
Originally Posted by
korben
On your example of an alien encounter, to the person with direct evidence to the accounts of the encounter is not in subjective thought, but an objective one. However, the reason an alien encounter is considered subjective is because you are the only one to whom witnessed it. I would have to take your word that it did happen, I have no means of verifying your claim. There is no direct evidence that I could verify the claim that you encountered aliens because I did not witness the event. Also, there is no substantial indirect evidence either which would be used to base your claims off of for verification. If you gave me a distorted photograph, it's incapable of verifying the claim.
The issue was the difference between subjective and objective. That difference is NOT a matter of what is in the mind and what is not in the mind, but
a matter of what is experienced by you alone and what is experienced by everyone. That is the standard of scientific inquiry, that you can define a proceedure that produces the same results no matter who follows it, and that what they believe will happen or want to happen will have no impact on the result.
After all if you believe like I do that the mind is just as physical as the body then there is no reason that its content might not one day be subject to just as much objective examination as the body is. But that objective examination of the mind will never be the same as the experience of being that mind. And therein lies the difference between objective and subjective.
The example about aliens is ENTIRELY relevant to the discussion of relgion, because here we have all these people who claim that a being of superior abilities, that they claim exists entirely outside their own mind, has contacted them without providing them one shred of objective evidence by which they can prove that this being has actually done so or that this being really exists. And we naturally have a lot of skeptics who see no reason to accept this as factual without such evidence. The situation is no different, and we who were not visited by the aliens are in exactly the same position of supposing that this alleged visitation was only an occurrence in that person's own mind even though that person has every right to judge for himself that the event was not just in his own mind at all.

Originally Posted by
korben
Much like a courtroom works in which both sides must state their claim to the event that has only a number of witnesses with different stories and accounts of the actual event. Religion has several different accounts from each religion, some having many Gods, others just one. It's not about proving every account is right because that would contradict the concept of God, we must try to prove just one, but all accounts differ.
Exactly, which is why despite the fact that so many people make these claims, we must nevertheless count them as a subjective perceptions rather than as objective. On the surface in certain areas or in societies, it may seem like something that everyone perceives, but upon closer examination looking at the details we can conclude that what is perceived is not quite the same for everyone at all. Furthermore, it is clearly something that some people do not perceive. Thus these religious perceptions are something that must be classified as subjective.
Again the distinction here is NOT one of direct or indirect or one of being in the mind and not being in the mind - that is NOT the difference between objective and subjective - NOT AT ALL! Those are seperate judgements that are your perogative to make in each case, but they are not equivalent.