• Christian school teacher arrested for alleged sexual assault; more victims suspected
(archived link)
• Christ the King bookkeeper gets 2 years in prison for embezzling church funds
(archived link)
• Ex-teacher at Pope John XXIII High School is sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking upskirt photos of students
(archived link)
• Pakistani religious body declares using VPN is against Islamic law
• Hate pastor renegs on promise to refund tithes
• Priest faces life imprisonment over third child sex offences conviction
• Church of England head resigns over handling of sex abuse scandal
(archived link)
• Ohio pastor accused of raping a juvenile facing 6 felony counts
(archived link)
This argument is only as compelling as “There are over 5,000 explanations for what the sun is. But don’t worry, only yours is correct.” Or “There are over 5,000 ideologies believed in by humanity. But don’t worry, only yours is correct.”
The difference is, with the sun, you can actually look up and see it. You can use a telescope to see it in detail. You can determine which of the 5000 statements is true. You can study and understand it. With religion, they all have an equal basis in reality
What if my god is the sun? Check and mate.
Before you try and blaspheme, just know the power of my deity can and will give you cancer if you don’t anoint yourself with the proper sacrificial ointments.
What Solar Piety Factor ointment do you recommend?
It depends on the types of sin happening in your local environment. Some places are exposed to more levels of gods wrath than others.
My environment is apparently steeped in sin based on current wrath levels, and only shows signs of increasing. Additionally, I am one of God’s cursed races, I bear the Nuclear Overlord’s most spited complexion.
The sun is a cruel, but righteous god. May your melanomas be painless and swift.
Understandable
Uh, my god is a giant space lobster that eats planets. I’ll have to ask if they can eat stars, but I’m guessing the answer is yes.
They also spit acid and fire, have laser eyes, and have a saddle so the faithful can ride them when they come to eat the planet.
The proof of my gods’ power is that lobsters are delicious
But do you agree that the argument is bad? If there was an actually legit religion then it would be logical that one is real and the 5000 are not. Doesn’t matter if religions are bogus, this logic is bogus too.
The logic is, unless your religion has an actual basis in reality, you don’t have any more claim to being more well reasoned than any other. Without this, any (and none) are on equal footing. If you believe just because you believe in something but you don’t have any particular reason to believe in your one, odds are you’re wrong.
It confronts people who claim they believe the true god(s) to say why they’re correct over the infinitely many others that could exist.
This is largely the thing that led me on my path towards atheism. I had a Buddhist friend in middle/high school, which led to me having an interest in other religions. Once you recognize all of them have equal reasons for their belief, it makes it hard to believe you happened to just be born into the one that’s real.
Not all religions have an equal basis in reality. If you have a religion that claims the sun is literally a divine, disembodied head that’s so mad it’s glowing, we can empirically disprove that. That’s just not what stars are. If you have one that correctly states what the sun is, that means the second religion has a better basis in reality than the first.
We can also know things logically or philosophically, but can’t debate them scientifically. That’s often how we come to moral conclusions - we can’t strictly base how we should behave off of evolutionary advantages, for example.
I mean, that’s a pretty human-chauvinistic view. You can prove that the sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace, but you can’t really prove that gigantic nuclear furnaces aren’t what disembodied godheads look like.
We know what a head is. It’s a part of a biological creature. In the absence of some convincing evidence or argumentation otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to assume it’s a head.
Robots are not biological, yet many have heads that fulfill the same sensory function as biological heads. It is very possible that non-biological sentient entities exist, and in absence of some convincing evidence or argumentation otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to definitively assume nuclear sentiences can’t exist.
You’re piling on assumptions like crazy, which makes for a logically weak position. All other things being equal, the claim that relies on the fewest assumptions is more likely to be true. Given the increasingly outlandish assumptions at play, it makes more sense to believe that the sun is not a sentient head glowing with rage.
Not really, no. My position is objectively based on fewer assumptions than yours. Occam’s razor is certainly useful, but it is not a tool for determining truth. It’s only a tool for determining the simplest explanation.
Your assumption that sentient beings, and their heads, must be biological places your claim in a much more precarious position relative to the razor than mine.
You’re making the argument that it is, or could be, a sentient, angry head. No evidence or arguments for that position, other than “well we can’t say it isn’t” have been presented. A head is a defined object, and there’s no reason to modify the definition of “head” to include the sun. Your argument doesn’t make much more sense than “a hydrogen atom may be a carbon atom, your assumption that it isn’t is precarious.”
Occam’s razor is indeed for simpler arguments rather than article strictly for truth. But from my experience as an engineer, generally the fewer assumptions you make when coming to a conclusion, the closer to the truth you’ll actually be.