The hajj, one of the largest annual human gatherings in the world, begins on Wednesday in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Amid rising temperatures and logistical challenges, the pilgrimage has increasingly become a test of endurance both for pilgrims and the Saudi government.
Millions of Muslims from around the world travel to the city to take part; Saudi Arabia said 1,475,230 pilgrims from abroad have arrived since Sunday. Last year, the Saudi government said more than 1,300 pilgrims died, many from Egypt. Most of those who perished had been unregistered, Saudi officials said, meaning they had made the trip without the permits that gave them access to heat protections.
But only one of them is making a claim. Theists claim there is a god. The burden of proof / unproof is on them. Really it’s pretty insulting to posit that such a fantastical cosmic being exists, and not be able to offer any evidence for it whatsoever.
They can offer proof that’s the book that claims there’s an omnipresent being.
Both are making claims and neither can substantiate it. The difference is the more mainstream religious folk tend to recognize this whereas many atheists seem not to.
I can show you a book about Hobbits and the dark lord Sauron and it doesn’t prove they exist.
Atheists don’t make any claim. They do not claim there is no god. They simply do not hold a belief in a god. If there were any reason to believe in one, any evidence for one, we would of course believe.
So really, there are just normal people interacting with the world as it comes, and religion, making up wild shit about what’s happening up in the sky.
The difference is the people who compiled the Bible at the Council of Nicea believed in it to varying degrees. The guy who wrote the Hobbit knew it was fiction.
It’s a huge assumption on your part that they believed it. It was and it remains an instrument of control. They took considerable editorial liberties, too, with the supposed word of god.
Anyway, even if they believed it that is STILL NOT EVIDENCE. The position that the Bible is evidence is incredibly weak. If you want to keep arguing that position, you’re going to have a very hard time and then lose.
That is an equally large presumption. I happen to agree that some were more interested in control but many were believers.
To them it is. Do you not get that they believe they have the words of their divine being in book form? If their faith is correct it would be proof.
You don’t seem to understand the word proof.
Proof means it can demonstrate what is true to anyone.
“If everything I’m saying is true, then this book is evidence of the truth!”
See, all I have to do is believe LOTR is real and then I meet your burden of proof. See how pathetic a standard that is?
Before you say no one believes LOTR is real, let me remind you that yes there are some people, and I consider them about as crazy as Christians are. Secondly, there are thousands of religions with supposed texts. Are all of those “proof” too?
I’ve heard the same self-validating logic about the council of Nicea. When asked “how could this possibly be the word of god when it was so clearly meddled with by human decisions?”
The answer: “well if you accept at all that it’s the word of god, don’t you think he would make sure it came out right?”
In other words, you either believe it or you don’t. But that’s the beauty of actual evidence, actual proof: you don’t have to already believe in it. It is sufficient to change preconceptions.
But why am I not surprised at this conversation. I mean OBVIOUSLY a religious person wouldn’t understand the very idea of proof. “Faith is the evidence of things unseen” blah blah. The brainwashing is real. People lose their very faculty to reason.