Why make stupid unsustainable arguments?

[Mr.wizard]

I'm not the one making the claim. Do you understand the burden of proof? When Christians claim that God exists, the burden of proof is on them. Proving a negative isn't necessary, Christianity isn't even worthy of refutation, and the same goes for other forms of theism.

I do understand the burden of proof, Evie. And you're right...Christians do have the burden of proof when they claim that God exists. But that's only one side of the coin.

Atheists have the burden of proof when they claim that God does not exist. Atheism is NOT merely a lack of a belief in God; it is a belief (ranging in strength from uncertainty to certainty) that there is no god. If that is your position, then you should be able to give me good reasons for it (just as a believer ought to be able to give me reasons for faith). It is a logical leap to go from "I'm not convinced by the evidence" to "Christianity/Judaism/Islam/whatever is not true." It simply means you don't have enough compelling evidence to know with certainty.

For example, is the total number of grains of sand on the beach an even or odd number? If you don't believe the number is even, shouldn't you have proof that the number is odd? If you're going to state something more than a guess, an opinion or a preference, you ought to start counting. Or admit that you don't know with certainty and remain agnostic about the number.

Further, the common cry that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is an example of confirmation bias. Since the skeptic is not inclined to believe the claims of believers, the bar is raised. On the other hand, when a Mythicist author makes claims that are not supported by real scholarship, the bar is lowered and the claims (though unsupported) are likely to be accepted by the average skeptical reader because the author is confirming the bias of the reader.  So, the end result of this confirmation bias is that something which may be quite strong evidentially is dismissed as "not extraordinary" because the threshold for what IS considered extraordinary is raised impossibly high in the mind of the non-believer. 

This is true in reverse, of course, for religious authors and their readers, pastors and their flocks. Believers can tend to be overly gullible in this regard. As Aractus pointed out, everyone is biased, so it's important for authors and readers to be aware of this bias and consider the source when evaluating claims of one sort or another.

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Fuck off, Danny.  YOU don't get to decide which scholars are real and which are not.   You keep your tiny little mind confined in a tiny little box and anything which challenges your predetermined notions is something which simply CAN NEVER BE REAL.

You're pathetic.

Aren't there universities and accreditation boards for this sort of thing?

Seems to me we ought to be able to figure out who has legitimate credentials and who is a self-published crackpot with a blog...

Atheism is a lack of belief, its a response to a claim, it does not make a claim or bear a burden of proof. Also "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is not confirmation bias, certain claims require different degrees of evidence. One example: If someone claims to have a dog, I am inclined to believe them if they show me the leash. On the other hand if they claim to have pet dragon, simply showing me a leash will not be sufficient.