Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[emjay]

I was thinking about religious indoctrination and why it's so difficult to shift and I realised it's because it's a coherent context like I was talking about before. A context is just a web of interrelated ideas/features. So a work of fiction is a coherent context in the sense that it has a lot of interrelated details that revolve around one or more central ideas. It is consistent within its own little world and that's all it needs to be to sustain itself. It doesn't have to be realistic it just has to fit together as it were because all they are are neurons providing input to other neurons and feedback loops/pockets of self-referential support. I was just thinking about it because I have a lot of religious indoctrination that still causes doubts sometimes and it doesn't have the right to do that because all that 'knowledge' about God... all that quantity over quality interconnected detail... did not come through evidence or with my informed consent; it was indoctrinated. It's just so frustrating that it is even given the time of day by my mind as potentially true, due only to the size of the context making it experience-able as 'real' in the same way a dream, book, or hypnosis is.. Islam for instance, is something I know absolutely nothing about... I don't know any of the details of it... there is no large, coherent context for it, and so it doesn't even figure into the equation. Same with any other religion other than the one I was indoctrinated into... Christianity. I just wish I could figure out how to 'unlearn' a context that didn't have the right to be there in the first place, but it has fingers in every pie (that's almost the definition of a context) so there's no central place to attack it that would entirely remove it. How do you get rid of a web of ideas? Unfortunately I'm not sure you can

How long has it been since you began doubting in ways that you found inconsistent with remaining a believer?  Because I once felt this way but the more I read and the more I became involved in the lives of those who left their ideas in print, the less emotionally and even intellectually bound did I feel to my former baggage.  I'm to the point now that I have no belief and no inclination to believe in Christianity left in me, and furthermore I don't feel any worse off for it either -- just the opposite in fact.  And if I were to be wrong about its being false, I don't see that it would make much of a difference; I would simply belong to the majority lot of human beings whom have existed.

Well it's been about eighteen years since it clicked 'there is no god', but in the time since, my confidence in atheism has grown mainly by learning and developing other much more plausible ideas about reality from science, psychology, neuroscience etc, rather than debunking Christianity. That's where I've gone wrong I think. To put it the terms of contexts, an unrelated (to Christianity) context of science/physchology/neuroscience has taken the forefront in my mind but the old Christianity context was never truly addressed, and thus never allowed to die. In my opinion only (I have no wish to misrepresent his intentions in any way... it's me that's thinking in terms of contexts, not him... I'm just saying how imo his behaviour would fit in practically with this model but not that that is his intention) it seems that Min addresses it all the time, leaving its tendrils no opportunity to get a foothold and top up the context, and it sounds like you've done the same thing but in a different way, by reading and getting involved in presumably debunking Christianity (as opposed to learning more about unrelated subjects)? I think you guys are on the right track... you can't expect to let something go unless you debunk it and cease to feed it. I don't mean I've deliberately fed it at any point, but by not challenging/dismissing every single thought about it that comes up, I essentially give it implicit authorisation to carry on doing what it's doing, which is maintaining and bootstrapping the context. That was my mistake... so now I think I'm gonna take the minimalist approach maybe not out loud but definitely in my head... any time a Christian thought comes up I've gotta say 'that's bullshit' or otherwise dismiss it

As to the doubt itself it's a kind of negative/no-man's-land kind of doubt rather than anything positive; I can't think of a single thing about Christianity that makes me think 'ah, that's plausible/possible' so it's not the case that there's anything positive pulling me towards it as it were. No man's land in the sense that if I knew nothing about it right now, nothing would convince me or tempt me to believe in it... just the same as I am with any other religion... I'm way too skeptical for that. So all it is is a negative kind of doubt that exists only because of unfinished business... because of emotional baggage that hasn't really been addressed.