The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Randy Carson]

This is irrelevant.  The question was, if you don't believe these other gods in the same way that the atheist doesn't believe in your god, if you are arguing that the atheist has a burden of proof for their disbelief in your god, you have a burden of proof in relation to these other gods.  That you do not apportion the same type of burden of proof for the same type of disbelief is inconsistent.  Either the atheist doesn't have a burden of proof, or you have one which you don't acknowledge.


This is contrary to the majority of cases.  The fact that most conversions happen in childhood, and the greatest predictor of the content of their belief is geography and the majority beliefs of parents and culture is strong evidence that the choice of which god or religion one follows is not such an open and rational choice.  The more likely story is that the god of one's belief is chosen first, and reasons come later.  Otherwise one is left explaining the correlations of geography and culture.


This is an attempt to shift the burden of proof illicitly.  We are not responsible for disproving your claim in advance of your having met the burden of proof for your claim.  Do you not apply the same skepticism to these other gods as we apply to your god?  You won't believe them until someone provides evidence of their existence.  We won't believe you until you provide appropriate evidence.  This is how the burden of proof is properly apportioned in relation to disbelief in your god, just as in disbelief in other gods.  Your explicit dismissal of a burden of proof in denying these other gods is implicit acceptance that the atheist doesn't have a burden of proof in denying the existence of your god.  The question is not who is making the 'positive' claim, whatever that means.  The burden of proof falls on him who is making an existential claim, a claim that something exists or is.  In denying the claims of a god whose burden of proof hasn't been met, any reciprocal burden is easily met by noting that the claim has not been adequately proved.

Jorm-

I'll just say this and let it drop because you seem like a nice person whose time has not yet come.

When a police officer or an FBI agent wants to learn how to spot counterfeit currency, does he or she spend a lot of time looking at fake bills? Nope.  They study real bills carefully, and this enables the to spot the fake ones quickly.

Now, by sheer grace of God, I was born into a Protestant Christian family. Later, moved by God, I converted to Catholicism. So, overall, I've spent nearly half a century studying the real deal. Did I do some minor comparative study along the way. Yeah, some. And from an apologetics point of view, I've read a LOT about Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses and Protestantism, some on Orthodoxy, and a bit on Islam.

From all of this, I can assure you that I don't need to spend a lot of time studying the Baha'i faith to know that Baha'u'llah was NOT a manifestation of God.

Part of the reason that I'm online doing what I do is so that you don't have to spend 50 years figuring that out.