(June 6, 2011 at 5:33 pm)Rhizomorph13 Wrote: You use too many hearts.Yes, it does depend largely on what you deem as evidence.
For example, if someone tells me they ate tacos on Friday, I would believe them without evidence. I would take it on faith that they wouldn't lie to me.
The amount of supporting evidence for something required depends upon how important it is to you. There
are several reasons that something could be important to various degrees. For instance, in your case where
a friend tells me they ate tacos on Friday, I'll just believe the claim. There is nothing for me to do because
they ate tacos, their eating tacos doesn't effect anything I'm going to do now or in the future. There's nothing
for me to gain or lose from this information. There is probably nothing in it for them - no reason - for them to
lie about it.
OTOH, if someone makes a claim that the "too good to be true" investment instrument they are trying to sell
me or my company will make us many times the going interest rate and is "risk free", I'm going to look
at that closely before I invest - if something is too good to be true, it usually is. Bankers and investment
brokers taking these claims on faith is a major thing behind the banking crisis.
If I'm working for the health department investigating a rash of digestive illnesses, I'm going to be interested
in what people had and where and when they ate it. If one person says they ate tacos at a particular
restaurant, it's a coincidence. If a dozen people say they ate tacos Friday night at a particular restaurant when
they come into a hospital with food poisoning, that will be closely looked at. If it's shown that those tacos
were tainted, someone may have a reason to lie about eating there in order to join into a class-action
lawsuit. I'd look at them more warily.
On religious claims, where "being right" has a great positive or negative effect on you for eternity, it would
seem to me that would be much higher stakes than either the financial or public health examples I gave
above. Certainly more than what my friend had for dinner on Friday! So, since this would have an
extreme impact on a theist for eternity, it would seem that they would require a great deal of hard
evidence that the claims of a religion are true. For, if there is a true religion, and the deity in that religion
will punish one for all eternity for picking a false religion, one would have to be ABSOLUTELY SURE
of the truth of the religious claims. Much higher than the investor would! So, why do they take it with
the same evidence that they do when your friend says off-the-cuff that they had tacos last Friday?
I have almost no choice to assume, since theists accept claims of others on almost no evidence, that the
whole thing about "requirements" - everything from tithing to fasting to adhering to the morality in
the religious teaching - is all make-believe, and they know it.
