dress it up in additional non-religious reasoning. Addressing the non-religions reasoning doesn't change your view. It's pointless to engage with you on it. Because it's not where your view ultimately came from. It is not. It has been addressed at length. Every person that debates you (on your side of faith and mine) comes away feeling like you don't hear their arguments. You don't address their arguments. Ask any woman on here that has talked to you about women's issues. Ask anyone on my side of the faith line that has talked to you about basically anything. You don't listen. You split up posts until they loose all meaning. At the end of the day the only reasoning that matters for you is the one you admit here: No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. So whatever would be the point to engage on anything else? God says it's bad. What else is there to talk about?

Jeremy Runnells Scott Owen Rob Porter Joseph Bishop. Paul Adams. Tim Ballard. Tom Kimball. I haven't noticed much reticence about critiquing the behaviors of these persons. Again: I think there is sort of a trend amongst some members of the Church in which they conflate the not condemning the sinner with championing sin or championing behavior that doesn't lead to, or is incompatible with, a covenant relationship with the Savior. It's not like Charlie Bird is in need of an "Innocent until proven guilty" sort of defense. He, as a Latter-day Saint, entered into a same-sex marriage. There is no dispute about that, right? The Church teaches that same-sex marriage is not marriage as God defines it, that sexual relations in that arrangement violate the Law of Chastity. There is no dispute about that, right? I found the behaviors, both definitively established and alleged, of the people in the above list to be profoundly incongruent with the Restored Gospel. I don't think anyone on this board disagreed with that, but neither did anyone suggest that such an observation is tantamount to assessing their "personal standing before God." I think the same has happened here. It's not out of bounds to observe A) the Church's teachings and the Lord's commandments on marriage and the Law of Chastity, and B) Charlie Bird's very public and social-media-drenched violation of those commandments. I think we can say that and at the same time avoid commentating on "his personal standing before God." Thanks, -Smac

And yet I laid out, with substantial detail and explanation, my reasoning. I legal and other settings, a "conclusory statement" is a claim or judgment presented as a fact without providing the specific evidence, facts, or reasoning needed to support it. You are acting as if I have not laid out my reasoning, nor have you even attempted to critique it. You just jump to a conclusory statement. Well, sorta. My legal training has also been a big influence. And my own research. And my own efforts to listen to what people who don't agree with me have to say. I've been doing this for a long time. I've also been observing folks like you for a long time. Advocates such as yourself lean very heavily on appeals to emotion, begging the question, dodging/ignoring questions, motive psychoanalysis and imputing motives, motte-and-bailey, concept creep (“harm,” “violence,” “erasure,” and “safety” expand until disagreement is morally equivalent to physical violence), "lived experience" as a trump card, false dichotomies, institutional capture framed as "consensus," ignoring the costs/ramifications, denial as evidence ("You're a bigot." / "No, I'm not." / "That's exactly what a bigot would say"). failure/refusal to acknowledge or address or allow limiting principles, and ad hominem to silence and/or invalidate viewpoints which diverge from yours. Not quite. I have gone to great lengths to test the validity of the Church's teachings here and elsewhere. I have not reflexively accepted them, but rather provisionally. I have since tested and examined the Church's position for many years, and am persuaded that it is correct. I have also done quite a bit of my own research and reasoning and analysis. Biology militates against same-sex behavior. It is a genetic dead end. The plumbing does not work. Sex utterly and categorically lacks any procreative capacity or intent or purpose. Zero. Zilch. This is unlike heterosexual sex, which categorically does have procreative capacity and intent and purpose, Sociologically brand new and not particularly coherent. Legally and sociologically, the creation of a brand new constitutional "right" to same-sex marriage via Obergefell was . . . strange. Civil marriage was a legal response to a biological fact: opposite-sex sex makes children, and children need an assignment of parents. Same-sex marriage keeps the legal status and both drops the fact and is categorically incapable of facilitating it. What then, is the purpose of the State taking any particular interest in what are undeniably real but biologically self-ending private relationships? That is sociologically strange even if one favors the policy. Constitutionally, it was strange in a second way, namely, the circuitous way the Court "found" an unenumerated constitutional right. See, e.g., here: And here: As a matter of fundamental constitutional jurisprudence, the justices were required to loosen the test for “ordered liberty” so that a historically unknown form of the institution could be declared already implicit in it. Those are different claims—one about what the family is, one about how judges may rewrite it. Obergefell ran them together under “dignity” and loneliness. Your thought experiments below (better grades, lab babies) do the same thing: they change the purpose of the institution and then treat your refusal to follow as proof you never had a purpose. It is not identical. Interracial marriages can procreate. Interracial marriages can facilitate the raising of a child by a mother and father. Same-sex relationships can do neither of these things. Motive psychoanalysis / genetic fallacy. My mind can be changed, or modified/adjusted. That happens all the time. Perhaps. No. But "morality" is mostly a matter of faith and belief. I also think, as an abstraction, that unmarried couples who have sex and have children outside of marriage are not behaving morally. However, I do very little with this. There is no value in me going around expressing judgments along these lines. The interesting thing about unmarried couples, though, is that they do not have a huge infrastructure of activists, ideologically captured institutions, money, and so on to advance the moral legitimacy of their behavior. Nor do that have self-appointed advocates go dole out "Bigot!" accusations for strangers who decline, even on reasoned and principled grounds, to toe the movement's line. I think the hypothetical is too absurd and unrealistic to take seriously. Probably not. That would just be a technological workaround, not a categorical capacity for procreation. And that's only part of the problem. The other is the intentional deprivation of a mother or father from the life and rearing of the child. No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. So are yours. We each of us "make up" our reasoning and analysis. It happens, though, that my reasoning is fairly substantive, and you are not addressing it. At all. I have plenty of additional reasons as well. Plenty of reasoning over and above religious sentiments. Biological. Sociological. Legal. And you aren't addressing any of it. Well, you could address the substance of my reasoning. You could also present reasoning of your own. I am happy to listen to what you have to say. It is quite reasonable and defensible reasoning from a legal and biological and sociological perspective as well. I have laid out my reasoning. You have not addressed it in any meaningful way. You have no obligation to, of course. But this is one of the reasons I am persuaded that my position is correct, but that yours is effectively indefensible. Again, no reasoning. No rebuttal to reasoning. Just emotionalisms shot through with logical fallacies, culminating in a failure or refusal to even attempt to persuade. I think if you had a viable and coherent exposition on and defense of your perspective on same-sex marriage, you would present it rather than retreat to logical fallacies and withdraw from the discussion. Thanks, -Smac

