The Outsider Test Of Faith

Faith - the sure and certain way to tell that all other faiths are wrong.

The Outsider Test Of Faith:



John W. Loftus' challenge to believers to apply the same test they use for other faiths to their own:

"If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim right now, say it isn't so? That is a cold hard fact. Dare you deny it? Since this is so, or at least 99% so, then the proper method to evaluate your religious beliefs is with a healthy measure of skepticism.



Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating. If your faith stands up under muster, then you can have your faith. If not, abandon it, for any God who requires you to believe correctly when we have this extremely strong tendency to believe what we were born into, surely should make the correct faith pass the outsider test. If your faith cannot do this, then the God of your faith is not worthy of being worshipped."

To this I would add:

• if you were born in Madrid, New York, Rome or Kansas you would almost certainly be Christian.


• If you had been born in first century BCE Jerusalem you would be Jewish.


• If you had been born in fifth century BCE Greece you would believe in the Greek pantheon.


• If you had been born in pre-WWII Japan you would be Shinto.

Wherever and whenever you were born you would almost certainly have the same faith as your parents.



Unless, that is, you had applied exactly the same standard to your parents' faith as you have to all the others. If you had, you are very unlikely to have any faith at all because, like every other faith, yours has no evidential basis and so would fail John W. Loftus' Outsider Test Of Faith.



In fact, if you were honest, you would admit that you have never really even thought about the other gods and other faiths, let alone applied any of the tests you just assume someone else must have made when they accepted your faith and rejected all the others.



If you disagree, please show your reasoning:



Hint: Arguing that all the other faiths must be wrong because yours is right won't work because that could be used with equal non-validity by all the others.



Debunking Christianity: The Outsider Test.....:



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