I’m partial to “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine”
Do the people asking that question just conveniently ignore the fact that religious leaders rape children like it’s going out of style?
Immunity to cognitive dissonance is a requirement to believe in religion.
While the quote presents a correct conclusion, it’s also problematic in that it makes a slip of logic and paints a target for fallacious rebuttal.
- The slip of logic: one cannot conclude that no gods exist because all religions are clearly wrong – all that tells us is that none of the specific gods depicted by these religions exist. The path to disprove the existence of ALL gods must go through philosophy instead;
- Painted target: by juxtaposing science and religion, he invites the religious nuts to perceive and treat both things as belonging to the same class of intellectual activity, i.e. the “you have your opinion and I have mine” crowd.
Scientifically, we’d have to carry out the scenario of erasing the religions to see if the hypothesis is true. But how would we compare if they were erased?
The trick is that you don’t actually need to do it, as we already have the functional equivalent analogue – the development of countless different religions in the past, in different regions of the globe – as evidence. If at least one of these religions were right, you would’ve expected it to show up in at least more than one region in the past, but we can clearly trace all similar religions to patterns of human migration, which strongly suggests humans created all of them out of their cultural beliefs at the time
