Evidence Verses Faith

[Kyuuketsuki]

I am a retired homocide detective. Not rich or educated by any means, but I love to learn and talk about the Bible. More so with atheists because they don't have as much religious influence. Actually they have it but it is sort of second hand. Their limited understanding comes from the pagan / Xian myths.

I have good reason to lack "faith" in the UK legal system (and my understanding is the US one is broadly similar) ... partly because I have been a juror twice (and Jeremy Clarkson was right when he wrote about the jury's being scarier than the criminals) and my experience of the law from "the other side" has been rather negative and I finally realise that the law is about anything but truth, it's simply about winning.

I want to talk about the importance of faith and evidence. One of the last cases I worked on was that of a man who was shot in his own apartment. The gun was dropped beside his body. I walked into the place and saw only that much and knew that he had been shot by a woman most likely; possibly a child, elderly person or imigrant but most likely a young woman. The rookies couldn't understand how I could have thought that and were amazed when two days later a young woman turned herself in for shooting the man.

How did I know? Faith or evidence? I had faith in my experiences on the job and thus all the evidence I needed. When a woman shoots a man out of passion she will most often drop the gun as if to separate herself from what she realizes she has just done. She doesn't think to hide the weapon and she doesn't care about the gun anymore.

Inexperienced killers having been backed into some corner might do the same but since this was a young man in his own apartment it was most likely a woman. I could have been wrong but I wasn't

That isn't faith though, it's intuition (if you like) based on (presumably) a great deal of experience, it's no different in principle that me making an intelligent guess about what might be wrong with a computer system based on minimal evidence (to many computer novices what I do apparently can seem like magic, I would imagine that to be true of science and scientists too, indeed anyone with expertise in a given field.

Another case I worked on years ago a man was witnessed in a park standing over a man shot to death holding the murder weapon in his hand. I didn't think he had done it even though most would have taken the scene as evidence of his guilt. It turned out he didn't do it.

Faith and evidence can both be wrong. Faulty.

And again that is not hard evidence although I would agree it would certainly have made him a strong suspect. Legal evidence requirements (at least in the UK) are not as strong as those required for science.

I have faith in the Bible because it proves itself to me. I have gotten to know it well and it never fails me. Its evidence speaks to me. Not so with you. Primarily because you believe in the myth of Christendom and observe its bloody history.

Good for you but it ain't science.

The soul, for example. I could write a big post on what the soul actually means from the Bible and you wouldn't be at all interested other than to say that it doesn't fit with what most Xians teach. That is because they teach a pagan influenced version of the soul.

I'm sure you could ... despite the lack of evidence for a soul and the contra-indicative evidence that in fact the soul is not the seat of whatever it's supposed to be ('spose you're gonna have to clarify what you mean by soul here, I'm going on standard Rat Catcher claims).

What does it matter to an atheist? Well - for one thing you would be dismissing the Bible through someone elses biased interpretation without investigating what the Bible itself says, which by the way, you shouldn't do with my interpretation either, but also because when a Xian says to you that your soul is going to be tormented in hell forever it would be nice, I would think, to point out to a Xian that that isn't true.

An awful lot of atheists have read the bible, cover to cover ... I admit I haven't but I have one (2 actually and that's not counting the one my wife has, I have 2 Koran's as well) so can look up what I want and it is on my list of things to do.

It is important to know what you are dealing with if you are going to deal with it.

I agree on that one, but I don't think it necessarily invalidates referred opinions.

Kyu