I'm happy to follow wherever the research goes on this. Similar to same sex marriage, there is no recorded, voted upon, thus saith the Lord revelation on the priesthood / temple ban. I am unaware of Young ever referring to the matter as just his personal views, and if that is the case, I'd like to see it. I am aware of this quote (here cited at ByuStudies): https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood That sure seems like Brigham Young thinks the ban is divinely mandated. As for scriptural basis, the ban had a number of scriptures often cited to support it (now disavowed), just like prohibitions on same sex behavior. Those scriptures cited prohibiting same sex behavior are few and far between. We pretty much ignore the entirety of Paul's sexual ethic, as well as the entire sexual ethic of the old testament (where marriage is a contract transferring the sexual availability and procreative capacity of a woman from her father to her husband). This certainly seems to leave a lot of wiggle room for accepting loving same sex couples should the church's leaders ever choose to do so.

This came across my computer today. Perhaps because Pew is well known and already well-respected, they are known to have more of a random sampling method rather than the convenience methods that dominate most attempts to collect data on Latter-day Saints. An interesting, fairly comprehensive report. I note that disaffiliation/retention has been a hot topic this year. This report shows LDS retention (specifically of those "raised as Latter-day Saints") at 54% with some breakdowns by age and gender. This seems to be similar to what others are saying about LDS retention -- somewhere near half. Anything that strikes you as discussion worthy? https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/09/22/tradition-and-change-among-latter-day-saints-in-the-us/

There’s a difference between discussing doctrine and practices, and discussing whether a specific person is sinning, how they are sinning, and how God feels about their choices. I brought up Charlie’s activity in his ward because it was providing factual information. It was never meant to open up a discussion about his personal standing before God.

