Why be good?

[Esquilax]

I BELIEVE YOU because in the absence of evidence to the contrary about your character, your motivations, your mental state, etc., I have no reason to believe that you would lie about something important to you.

Neither did the apostles.

You probably responded to my last post by now, and if you did I'll get to it later when I have a more substantive chunk of time, but I do need to ask this one question: do you just accept every claim until you have evidence proving it wrong? Do you not see that this will force you to believe in mutually contradictory claims? I mean, you have no evidence to the contrary of every other religious claim, so the fact that you're specifically a Catholic kinda makes your claim to how belief should work suspect to begin with.

You're shifting the burden of proof, Randy. It's not up to everyone else to prove a claim wrong, it's up to the claimant to prove it true, which is what we've kinda all offered to do, in one way or another. For some strange reason you're insisting that we ignore all of that, all the better evidence we're willing to provide, and assess the claims as true based solely on the fact that someone said so and you can't prove them wrong. But your credulity only extends to you, it's not binding to the rest of us; we're prepared to offer better evidence. You don't then get to say that we're all accepting these claims as face value, because that's not what's going on at all.