Why be good?

[Simon Moon]

The question is where one places the boundary, between claims that it's reasonable to entertain on their own, versus claims for which it is not reasonable to entertain at all, and frankly, you probably have a line in mind for every other claim bar your particular religious beliefs; you belong to one specific religion, after all, the supernatural claims of all the other religions somehow miss this "you should believe claims unless you have a good reason not to," schtick you've been pulling, so chances are their supernatural nature, from an entity you haven't presupposed to exist, is a good enough reason to reject those claims... it's just your specific god beliefs that get a pass, that are subject to far softer scrutiny than all other supernatural claims. That special pleading is the weakness of what you're talking about.

Your initial question was pretty straightforward.

Which of the 4 claims were the most/least believable, and most importantly, why?

And Randy completely ignored it. He failed to answer, and instead talked about certainty, and ended his response with a facetious statement. As if how regularly the argument is used, is a problem.

It's kind of an important distinction, dude. If you're going to have a conversation about the nature of claims, then discussion of the factors that go into how we accept claims is a big part of that. If you're getting a repeated theme, obviously it's something we find important.

And of course, Randy uses the same method all the time, I'm sure. I'll bet he disbelieves all sorts of extraordinary claims (alien abductions, bigfoot, crystal healing, loch ness, etc, etc) for the same reasons we do; lack of supporting evidence and reasoned argument.