I am sorry. I am trying to take care of my wife and edit 809 footnotes on a book on 1930s Chihuahua. So I am not real focused. We have to go up to the cardiologist tomorrow in El Paso. That is quite a hike there and back the same day. I don't always do nuances well on the forum. There are broad categories that are accepted by most for forms of truth. Certainly there are nuances between them. None of them are seen as absolute except absolute truth which, by most gurus of the science of truth seem to be unknowable by the human mind anyway. I do think we interpret the Scriptures in ways that they never intended. Even Christ used metaphors and allegories and parables which represented different forms of truth. The very word truth in Greek meant something quite different from what we read into it today. People of faith, however, tend to react strongly to discussions about truth, especially in the words of Christ. They jump to a lot of conclusions. Take care.

In a Johari Window construct, a blind spot is something that others see in you, but you don't see in yourself. That is my personal preferred definition. I am unaware that Bourdieu uses the term blind spot. My use of the word does not imply that a blindspot is negative. I have a hard time seeing myself as intelligent. Many folks seem to think I am, most of all my wife! Having said that, one of the goals of therapy using the Johari Window Model is the shrinking of blind spots and the hidden areas (I don't see them and other people don't see them). They are two of the four quadrants in the Johari Window. The theory is that an oversized blind spot quadrant and an oversized hidden quadrant should be rightsized in therapy.

Was there a claimed revelation for the priesthood ban? I think Young, from the beginning, referred to it as his personal views, and then eventually there were others who claimed false memories about Joseph Smith saying it was wrong, but I didn’t think any president of the church actually claimed revelation on it? I think you are right though, in that the priesthood ban came from bias and prejudice, and that the prohibition against same-sex marriage could certainly be from a similar place. I think one of the issues that can’t be ignored when trying to compare the two is that from the beginning Brigham Young taught that someday, eventually, Black members would get the priesthood. There’s no equivalent to same-sex marriage in our theological history. That doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, but in a comparison, I think it’s relevant.

Except that unlike the prejudicial priesthood ban against blacks, there has never been ANY claim of a revelation from God prohibiting gay marriage. Like the priesthood ban, it is based on conservative religious prejudices that like the prejudices against blacks go back for centuries

Define how you are using “hell” here, please. LDS would typically say hell, which is a subsection of Spirit Prison, is only for the unrepentant, not for those who are only not as informed as they need to be to accept or reject the gospel and need to learn more. We do not see all nonLDS Christians as unrepentant after death. I would not be surprised if a majority of us see nonLDS Christians as repentant as LDS Christians.

Where the heck did you get that idea? We honor traditional Christianity for preserving the word of God in the Bible, for example, even if the preservation isn’t perfect. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2007/05/the-miracle-of-the-holy-bible?lang=eng Then there is the fundamental doctrine of the Light of Christ being given to every person who has existed. Much of that has found its way into traditional Christianity….the belief of love one another, widely and strongly taught in traditional Christianity, is inspiration received from God. Lacking the fulness of the Gospel does not imply lacking all of it. Traditional Christianity has received some things from God, not nothing. I would say many, many things.

I don’t think you are catching the direction of my comments in trying to understand the attributes of doxa as your responses don’t seem quite on point to my questions, which is most likely my lack of clarity in framing them, not your comprehension. I am going to step away and see if something else comes to mind to better explain what I am wondering about doxa, what gaps in your explanation of it I am looking at as we seem to be looking at different gaps.

I would say beliefs can include rational truths, irrational truths (things we believe are revealed or intuited truths that are actually true but have little evidence beyond the revelation), falsehoods, and conditional truths (sometimes true, sometimes false). I don’t see why revealed truth can’t be rational truth as well. Just because one is able to find valid evidence once a truth is revealed does not remove the experience of the revelation. I am thinking of the anecdote of the scientist who had a daydream of a snake biting its tail that led to his discovery of the shape of the benzene molecule. I have heard some describe that as God inspiring him, revealing that truth to him. If they are correct, wouldn’t that be a truth that was both revealed and rational because he could support the revelation through experiments? Couldn’t a belief in a creator be defined as rational if a person calculated the probability of the existence of whatever to be so minuscule that it made more sense to believe in a creator than in chance? Their calculations may be founded on unintentional inaccuracies, but to the best of their own knowledge and their culture’s, the calculations were accurate. If that person also had the experience they believed revealed the truth of God to them, then their personal knowledge of God would be in both categories of rational and revealed truth….if I am understanding you correctly, which is probably a big if. I am not challenging you, but trying to explore the nuances of your comments.