Outsider's Test of Faith (OTF)

[Lion IRC]

John W. Loftus is a former evangelical pastor. While he was still in the church, he took an advanced degree in Apologetics under the well-known William Lane Craig. He has since become an atheist and has written a few books on the subject of religion. I will take the following word-for-word from The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails.

1. Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis.
2. Consequently it seems very likely that adopting one's religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree. This is the religious dependency thesis.
3. Hence the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false.
4. So the best way to test one's adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths. This expresses the OTF.

So here is the Outsider's Test of Faith if any of our theists wish to take it. Frankly, I doubt that any of them will give it a test drive.

The problem here, apart from the genetic fallacy, is that people in the United States are not practicing a religion which originated in the United States.

Jews, born and raised in America, are practicing their religion in a country a very long way away in time and distance from where Judaism originated.

So the argument that....oh, youre only Jewish because you were born in Brooklyn is a fail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_popu...rban_areas

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My religion formally got started in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago Mr Loftus.