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Faith is The Enemy
Irwin doesn't know how to handle serpents The Lord's Way
Speaking in Tongues
The Leap of Faith
Blinding Faith
Try this thought experiment.
Somebody tells a man twhat something that is impossible happened. The man telling the story that could not be true is a convincing storyteller. The man hearing the story believes it.
He tells another man. The second man believes him for the simple reason he sees no particular reason not to. He tells a third, who tells a fourth and he goes on to say that people who believe the story will go to Heaven while those that don't believe it will go to Hell. The fourth man is tortured to death proclaiming that the impossible thing happened and he himself had seen it happen, or so the sixth man is told, and why should he doubt the story? Seventy generations later your father tells you the impossible happened.
Everybody believes the first man and none of them has any good reason to. Is the chance that the impossible happened affected by the number of people in the chain? If so, does a long chain make doubt more or less sensible? Logically the answer lies with the original event or non-event, everything that happens afterwards is as irrelevant as the magician's assistant's feather-trimmed bustle. The test of time is meaningless. People will believe what they have been told to believe until something shocks them into a different belief, and when you are surrounded by people who consider any doubt to be proof of an evil character you have a strong incentive to keep your doubts to yourself.
We cannot know anything except what we know ourselves, that we were told and who told us. Anywhere along that chain the story could have been made up or distorted. Once faith has been added to the mix all prospects of ever knowing anything have been thrown out of the window. Once believing something becomes an act that is regarded as good in and of itself all prospects of knowing what has really gone on have been lost.
Faith is a form of bribery. The faithful have been told that believing an intrinsically unlikely or impossible thing is as good as doing something good, that you can be a good guy, a hero, just by believing. How hard is believing? People can and do believe the weirdest stuff even without the prospect of reward. Eternal life and happiness plus the bonus of just punishments for those who deserve them, that is surely a better bribe even than free beer and pizza.
How can you take the faith of the faithful seriously any more than you can trust the testimony of the murderer's wife? People of faith believe not because they know but because they choose to believe in order to receive a reward.
Courts only accept testimony from professional paid witnesses with caution and anybody who is paid to give evidence in a single case is rightly dismissed all together as being unreliable. A bribed witness is a nobbled witness. The faithful are bearing witness in the expectation of being rewarded for bearing witness. They may say they are not presumptuous enough to expect a reward but you know they don't expect nonbelievers to get anything remotely resembling a reward. Surely this makes whatever they say they believe in seriously questionable.
When was the last time you were offered a bribe for telling the truth or for believing something you had every reason to believe? When was the last time anybody offered you the prospect of eternal life or even a half a pint of lager for believing that water is wet or two and two make four? When does anybody offer a witness a huge bribe to give honest testimony they would be happy to give without such a payment?
Religions spread by the despicable techniques of
1] Bribery
2] Threats
3] Indoctrination of the malleable minds of children
Liberalism, secularism and humanism shun these techniques. The truth needs no special pleading, no threats and no bribes. Liberal secular humanist education allows people to question all values including its own.
No belief should be accepted as reasonable if it involves bribes for the believers. Everlasting life in paradise with 72 virgins has to be considered something of a bribe. Any belief that relies on bribes should be regarded with extreme suspicion and yet religions are not only accepted they are considered to be the epitome of respectability. This is utterly bizarre.
How have we allowed religions to make out that their threats and bribes are actually respectable and legitimate? If any commercial product was sold with promises of everlasting life or eternal punishment in hellfire for people who bought a rival product do you think there might be just a little bit of hostility generated towards the product and those marketing methods? Of course if you believe what they are selling then you see things differently. I don't.