The Holy Spirit (Part 1)

The Bible is so utterly vague in most of its descriptions of the Holy Spirit that it becomes obvious upon an unbiased examination of the Bible itself that there is no support in its texts for many popular notions and statements about this part of Christian theology.  More foundationally, there is nothing but subjective emotive or general psychological experiences that might seem to point to the presence of the Holy Spirit, making any belief that the Holy Spirit is near by a being that cannot verify the correspondence of many perceptions to outside forces fallacious--even if Christianity is true and despite all the evidence suggesting it is true.  There is even little in the Bible about the Holy Spirit in the first place.  Epistemologically or when it comes to Christian metaphysics, the role and importance of the Holy Spirit is relatively minimal by comparison to certain other things.

Again, there are crucial epistemological barriers to ever knowing if the Holy Spirit is present or actively trying to bring something to a person's attention, even if Christianity is true and the Bible is an accurate reflection of Christianity.  All one could ever have short of omniscience or telepathy is the perception that it seems like the Holy Spirit is there, and any rationalistic or Biblically-sound thinker would never believe in anything because of this except that the perceptions exist, that they seem to be caused by the Holy Spirit, and so on.  Pneumatology, the branch of Christian theology about the Holy Spirit, is not known experientially or Biblically by a subjective, unverifiable perception of the Holy Spirit.

Then there is the fact that different people who claim the Holy Spirit is telling them contradictory things cannot possibly all be right at once--though even the ones who are right could not know they are correct, and they would have succumbed to one of the most asinine ways to fallaciously approach Christian theology and life as someone supposedly committed to them.  It is not true by logical necessity that the seeming presence or prompting of the Holy Spirit means it is actually there, but even aside from this, the many people who believe or assert that the Holy Spirit guides them cannot all be simultaneously right.  Moreover, since the Holy Spirit would be in alignment with the actual teachings of the Bible, someone who says the Holy Spirit has told or taught them something that contradicts the Bible are automatically lying intentionally or too irrational to grasp their hypocrisy.

An evangelical who thinks the "conviction" of the Holy Spirit is the reason they hate profanity, for example, already believes at least two things that are false: the idea that profanity is Biblically sinful and the idea that the Holy Spirit is "convicting" them about this.  The same holds true of the evangelical who thinks the Holy Spirit torments their conscience for Biblically innocent things like sexual attraction, enjoying horror films, or any other nonsinful thing that legalists pretend the Bible condemns.  In this situation or others like it, the Holy Spirit as presented in the Bible could not possibly be on a legalist's side because the Bible itself teachings things that conflict with what such Christians ascribe to it.

Before one even focuses on what exactly the Bible claims about the Holy Spirit, these objective philosophical facts about epistemology and contradictions need to be understood if one is to grasp the knowable truths about Christian theology in this area, as well as how to live it out or react to others if they pretend to either know the presence Holy Spirit or to have been given accurate divine revelation from it when it contradicts the Bible.  Even if someone's belief or statement that the Holy Spirit is teaching or convicting them of something does not oppose what the Bible actually says, it would still, even then, be unknowable if oneself or another person is truly experiencing the presence or guidance of the Holy Spirit anyway.