there are also people who thought david koresh was god, or charles manson or jim jones or however many others. and as you say, "they were there".
I have two thoughts on this. 1. Oral traditions can go back several millenia, but they do have the great failing of generation after generation of embellishment, omission, mistranslation, and other errors that are cumulative. It's how a core story (whether true or false) becomes a mythology. We must recognize mythology for mythology. 2. On the other hand, it is a fact that every primitive people on the planet have a God concept and its associated mythologies. They retain this through thousands of years of development and advancement with plenty of opportunity to assess these beliefs for value and, for the most part, have not abandoned them as useless. This suggests that not all that is legendary is mythological. The fact that easily disproven mythologies exist does not obviate the evidence that the God concepts underlying them have persisted essentially forever in human terms. There may be something to this that mortal humans will simply never know. The fact that primitive people made up stories to help them understand complex phenomenon beyond their sophistication does not in itself prove that the underlying concept is imaginary.
seems overwhelmingly obvious to the point of absurdity. you might as well say "my child believes there is a dracula under his bed. because i believe he is imagining it or making it up, that doesnt logically prove that the demon isnt there". it certainly is true that the demon might be there. but so what? there is no reason to believe it is there, so why even bother?
Its because you do not think logically. Absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. How many times must I demonstrate this to you? I had been making a point that you completely missed, apparently.
i am not telling you i dont understand your point. i am telling you the point is impossibly obvious and weak. again, that you think santa claus doesnt exist is not enough to prove he doesnt exist. we all know that. i have no evidence for santa claus. i cant prove he doesnt exist. i have an absence of evidence. and i have no evidence of absense. well bully for me, maybe i should start believing in santa claus! see how weak this point is? a practical way to look at things is that there is no reason to believe in something until actual evidence exists. else all things false and true are equal until explicitly proven false. and non-falsifiablity doesnt equal true. far from it.
you had a point, but it at the top of your head. you were making an effort to play your role as pragmatist that gives both sides of an issue equal time. the problem is that there is literally nothing to discuss on the side of belief. reminding us of the idea of non-falsifiability is not a real point worth making. if you dont understand why, then consider if you would make that point if we were discussing the easter bunny, which is also non-falsifiable. nothing is weaker than pointing out that something hasnt been proven untrue, particularly something that is explicitly described as invisible and undetectable by observation. basically youa re reminding us that undectable things are undetectable. yeah, we get it it, A is A, thanks. you are only encouraging the idiots and furthering the idea that faith and lack of faith are two equally plausible positions, which is wildly and ferociously absurd.
Yep. Monday and Wednesday. I'll be in London, UK all next week. I'll send in a report on the state of Socialism.
