Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[The Grand Nudger]

That's not the issue. Deciding if and when it is permissible to end a human life, what it means to be human, and how to make and live in a just society has very little do with what someone believes about the afterlife. Whether we acknowledge it or not, everyone has a philosophical world view.

Personally, I find non-theistic appeals to the "golden rule" and evolved empathy to be such loosely held principles that one could justify almost any horror that is personally or collectively convenient at the moment. That is not to say that poorly formed and rigidly held philosophical and religious convictions don't often result in judgmental and heartless choices, but corrective measures and restraints are contained within those traditions that are not available to atheistic ones.

When societies spiral into war and atrocities are committed I don't imagine it is on account of which philosophical world view the main players hold.  I mean that in the sense that such considerations rarely factor in for the worst of the worse.  What they do then doesn't follow from their failed philosophical views but from their particular psychological twistedness and character failings.  You can say, "well if they'd just embrace xtianity this would never happen" but you know, it wouldn't happen either if I was simply appointed absolute ruler of the earth.

It doesn't seem to have anything to do with a god anyway, and obviously many people who "accept christianity" still blissfully murder others.  A disproportionately large number of murderers just so happen to be christians, lol.  

Meanwhile, appeals to god -have- been used to justify -every- horror...whereas Neo here is wondering about the what ifs his god addled mind come up with...which just -might- have more to do with god addled minds than what secular moral systems do or can justify. In the same vein..we don;t appear to have any trouble whatsoever coming up with corrective measures and restraints outside of pixie belief. Laws and prisons and good upbringing are hardly predicate on god, but they sure do end up housing a hell of alot of christers.......

I expect a believers notions of the supernatural to be fanciful...but in Neos case, as is the case with many christians, their beliefs about the mundane world and the people in it, what we can and can;t do or can and can;t justify appear to be no less fanciful....and perhaps more so on account of them not being hidden from plain view, as the divine purportedly is.

......................?

All of it, every jot above, is an attempt to argue for some sort of necessity of god in the absence of evidence...but when that fails..what;s left? God is neither in evidence nor a neccessity, either logical or practically. It sure -seems- like a useless idea, all of a sudden, and the examples chosen make it look even worse - in that they highlight the ways in which the god idea not only fails to help, but actively harms. It's, at least, a few steps ahead of tarot cards on the shittiness count.. and at best no further behind on irrelevance.