Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four…
And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.
Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.
But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.
That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.
So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.
The Tuesday/Monday example being arbitrary is my point, glad you pointed that out. This is the casual way that I “have faith” that there is no God. In my eyes your choice of deity to worship is just as arbitrary, there are thousands of religions. The fact that some of them promise “hell” to “sinners” is not a reason for me to operate as though these things are true. There are just as many if not more spiritual practices that have nothing to do with eternal damnation, why would I operate as if any of these are the reality when they’re all claiming to be The One Truth? I’m expected to pick yours just because you said so? That seems silly, and it’s also silly to call this thought process “faith” I think.
Regarding the dinosaurs, we have fossil records, and that’s a bit different than “God is gonna getcha, better be a good boy, believe me bro,” but I do in fact believe that Jesus existed, because we have extensive historical context and documents talking about him. As stated elsewhere this is sufficient to generally consider a person to have existed. Most historians also claim as much, and I’m not a historian so I will defer to the experts. Whether or not he is the Messiah though, and has magic powers as stated in the bible, is a much more ridiculous claim. When you tell me a reality-bending zombie that is his own father exists, the burden of proof for that claim is much higher than “Did this person exist historically?” This is the point that FlyingSquid is making, which I agree with.
