Speechless

[KevinM1]

I wanted to see what was atheism all about. Now I know that there is an invincible position of "show me the evidence".

I dont remember making the only possibly painful statement like "obey my God or burn".

You do realize that "show me the evidence" means that we're willing to change our minds in the face of verifiable evidence?

The problem is, the evidence we're always subjected to falls into the following categories:

1. Attempts to logic a god into existing, as though a well-reasoned argument suffices in place of actual evidence.  What's funnier is that these arguments merely create a deistic entity that may as well not exist anyway.

2. Attempts to treat various religious accounts as being unbiased and inherently accurate, and thus evidence for its own claims.  Various fallacious sub-arguments tend to follow ("They wouldn't believe in a lie," "They wouldn't die for a lie," "Persecution implies truthfulness," "These are indeed unbiased eyewitness accounts," "The stories are more likely to be true because they describe things impossible according to our knowledge of the universe," etc.).

3. Personal testimony, as though anecdotes (often filled with gross misconceptions about, well, everything) are somehow more convincing than hard evidence.  Shit like NDEs, not understanding the possibility of false positives, and the reliance on post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies.

So, no, "show me the evidence" isn't invincible.  It's just that apologetics does everything except provide evidence.  There's a whole lot of emotional appeals, word salad, and various forms of conflation (causation and correlation is my favorite flavor, for the record), but no real evidence.

And, frankly, I'm disappointed.  I think reality would be a lot more interesting if gods and devils and angels existed.  At the very least, it'd give me an excuse to blast some Iron Maiden out my windows.