The real religion?

[LadyForCamus]

I didn't make any truth claim here; I was just discussing the validity of witness testimony as evidence and the flat denial of testimony without qualification or any critical thinking.

First, Just to be clear: I am not making the claim, "there is no God." Theists make the claim, "i believe there is a god". (Thanks Crossless!) My position is, I withhold belief that this claim is true, or likely to be true, until sufficient evidence for the claim can be demonstrated.

To address your above point: You're saying that you aren't making the claim that the bible is accurate; that Jesus is the son of God, and that humans experience a personal relationship with him? Well, that's pretty dishonest of you. What would God think about you saying that here? Just because you didn't start this discussion doesn't mean you aren't making any truth claims about your religion, and frankly, it's pretty slippery of you to try and wriggle out of the burden of proof this way.

I think that what you are doing here is called illegitimate totalian transfer. Trust is one of the meanings of "faith" and there is a reason, that the qualifier "earned" or "blind" is affixed to the word.

That's why I specified, "might". [emoji6] The reason the qualifier was added was to distinguish the very real differences that exist between religious faith (if you want to talk semantics about word meanings, when I say "faith" as it pertains to religious beliefs I specifically mean belief in the absence of sufficient evidence), and confidence in the scientific method. You will not get around these fundamental differences without committing a logical fallacy.

Other fallacies that may be present here, include straw man, and begging the question.

Um...okay, lol. Care to elaborate?

For instance, where I came into the discussion, was the unqualified rejection of witness testimony as evidence.

Unqualified rejection? Eye-witness testimony has been shown to be unreliable over and over again. Here is just one recent article on the subject, if you're interested. There are many:

Http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/h...ists-weigh

I'm not saying eye-witness testimony is irrelevant; I'm saying that by itself, it's not sufficient. If it wouldn't be enough to sentence a person to life in prison, it certainly shouldn't be enough to convince you of any supernatural, magical claims coming from anywhere.

Also, as m.h.brewer and rhythm have been pointing out along the way, much of the NT is not even written by actual eye-witnesses, but by people who supposedly spoke with eye-witnesses.

This is called heresay.

Eye witness testimony is It was said, that what was testified about in a book, was not evidence. My assumption about our conversation so far, was that you where making this argument as well. And yet here, you give an example from science calling that which is written in a database.... evidence. Now if you are saying, that what the writers of scripture claimed to have seen is not evidence, but this database is; please explain why. What is the difference?

I feel like I am talking to a brick wall...

A book full of testimonies is not the same as a book containing data derived from tests. can you name ONE test that has corroborated a supernatural claim made by eye-witnesses in the bible? Look....if science text books around the world contained language like:

"We know the earth is round because 100,000 people spoke to this one guy who SWEARS he went to space and saw that the earth is actually a sphere," or -

"Scientists know that multiple sclerosis is caused by an autoimmune reaction in the body that attacks neurons, because they heard it from a couple of doctors in Canada who swear they know a surgeon who figured it out,"

...then those books would be as shitty and unreliable as the bible!!! Science works with testable data. The bible is just people saying that stuff supposedly happened. How can you NOT see how you are equivocating "faith", and conflating here?