You are absolutely right. While I felt deeply pressured to put this out of the way, I should have saved a draft and waited until I had clarified and organized the concept before presenting it here. Not so much because I fear hurting the readers’ sensibilities, but because a badly written post hurts the integrity of this site I love so much.
I have discussed with religious people left, down and right, and have been confronted with a very large variety of arguments. There was a part of my way to atheism where I was literally begging theists I trusted to help me find arguments to protect my faith. They kept disappointing me. Only when I felt as certain as I thought I would ever be that no new arguments could come up, I decided to make the great leap over Hell, and officially abandon religion. If I thought there was a non-negligible chance of new arguments swaying me, I wouldn’t have abandoned theism, purely out of fear of Hell.
*Not necessarily: as other posters have pointed out in this discussion, some arguments need more reduction of inferential distance than other, which are much more immediate. Pointing out incosistencies and counterexamples, for example, is far more efficient in making people doubt than explaining the epistemiological merits of Occham’s Razor and reductionism.
You are absolutely right. While I felt deeply pressured to put this out of the way, I should have saved a draft and waited until I had clarified and organized the concept before presenting it here. Not so much because I fear hurting the readers’ sensibilities, but because a badly written post hurts the integrity of this site I love so much. I have discussed with religious people left, down and right, and have been confronted with a very large variety of arguments. There was a part of my way to atheism where I was literally begging theists I trusted to help me find arguments to protect my faith. They kept disappointing me. Only when I felt as certain as I thought I would ever be that no new arguments could come up, I decided to make the great leap over Hell, and officially abandon religion. If I thought there was a non-negligible chance of new arguments swaying me, I wouldn’t have abandoned theism, purely out of fear of Hell. *Not necessarily: as other posters have pointed out in this discussion, some arguments need more reduction of inferential distance than other, which are much more immediate. Pointing out incosistencies and counterexamples, for example, is far more efficient in making people doubt than explaining the epistemiological merits of Occham’s Razor and reductionism.