'My religion/conspiracy theory EXPLAINS WHAT ALTERNATIVE THEORIES CAN'T and is CONSISTENT WITH THE EVIDENCE'
The recipe for generating a successful new religion or conspiracy theory usually involves two key components:
1. identify supposed 'mysteries' that an appeal to your preferred unseen intelligence (MIB, God, gremlins, fairies, the CIA) operating behind the scene easily solves (e.g. why the twin towers came down like that, how life began, why you can't find your keys).
2. be ingenious at explaining stuff away. Any apparent evidence against your theory can always be accounted for given some ingenuity , e.g. if you believe in young earth creationism, cook up explanations for the fossil record, etc.; if you believe in a good, loving god, cook up explanations for all the horrendous suffering we see in nature; if you believe the royal family are alien shape-shifters, cook up explanations for why they're never spotted in alien form, how they could possibly have got here, infiltrated the royal blood line, etc. Consistency with the available evidence can always, by such means, be achieved.
So, you can
now (often correctly!) declare that:
(i) your new religion or conspiracy theory explains, by appeal to hidden agency, what orthodox theories do not or cannot, and
(ii) your new belief system is also consistent with the evidence!
If you think your belief system is reasonable because it ticks boxes (i) and (ii), I suggest you think again. Many utterly ludicrous belief systems also tick both boxes. That can't be the reason your belief system is reasonable, if indeed it is...
(i) your new religion or conspiracy theory explains, by appeal to hidden agency, what orthodox theories do not or cannot, and
(ii) your new belief system is also consistent with the evidence!
If you think your belief system is reasonable because it ticks boxes (i) and (ii), I suggest you think again. Many utterly ludicrous belief systems also tick both boxes. That can't be the reason your belief system is reasonable, if indeed it is...
Comments
What you are trying to identify as some fallacious form of reasoning unique to religion is nothing more than the normal course of human learning, the paradigm shift.
The following explanation of free will is given in the internal metaphysical story of the gospel as follows:
Free will operates in the choice of mental state.
The above is part of the explanation of determinism and free will, and although it solves this philosophical conundrum, it is the source of the explanation which is controversial, and not the explanation itself. Dictionary meaning of Determinism: The doctrine that the will is not free, but is inevitably and invincibly determined by motives, preceding events, and natural laws. Our choice is free, but it is in choosing between two kinds of determinism. Free will is the choice between two kinds of determining factors that lead to actions, these two determining factors are the rational mental state and the irrational mental state. Free will chooses the conditions and not the outcomes. This philosophical wisdom comes from both the allegory of the Bible and the allegory of the Nicomachean Ethics.
The bible has been misinterpreted and misunderstood..
In an email I sent to secular, humanist, and skeptical organizations, I attempted to suggest that the Gospel of Matthew was like Aesop’s Fables, and that the surface or external story is not meant to be true. I don’t assume that Joe Hinman believes that an actual race occurred between a Tortoise and a Hare, and that we should organize an Animal Olympics to encourage such activities, but I didn’t expect so-called open mined people would exhibited such knee-jerk reactions and assume that I believed in God. The tragedy is that so many millions of people still believe in this religious external story of the allegory, and because they assume that the superficial or surface story is the only story, it seems also to tragically force some non-believes into prejudging this document on a superficial basis.
There is no God and there never has been. The real question now is, do non-believers also have closed minds or can they look at a different way of interpreting a misunderstood document? The title of my second book “A Philosophy of Spirituality” is designed to honour and pay homage to Greek philosophy. The word spirituality is not in reference to a God or Gods, it is in reference to the unseen physical forces, such as gravity, that are operating on nature and on us. The full title of the book is “A Philosophy of Spirituality: A Theory of Physics and Metaphysics”. Biblical scholars have misunderstood the nature of the document, and so has people like Joe Hinman. How long this ridiculous state of affairs will go on I don’t know, but unless people begin to examine the alternative arguments put forward, nothing much will change.
In an email I sent to secular, humanist, and skeptical organizations, I attempted to suggest that the Gospel of Matthew was like Aesop’s Fables, and that the surface or external story is not meant to be true. I don’t assume that Joe Hinman believes that an actual race occurred between a Tortoise and a Hare, and that we should organize an Animal Olympics to encourage such activities, but I didn’t expect so-called open mined people would exhibited such knee-jerk reactions and assume that I believed in God. The tragedy is that so many millions of people still believe in this religious external story of the allegory, and because they assume that the superficial or surface story is the only story, it seems also to tragically force some non-believes into prejudging this document on a superficial basis.
There is no God and there never has been. The real question now is, do non-believers also have closed minds or can they look at a different way of interpreting a misunderstood document? The title of my second book “A Philosophy of Spirituality” is designed to honour and pay homage to Greek philosophy. The word spirituality is not in reference to a God or Gods, it is in reference to the unseen physical forces, such as gravity, that are operating on nature and on us. The full title of the book is “A Philosophy of Spirituality: A Theory of Physics and Metaphysics”. Biblical scholars have misunderstood the nature of the document, and so has people like Joe Hinman. How long this ridiculous state of affairs will go on I don’t know, but unless people begin to examine the alternative arguments put forward, nothing much will change.