Quote:
Originally Posted by Hakulyte
The difference between Religion and the Dragon in the garage is that the Dragon doesn't have books dedicated to it with an entire segment of population preaching it + history marks left over multiple centuries.
Maybe that part of the population is crazy, but I like to think there's potentially more to it.
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Does a ton of people believing something necessarily mean that that thing is actually true? Think of a magician who performs in front of a live audience and makes his/her assistant disappear. The audience might believe as an entity that the magician really vanished his/her assistant, but the
truth of the matter is that it was just an illusion.
I would qualify myself as a
gnostic (or strong) atheist and my reason is this: Humans have always looked for answers to questions they have about the world and are usually not willing to accept "don't know" or "can't know" as an answer. Instead we look for an explanation, and when we don't/can't find one, we invent one. I believe this is how religion came about in the first place and it's also why there are so many different religions around the world. Groups of early humans all around the world came up with their own narratives for how this world came to exist and how we as humans came to exist. It was the best explanation at that time, so it was accepted en masse by these cultures and in turn passed down to their young.
Because humans are constantly looking for explanations and validation in their beliefs, they might pray for an outcome, and if it becomes realized, they will attribute it to their God(s) and use that as validation that their religion is true, when in actuality it is equally, if not more plausible, to be a coincidence. When implementing a thought process like this, it is very dangerous when it comes to continuing to validate a belief that is unfalsifiable. Your belief system will never and
can never be disproven, which leads us to the God of the gaps and still having religion today. When science explains one thing that was previously attributed to religion, there will usually be another unknown that will take its place. I have done more research on the topic of religion than I care to admit and the reason why people believe with 100% confidence that their God(s) is/are real is that they were raised in the religion and that they have experienced life-changing events that they attribute to the God(s). When trying to reason with these people by using another religion as an example, the usual response is that people can believe what they want to believe, but they believe their religion is the truth and others (who are equally as convinced as they are, but with Allah instead of Yahweh) are believing a lie simply because it is what they have grown up their whole life knowing.
relevant vid (talk starts at 3:40):