I see.
So on your account, if I've understood it, I have sufficient evidence to justify a high confidence in a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any of those accounts, and the fact that I lack such confidence is merely because I haven't properly evaluated the evidence available to me.
Yes?
Just to avoid confusion, I'm going to label that evidence -- the evidence I have access to on this account -- E1.
Going further: on your account, you have more evidence than E1, given your upbringing and personal experience and everything else, and your evidence (which I'll label E2) is sufficient to further justify a high confidence in additional claims, such as Thomas Monson's exceptional ability to communicate with that Power.
Yes?
And since you lack personal experiences relating to Sun Myung Moon that justify a high confidence in similar claims about him, you lack that confidence, but you don't rule it out either... someone else might have evidence E3 that justifies a high confidence in Sun Myung Moon's exceptional ability to communicate with that Power, and you don't claim otherwise, you simply don't know one way or the other. .
Yes?
OK, so far so good.
Now, moving forward, it's worth remembering that personal experience of an event V is not our only, or even our primary, source of evidence with which to calculate our confidence in V. As I said early on in our exchange, there are many events I'm confident occurred which I've never experienced observing, and some events which I've experienced observing which I'm confident never occurred, and I expect this is true of most people.
So, how is that possible? Well, for example, because other people's accounts of an event are evidence that the event occurred, as you suggest with your emphasis on the mystical experiences of millions (or billions) of people as part of E1. Not necessarily compelling evidence, because people do sometimes give accounts of events that didn't occur, but evidence worth evaluating.
Yes?
Of course, not all such accounts are equally useful as evidence. You probably don't know Thomas Monson personally, but you still take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of YHWH, primarily on the basis of the accounts of a relatively small number of people whom you trust (due to E2) to be sufficiently reliable evaluators of evidence.
Yes?
(A digression on terminology: around here, we use "rational" as a shorthand which entails reliably evaluating evidence, so we might semi-equivalently say that you trust this group to be rational. I'm avoiding that jargon in this discussion because you're new to the community and "rational" in the broader world has lots of other connotations that might prove distracting. OTOH, "sufficiently reliable evaluator of evidence" is really tedious to type over and over, which is why we don't usually say that, so I'm going to adopt "SREoE" as shorthand for it here.)
Moving on: you don't know Sun Myung Moon personally, but you don't take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of the higher Power, despite the similar accounts of a relatively small number of people, presumably because you don't trust them to be SREoEs.
Yes?
And similarly, you don't expect me to take seriously the proposition that Thomas Monson is a Prophet of the higher Power, not only because I lack access to E2, but also because you don't expect me to trust you as a SREoE. If I did (for whatever reason, justified or not) trust you to be a SREoE, I would take that proposition seriously.
Yes?
Pausing here to make sure I haven't gone off the rails.
Yes, actually, that's spot on. Good job and thank you for helping me to figure out my own reasoning. Please continue...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.