Testimony: Are we being hypocritical?

[paulpablo]

I wasn't quite sure where to put this.

In light of everything going on in the county right now with powerful men and sexual assault/harassment, it got me thinking about our past discussions regarding testimony as evidence.  Though there were some nuanced differences of opinion among the atheists who participated in those discussions, on the whole it seems most of us hold the position that testimony is not evidence, and that quantity speaks nothing of quality.  Are we being hypocritical then, in accepting these allegations at face value?  If we're being true to our stated position, then we're either:

1. Accepting a serious claim as true a despite total lack of evidence 

Or

2. Accepting the testimony as evidence 

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.  

Thoughts?

There's some sort of argument that's just based on technical definitions of what evidence/testimony/eyewitness evidence is.

I would generally call testimony a type of evidence, by definition that it's some sort of indication of what is true and that comes under the definition of what evidence is.  An indication of what's true.

It is however not necessarily the most reliable evidence, and as other people have said it depends what the claims are as to how believable that evidence is.

We know women and men exist and sometimes men commit sexual assault.  So at the very least the claims are easier to believe than a lot of the claims contained in the bible in the sense that the bible contains claims of things that have never been shown to have ever been able to happen.

I've always said that the statement "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is false.  Everything requires equal amounts of evidence, what makes some claims ordinary is that we already have evidence of them happening in an ordinary day.  Extraordinary claims are extraordinary to begin with because they start off with less evidence backing them up.


I haven't judged any sex allegations to be true or false personally so no one could really call me a hypocrite.  I know the names of some of the people accused of sex crimes but never bothered to check in detail about any of the stories.

What limited things I've heard is that Louis CK wanked in front of some girls and did it really fast.  Which actually sounded funny to me but I guess it could have been scary for a woman if he had her cornered and randomly started wanking at her. He apparently admitted he did these things so there's not much more to say about that.

The rest of the men who have claims against them I know so little about, but apparently their friends and people around them knew they were up to this kind of stuff a lot of the time.

In a court case though I would say it's obvious a person shouldn't be convicted of rape purely because someone said they did it.