Is Accepting Christian Evidence Special Pleading?

[SteveII]

While I am going to let you have the last word in our back and forth-

Thank you for acknowledging me.  Some people just stop responding which I find rude, considering I do take the time to give thoughtful responses; snark non withstanding. 😏

I AM going to clear this little misunderstanding up. 

In my OP, I said "For the purposes of this discussion, eyewitness testimony (from any religion) is evidence." under the section where I was defining my terms.  This is because we just came off a rather long thread where some of you, despite logic and the reality that we as a society do accept testimony as evidence, actually have the position that testimony is NOT evidence. I was not going to rehash that nonsense.

Again...you're just asserting that witness testimony counts as evidence, and now you're declaring winner of a debate we just had on the subject, which was FAR from settled when you and Road dropped out.

Your entire argument here, in defense of special pleading charges, hinges on us accepting your assertion of witness testimony as evidence.  Obviously, I'm no expert on formal argument structure, but your position in the OP looks something like this:

1. Witness testimony is evidence
2. Christianity has more witness testimony than other religions 
3. If Christianity has more witness testimony than other religions, then it has more evidence 
4. Since Christianity is better evidenced than other religions, special pleading does not apply

No one here (except Road) accepts premise 1.  And, if you can't get 1. by us, you can't get to 3.  If you can't get to 3., then you haven't justified your conclusion.  Asking us to accept without question, or assume for no other reason than the success of your argument that testimony is evidence, is absolutely unfair and to me, a dishonest debate tactic.  Your opinion that our objections to the arguments for "witness testimony is evidence" are nonsense, is just that.  An opinion.  It has no bearing on anything in this argument regarding special pleading.

YOU have to read in a lot of extra meaning to those words to come up with "For the sake of the argument, let's assume The Bible is evidence

Is that not what you're asking us to do?  I mean, isn't that your whole thing? That the Bible; the Christian testimony, is the evidence?  Aren't you the one who gets bent out of shape every time someone tells you, "the Bible is the claim, not the evidence"?

You do know that not considering testimony as evidence is a very fringe idea, right? Most people here (even atheists) do not hold to that. In fact every legal system in the world illustrates that point quite clearly. Additionally, you would have to discard 99% of what we know about any history because...well...it is just people writing down what they think happened. Let it go. It really does sound silly.