> A problem: you're talking to someone who used to be religious, so I have as much access to the internal thinking of a religious person as you do.

Just one way you've missed the mark: you are speaking as if your access to my mind is as good as it is to yours.

> Short answer: not in any interesting way.

To you, or to all people?

> From large quantities of experience, I would guess

At least here you realize you're guessing.

> that you yourself don't believe in any other context, as evidenced by the fact that you don't practice them.

How could you possibly know this?

> Those pages, particularly the latter, are another example of poor communication being presented as intelligence. If we translate to English instead of philosophy-speak, it boils down to an argument about whether perception is reality or not.

Here you are speaking as if you perceive reality as it is directly, no interpretation, no bias.

> Let's cut to the chase with a relevant parable:

> After all, perception is reality, so if you're the Buddha and you perceive being cut in half with a sword as no big deal...

It may be relevant, but it certainly isn't representative.

> ...that will be just fine, right?

Incorrect. Might you be thinking in binary?

> The thing is, science is perfectly capable of answering this question--it's not unknowable.

"Science" only has volition through scientists (or "scientific thinkers"), and Humans very often are not able to not know things (particularly educated Humans at times....a little knowledge is a dangerous thing as they say). Studying science does not turn one into a Perfectly Rational Human, after all.

> The experiment of cutting someone in half with a sword...

Look at you milking this incorrect strawman!

> you already believe

You can not read my mind. You are literally hallucinating.

> So if you're about to make an argument about direct and indirect realism, I'd have to ask, why do you believe that reality is reality when it comes to swords (and everything else in your day-to-day life), but you suddenly you want me to believe that perception is reality when it comes to your invisible friend?

Please, tell me who "my" "invisible friend" is, Human. Tell me in vivid detail, I would really like to know this about my actual, not indirect self.

> My only opinion of the unknowable relevant to this conversation is that by definition, neither of us knows it.

Note that this itself is an opinion (an opinion of an opinion).

It is also a tautology, which in this case I would classify as cheating (you are making claims to know the unknown, and backing it up with a tautology).

> More parts of philosophy I think we can discard without losing anything of worth

When you say "think", I'm curious what you mean. Could you (after the fact, giving you an advantage) write out a pseudocode representation of the chain(s) of logic (and the axioms & premises upon which it is based) you ran to arrive at that incorrect conclusion? Because I have a sneaking suspicion there might be some heuristics and bad axioms(!) in the cognitive pipeline.

> More parts of philosophy I think we can discard without losing anything of worth:

> 2. Talking about the unknowable as if we know it.

Ok, this is too much. Have you been putting me on this whole time?

I'll shoot the fish in a barrel in your followup later on (I am "posting too fast"...what on this site isn't at best a half truth?).