Poetic vs logical arguments.

The biggest problem I have when communicating with religious people is the number of poetic words that they tend to use. One can't argue with poetry, because poetry is not supposed to be logical, and it's not supposed to make sense.

Some examples of poetic words are words like "faith", "deserves" and "worthy". While they might seem perfectly logical, one has to try to deconstruct a word into its simplest form, and then one will know whether or not that word really has meaning.

Let me start with "faith".

In the real world, an intelligent person will believe something in the same proportion to the quality of the evidence which they know of. Here is a chart to demonstrate:











The next chart shows the opposite: Irrational thinking, where a person's confidence level is the opposite of the quality of the evidence which they have.










The dictionary definition of faith is: Belief without proof. The less evidence, the more faith is required. Here's the chart.










The next chart demonstrates that intelligent belief + faith = 100% certainty. Faith is when you believe something in spite of the quality of the evidence. It's a stuffing, like the polystyrene chips that one has to dig out of a box to get to the thing which really matters.












You may ask, "What if someone says they have faith in someone's ability to drive?" In that context, the word faith is exactly as I've defined it above. Based on all evidence available there might be a 99.99% chance that they will survive driving from A to B, but if you are 100% confident, you have inflated your confidence by 0.01% above reality.

What I'm writing is not really about faith. It's more to demonstrate that whatever you believe faith is, if it's not this, then it's different to what I believe it is. That means that if you and I have a different understanding of a word, it won't make sense for us to use it in a conversation. We would have to search for words that we both agree on the meaning.

The next two words I want to talk about are "deserves" and "worthy". Unlike faith, these words do have a meaning, but only in a certain context. That context is a made-up rule or law.

If you drop an apple, and it hits the ground, you've proven the fact that gravity makes apples drop to the ground, but you cannot say "an apple deserves to hit the ground", because that implies a made-up rule.

The apple is not worthy of hitting the ground either, because it still implies a made-up rule. You may say that Prince William deserves to be king, or that he is worthy of being a king, which is correct, because the made-up rule might be something like "princes become kings".

The problem with "deserves" and "worthy", is that if you use them to argue a case, you're implying a rule, and it's usually the rule itself that needs to be argued. I may not agree that princes should become kings. Instead I may believe that a better rule would be to have a contest to determine who the next king should be.

A rule also requires a reason. This reason is absolutely essential for a reasonable argument. To say "princes become kings" has no value without a reason. The reason might be something like, because royal families have a lot of power, so they keep the king in the family to be selfish. (I don't know if that's the reason, but I'm just making this up)

The next word I want to talk about is "punishment", which relates nicely to "deserves" and "worthy", because punishment is based on made-up rules that serve a purpose.

The purpose of punishment is typically something like this: To protect the majority of people. It does so because people will see the punishment, which is typically something painful or uncomfortable, causing them to have fear, or it will keep them locked up, so that they're no longer able to harm other people.

So punishment protects a group of people, and works by either through fear, or prevention.

When I ask religious people whether hell is revenge or punishment, they usually don't respond, but those who do respond call it "punishment."

So I leave you with the following thought:

Does a place of eternal suffering protect anyone?

Of course not, so hell is not actually punishment. It's something else... it's a made-up rule that says that people who do not have faith (see above for definition) burn forever. If you can come up with a good reason for that, using words that we both agree on the meaning, then that's fine, but considering that I already don't think faith has any value, and don't see any value in burning people forever, I doubt that very much.

If I were a loving, all powerful God, I'd have simply made everyone eternally happy.