No, I did not say that religious believers trust in something they don't believe is real. They (some of them) trust in something about which they have insufficient data to know for certain whether it's real.
Do religious believers trust in their God? Do religious believers commit to their God? Do religious believers believe their God is real? Is there any sound, objective evidence their God is real? If not then their belief is the result of credulity.
Yet here you are, expressing beliefs without any sound, objective evidence (your impression of internet posters' motives is neither sound nor objective evidence), and in fact rejecting evidence when it's offered (I'm a religious believer, and I see no way of determining to what extent my religious commitments are to something real).
Do you believe your God is real? I suspect you do. Is there any sound, objective evidence your God is real? No, there isn’t. Your belief is the result of credulity.
And as I said, the core belief of many atheists is that an uncaused universe is real, despite a complete lack of sound, objective evidence supporting that belief. Why is that not credulity?
It isn’t credulity because there is plenty of sound, objective evidence to show that the universe
is real. I don’t think atheists believe the universe was uncaused. We don’t know the cause and we certainly don’t credulously believe that “God did it” without a single shred of sound, objective evidence to support that belief.
The only justified position is "I don't know." And that is in fact my position. What's credulous about it?
So you don’t know whether your God is real or not? I suspect you do believe your God is real despite there being a complete lack of sound, objective evidence supporting that belief. That belief is the result of credulity.
Sure, I think it's likely that fear of death drives much religious belief. But I'm not going to draw that conclusion until I have some sound, objective evidence, since that would be credulous of me. So present some sound, objective evidence, please.
Religious believers tend to be driven by their emotions, particularly fear and anxiety. Religions pander to those fears and exploit them. Christianity seems to have refined this quite well.
Christians confirm their insecurity with their incessant desire for, obsession with and talk about being saved. It is the insecure who constantly yearn to be saved.
Are you anxious about whether you will enter heaven? Don’t worry, your religion teaches that someone else was executed to pay for your sins. Are you afraid of dying? Don’t worry, your religion teaches that you will never really die. Are you living in squalor and hardship? Don’t worry, your religion teaches that you are going to a better place. Are you beginning to lose your religious belief? Your religion teaches you to fear the hell of eternal torture that awaits non-believers. Religions exploit the fear and anxiety of their followers.
Religious beliefs are used as a shield against the harshness of reality. You can see this in religious language, which is rife with euphemisms. For example, ‘faith’ in the sense of belief without sound evidence is a euphemism for credulity. Then there are all the euphemisms used to assuage the fear of death such as passed away, passed over, passed on, passed to the other side, gone to a better place, residing with God, gone to heaven, etc. There are euphemisms used to avoid admitting to self-deception; ‘faith’ again; ‘heart’, meaning emotion instead of reason (as in “facts acquired in the heart” or trust in your heart); ‘hope’, the confident expectation that the ludicrously implausible will occur (for instance, eternal life); ‘Truth’, meaning logical fallacies, misrepresentations and outright lies; and ‘visions’ for dreams and hallucinations.
Religions provide shallow answers to comfort shallow thinkers. Are you anxious about not knowing the answer to some question about nature and unable or unwilling to think about it? Don’t worry, just assume “God did it” and bask in the comfort of
knowing you are right.
There are other examples I could provide, but these alone should be enough to show that religious belief is the result of a combination of insecurity and credulity. Religious believers are insecure enough to want to believe the comforting promises of religions and credulous enough to believe they are true.
Not until you present the evidence. I'm willing to accept "non-skeptics are more credulous than skeptics", but that's pretty much a matter of definition.
Are religious believers sceptical about the notion that their God is real? Have they withheld their belief until they have multiple, independent lines of sound, objective evidence to support it? Of course they haven’t. They are non-sceptics and hence more credulous than sceptics.
Not a chance. Both because you haven't begun to present any evidence to support it, and because I'm a believer and I don't consider myself credulous.
So you don’t consider yourself credulous? Tell me, do you have any sound, objective evidence at all that your God is real? No? But you believe it anyway, don’t you? If so then you are credulous.
So in support of your bald assertions about religious believers, you post a link to another post in which you make the same bald assertions?
The examples that I’ve given here support the assertion that religious believers tend to be driven by their emotions, particularly fear and anxiety.
You only need to read the posts from religious believers here or at
FSTDT to confirm that they base their beliefs on logical fallacies, misapprehensions, personal experiences, feelings, anecdotes, weak evidence or none at all.
Finally, the assertion that religious beliefs are often held with intractable, absolute certainty also is confirmed by the posts here from religious believers as well as the recent Pew Forum
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.
