J
Jewel34
Guest
I don’t believe it either. Religion is not a “vast conspiracy” to keep people in line, though it works beautifully in that role, too. The believers are honest in their conviction. They are really concerned about the fate of the “heathens” and their effort to “spread the light” comes from their desire to help us mend our ways – in other words it comes from real agape. Of course, good will is not enough. It needs to be accompanied by cold, dispassionate logic, where only facts count, nothing else. And that is where they “miss the mark” (sin?
).It would be fun to conduct a conversation with someone who does not commit the usual fallacies, and who is actually willing to respond to the actual arguments instead of trying to evade them. The first step would be to establish the groundwork for the nature of “evidence”. And this is the first stumbling block, too. The believers consider the “unsupported hearsay type” of evidence (the Bible, the sacred tradition, etc…) as valid and admissible. The skeptics do not accept this approach. And the conversation stops before it could even start.
Whose fault is that? It is obvious that “hearsay evidence” is not admissible in serious cases of the court of law. Everyone (including the believers) would be horrified if they would be the recipients of a guilty verdict, solely based upon the “evidence” of “well I heard from Joe, who said that he heard it from Jim, who said that he read it somewhere that the accused attacked, raped and killed a dozen children when he was on vacation. No, the bodies were never found, and there are no children reported missing, but Jim is a very reputable person. How could anyone doubt his word? Do you dare to call him a lunatic, or a liar?”. And the believers wish to establish the “veracity” of the miracles, of resurrections on such flimsy “evidence”. Sorry, no dice. We are willing to listen, but we are not willing to buy the Brooklyn bridge unless some real evidence is presented.