Testimony is Evidence

[bennyboy]

In short, there are two views we can take, neither of which helps us with the God idea:
1)  Testimony is NOT taken as evidence.  Christians, having no other kind of evidence, therefore have no basis on which to base their beliefs (or to transmit them)
2)  Testimony IS taken as evidence.  The Christian narrative, being in conflict with billions of other people's "evidence," has in this sense as much evidence against it as for it, and the Christian case simply isn't compelling enough for anyone to bother with it.

Again, false dichotomy. There is a third option - we each weight testimonial evidence according to multiple factors and find some weaker, some stronger.

No, I don't think so. I believe it is your bias that makes you think your religious testimonial is more valid or valuable than the religious testimonials of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and so on. I'm pretty sure that a devout Hindu will value his own texts, history, word-of-mouth, and personal experiences as more valid and valuable than yours. His respected community members will confirm his beliefs. His excited temple members will talk of visions or of powerful feelings. Whatever you say, he will mirror in kind. He will be certain that his testimonial represents truth, whereas yours represents a misunderstanding of truth.

Since there is no physical evidence, then you will have to establish to my satisfaction not only that testimonial might be useful in establishing the truth of religious claims. You'll have to demonstrate that one faith's testimonial evidence due to "multiple factors" is in fact weaker or stronger.

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As most people who have existed have been theists based largely on testimonial evidence, I have to disagree. It can be very persuasive.

Since the particular God ideas that all these people have held have been so varied, there are three ways of looking at this state:
1) There's some underlying, non-mythological real God, humans sometimes have contact with this God, and the different religions are the struggle of minds in describing the indescribable.
2) There's something about people that leads us to anthropomorphize that which is mysterious, so we have a genetic predisposition to put a human-like face to inhuman things.
3) There really is a God, but we have no contact with such-- our God ideas are as (2) above: an artifact of the human brain's predispositions toward seeing things a certain way.

I believe these three options cover all the bases. Note that none of these options allows you to put forward the Jesus man-as-God idea as viable if you consider the testimonials of non-Christian theists as credible.