Testimony is Evidence

[bennyboy]

Do you have any method to add to this?  (People still seem to be avoiding this point)  

Yeah, I'd add one thing. You take as a starting point an idea (let's say the God idea), and then establishing what evidence will / won't be accepted in considering the idea's validity. That's fine. If one is exposed to the God idea, then you'd start looking around and seeing if your experiences, your world view, and the things other people have told you are consistent with that idea.

But what we haven't talked about is how you come up with a starting point worth bothering with. People say all kinds of stupid garbage that I don't even bother with, because it's so obviously made up or just plain false that I don't want to waste my mental effort.

The problem with the religions today (in my opinion) is that we now have easy access to better quality information, and this makes it impossible to consider mainstream religious ideas. Yeah, you might have a billion testimonials from faithful Christians. But unfortunately, Muslims, Hindus, etc. are online too. That it's so easy to communicate makes testimonial much LESS valuable. A thousand years ago, you might only have social access to say a few dozen or a few hundred people. Now it's maybe 3 billion. If you start trying to collect and openly consider 3 billion flapping mouth-holes' evidence, you'll be dead LONG before you get through even 0.1% of it all. The solution is this: "La la la la la I can't hear you." But if you do that, nobody will listen to you, either.

Consider this. People, on average, are pretty damned stupid. And HALF of them, by definition, are even stupider than that. But they can figure out how Youtube works. So you've got maybe a billion yokels all over the internet saying all kinds of shit about all kinds of things. I'm not thinking about whether there are alien abductions, or magic crystals, or ghosts in the Whitehouse, or the earth is flat (holy shit, this is a thing, now!). So if you want to even GET to the evidentiary stage, you'll have to show that your idea deserves to get past my filter.

So this is what I'd add to the process-- you need subsidiary evidence just to get to trial, so to speak, before you even challenge anyone to consider or refute the evidence by which you mean to establish the truth of an idea. And I don't think that the Christian position has even enough evidence for me to start the process of seriously considering it.