RE: Testimony: Are we being hypocritical?
November 19, 2017 at 1:27 pm
(This post was last modified: November 19, 2017 at 1:29 pm by Homeless Nutter.)
(November 19, 2017 at 10:20 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: [...]To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't believe these women. I'm also not conceding that the Bible qualifies as eye-witness testimony. I'm just wondering if we've been unfairly rigid to our theists in these debates regarding the nature of evidence. [...]
No. There's something called "prior probability". It's been thoroughly demonstrated, that people do rape, or abuse their power over others. However, despite thousands-of-years-worth of desperate efforts made by countless nut-jobs, swindlers and ordinary morons - the existence of gods is as unconfirmed as it's ever been.
If rape, or any other sexual misconduct, was as mythical as gods - or, say, alien abductions - I'd be inclined to believe in Cosby's, or O'Reily's innocence, at least in this matter.
Take the Satanic Panic of the 80's, for example - many people were accused of things that simply did not (and do not) happen, except for imaginations of certain deluded people - mostly christians, may I add - despite no prior probability and no evidence, beyond "testimonies", often extracted from children, using questionable - or outright crazy - methods. This is what happens, when you try to give irrational people the benefit of the doubt and apply the same rules to their inane babbling, as you do to mundane claims.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
