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Goodbye Jesus

Absence Of Evidence Is Not Evidence Of Absence?


Neverlandrut

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Yep, that's the rub.  If one has no evidence for something, one should have no compulsion to believe it.  Faith-based religions suggest, on the contrary, that one is utterly and completely compelled to believe things without evidence (or at least without any good evidence).

 

The common religious notion that you will be tortured forever (or for a really long time, depending on the sect/religion) if you don't believe things for which there is no evidence for is a gross form of manipulation and one of the most perverse tendencies of human religious behavior...

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Yep, that's the rub.  If one has no evidence for something, one should have no compulsion to believe it.  Faith-based religions suggest, on the contrary, that one is utterly and completely compelled to believe things without evidence (or at least without any good evidence).

 

The common religious notion that you will be tortured forever (or for a really long time, depending on the sect/religion) if you don't believe things for which there is no evidence for is a gross form of manipulation and one of the most perverse tendencies of human religious behavior...

I can't give your policy enough rep points! what if believing In this false narrative empowered one to be good and live an honest life? That would be good even if it was the fruit of false belief.

 

Define good evidence

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Yep, that's the rub. If one has no evidence for something, one should have no compulsion to believe it. Faith-based religions suggest, on the contrary, that one is utterly and completely compelled to believe things without evidence (or at least without any good evidence).

 

The common religious notion that you will be tortured forever (or for a really long time, depending on the sect/religion) if you don't believe things for which there is no evidence for is a gross form of manipulation and one of the most perverse tendencies of human religious behavior...

I can't give your policy enough rep points! what if believing In this false narrative empowered one to be good and live an honest life? That would be good even if it was the fruit of false belief.

 

Define good evidence

It may provide a frame work of social reinforcement to live a moral life (which is good in and of itself), but belief in supernatural beings and the supernatural claims of religions hardly deserve credit for this. In fact, many biblical teachings are very immoral. Yet many Christians are moral people. They do not get their morals from the bible (If one reads the bible, it's very clear why that is so.). They get them from social reinforcement within the communal religious setting, from leaders who value morality. They are then taught to interpret the bible in light of those moral values, then are told the bible supports those moral values (circular reasoning fallacy). There have been ample studies done to determine the relationship (if any) between the degree of religious belief and social health within countries. In most all of them, the results show that the more religious a nation (yes, Christian nations included), the higher the rates of violent crime, teen pregnancy, poverty, and a few other factors I can't remember. It also showed that the more secular a nation is, the lower the rate of violent crime, teen pregnancy, poverty, etc. These results are correlative only and do not prove that being less religious causes better social health, but it does disprove the notion that being more religious causes better social health.
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Yep, that's the rub.  If one has no evidence for something, one should have no compulsion to believe it.  Faith-based religions suggest, on the contrary, that one is utterly and completely compelled to believe things without evidence (or at least without any good evidence).

 

The common religious notion that you will be tortured forever (or for a really long time, depending on the sect/religion) if you don't believe things for which there is no evidence for is a gross form of manipulation and one of the most perverse tendencies of human religious behavior...

I can't give your policy enough rep points! what if believing In this false narrative empowered one to be good and live an honest life? That would be good even if it was the fruit of false belief.

 

Define good evidence

 

 

Wanderinlostchild,

 

I am personally not anti-religion in a broad sense.  So, I would say that certain religious beliefs and practices can be beneficial to leading the good life-- meditation, almsgiving, acts of kindness, exhortation to honesty and humility, cultivating a sense of awe, etc.  I am more anti-dogmatism and dislike people threatening others with divine wrath and hellfire for failing to see the "truth" of certain speculative and dubious metaphysical positions.  

 

Good evidence?  Good question!  I think I'd say that religious belief often fails because it cannot be verified by our senses or by experimentation.  They can't deliver on their promises for a better life, higher morality, more inner peace.  No group or sect seems to be inherently more "good" than any other.  Some somewhat random thoughts...

 

  • Holy books from different religions seems contradictory based on the way we look at evidence in every other area of life.  The existence of things like textual discrepancies and lack of clarity in Scriptures seems beyond any reasonable doubt.  Prophecies always seem very connected to their times-- there are not Biblical or Koranic prophecies about the computer age or space flight for instance.
  • Miracles, if they exist at all, never seem to be of the obvious kind.  The whole "why won't god heal amputees?" and "why won't god heal children with cancer?" types of arguments are fairly persuasive to me here.  
  • Sacraments and ceremonies seem to be without power or efficacy.  The "proof" seems undetectable-- which makes it very fair to ask if there is anything really going on.
  • Do I know how the universe came to be?  Of course not.  Is it utterly amazing?  Yes.  But trying to say that some particular god or another made it for some particular purpose seems to create more questions than it dispels.  And the more precise a religious belief is, the more demonstrably wrong it seems to be.  (Disproving inerrancy is fairly simple-- disproving some form of liberal spirituality is far more difficult and subtle.)
  • If dogmatic religions support morality, it seems strange that "heterodox" people are not more or less moral than "orthodox" people (at least in my experience)-- even according to their own standards of what morality is.  If "by their fruits ye know them" is true, we can't seem to know that any particular religious dogma is true.  Why aren't more Sourthern Baptists "like Gandhi" if they have the Holy Spirit inside them?  Why don't Christians have more unity of doctrine if they are all one with Christ?
  • Having crucial more-important-than-life-or-death decisions riding on our ability to "know" whether the Trinity, Satan, angels, some doctrine of textual inspiration, the afterlife, the Atonement, the extent of canon, the precepts of the Apostle's Creed, the inspiration of the Koran or the Gita, etc are true seems very odd indeed.  If any of these things are true, they are far from obvious, not verifiable, and suggest a bunch of logical absurdities.
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Thanks aggie and neverland! Surprisingly helpfull.

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