Testimony is Evidence

[bennyboy]

And I believe it is your bias that leads you to argue that religious testimony is all completely and equally worthless.

It's worthless because it is contradictory among faiths, and there's no clear metric by which to evaluate the testimony of various traditions.

Your satisfaction? I've noted that people assess evidence differently and I'm OK with that, as I'm not the final arbiter of what constitutes evidence. What makes you think I'm trying to change your mind personally? I'm writing for the theoretical reasonable person. If you see your error that's great, but it's not my main intent.

When I say "my satisfaction," I speak as an unconvinced non-Christian, under the assumption that your testimony has as its goal convincing non-Christians that the Christian represents existential truth.

I've already given one factor - a person who stands to gain from testimony is given less weight than someone who doesn't stand to gain, or may even suffer loss from their testimony. I've noted with the smoking example that this is a common criterion, and I've given the example in religion of Mohammed v. Paul.

Any growing religion stands to benefit by increasing its membership-- the benefits of increased community, increased income, increased credibility by appeal to numbers, and so on. This should be obvious, I would think.

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.

I've already noted that I don't find Mohammed as credible as Paul and given one basis for that position, yet you continue to push this false dichotomy.

And then a Muslim will come in and say the exact same thing. You need a lot more than a relative weight of suspected motivations to establish credibility.