Testimony: Are we being hypocritical?

[bennyboy]

Thoughts?

It comes down to an important point-- evidence must only be sufficient enough to convince people. If they are inclined to believe something, they will accept particularly weak and low-quality evidence. If you want to convince most people these days that a man in power abused his power to gain sexual favors-- this really isn't a hard sell.

A couple things should be pointed out, though:
1) Bitches will lie, and heads will roll. Now that there's real momentum in Hollywood, the witch hunt is properly on.
2) Convergence matters. When you get unrelated people with no clear motivation to independently agree on behaviors, then there is a sense of credibility here.
3) For the most part, it's not a criminal case. It is people getting called out on social media. The standards for evidence in the court of social media are almost zero.

If you said, "Hearsay is NEVER sufficient evidence," but you want to lock up men who have been accused by hearsay, then there's a conflict there. But if you consider sexual allegations highly likely, and the existence of a Judeo-Christian God highly UN-likely, then the Christians have the duty to meet whatever standard of evidence you hold FOR THAT IDEA, or they will fail to convince you, and you will not attend your church or put money on the donation plate.

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For me the question has never been if testimony can be accepted as evidence, but if it can be accepted as evidence on it's own.

It's the same question in this case.  What evidence will there be for sexual assault that happened maybe a decade or more ago?

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With respect to the OP, the issue largely comes up with respect to NT reliability. The point generally made by believers is that skeptics have ruled out the supernatural in advance or at least raised the burden of proof to an unobtainable level. As such the very nature of the thing we are trying to prove serves as the reason given for not accepting evidence of it. It's a no win situation.

The thing is, we have all observed plenty of inappropriate behavior by men, sometimes face-to-face; it's not a matter of whether this is possible, but only of WHO has done it.  We have not all observed plenty of things that can only be attributed to God; we are not in a position to say from experience, "Some Gods are definitely real, but we just have to figure out which ones."

If we already believed that many gods were probably real, then we'd very likely accept flimsy testimony: "Yeah, I saw Thor's hammer, and so did my sister!  He was waving it around in a hotel room after a coke party."