(September 22, 2015 at 8:00 pm)WishfulThinking Wrote: ... The world is filled with thousands of religions and beliefs (roughly 4,200, if google is correct), one of which is probably true. ...
What reason do you have to believe that? It is entirely possible for them all to be false. Given that most of them come from primitive people who were ignorant of the way the world works, we can be pretty sure that they got things wrong even before we start looking at the particulars.
If you were serious about wanting someone to convince you that your religion is false, you would want to tell us what your specific type of Christianity is. The approach one would take with a Catholic is different from what one would take with a fundamentalist Southern Baptist. And even within a specific type of Christianity, individuals have different beliefs. It is very common, for example, for people who call themselves "Catholic" to disagree with official Catholic doctrine in many instances (e.g., the morality of using birth control, etc.). So you would want to start by telling us the beliefs that you regard as important to your specific religion.
However, we can say that there isn't any good evidence that any type of Christianity is true. Just like there isn't any good evidence that Santa Claus lives on the North Pole. Do you think it would be reasonable to require a specific proof that Santa Claus does not live on the North Pole before rejecting the belief? Do you approach other questions that way, that you believe everything until it is proven false? If so, you must also be a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, etc., until you encounter specific proofs against them.
The idea of an afterlife is silly because your mind is pretty well known to be some processes of your brain or the result of some processes of your brain. (This is known through a variety of things, such as the study of brain-damaged people. It also explains why it is that your mind gets drunk when sufficient alcohol is introduced into your brain.) When your brain stops its processes, your mind is gone and so you are gone. So there is no possibility of an afterlife.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
