AB,
My God given freedom to choose what I write.
So let’s pause and sum up shall we?
You believe yourself to have knowledge of a suite of religious claims of fact (“God”, “soul”, “Satan”, “angels” etc). You really think these things objectively exist – ie, they’re real both for you and for everyone else too. If any claim to knowledge is to be taken seriously however, it needs to be
justified – first for the claimant, and second for the audience the claimant expects to agree with him.
Absent such justification(s), all you have is unqualified claims – essentially just guessing.
This is epistemology 101, so you will grant me this much at least I hope?
OK then, how should claims of fact be justified? When it comes to religions, there are it seems two approaches: faith and reason.
So if we consider faith first, anyone can have a deep and genuine faith about anything. You can tell me that you think god is real because that’s your faith, and the next person can tell me that leprechauns are real because that’s his faith. For epistemological purposes therefore “faith” is worthless – not only does it give the audience nothing to evaluate and consider, it gives the claimant nothing to evaluate and consider either. It's just a strongly held
but not justified opinion, nothing more.
So that leaves reason as the remaining option you have to justify your claims. So what happens when you try to reason your way to justifying your religious factual claims?
That’s simple – the attempt always ends in disaster. You lack the ability to construct even a simple logically robust justifying argument (despite having claimed to have “thought deeply” about such matters) and so you always collapse into either one or multiple fallacies – the
argumentum and consequentiam, the
post hoc ergo propter hoc, confirmation bias, survivor bias and (wearyingly) so forth.
When your attempts to reason your way to justification fail (as they always do) this leaves you with some further options. The first is to address the falsifications you’re given, and then either to rebut them or to abandon their use in future. You never do this though – to my recollection not once in all the countless times you’ve repeated the same mistakes in reasoning over and over again have you ever tried to address the falsifications you’ve been given.
Not once.
So what do you do instead? What you do is one of two things: either complain that logic is all “man-made” in any case, and so cannot therefore have anything to say to your faith claims. Or just ignore the problem and revert to your safe place of blind faith claims (“My God given freedom to choose what I write” etc) whereby your premise and you conclusion collapse into the same thing.
So if we take these responses in turn, if you think that logic is “man-made” and so irrelevant for the purpose of justifying your faith claims why continue with attempting it incompetently? If you can’t reason your way to your conclusions competently (and it seems you can’t) but you think reason is irrelevant in any case what do you think continually making wrong arguments will achieve? All that happens – has always happened in fact – is that your wrong arguments are quickly identified and shot down. And when you ignore that problem and just repeat the same wrong arguments it only makes you look dishonest or foolish. Or both.
So when you finally run out of road and give up the attempt even at demonstrably wrong arguments, you scuttle back to blind faith claims instead – to which the only sensible reply is “so what”? Why should anyone care what your unqualified faith beliefs are – indeed why should
you care given that you have no means of justifying them
even to yourself?
In short, if all you have is wrong arguments and blind faith claims but you hope to justify your beliefs nonetheless then you really need to come up with another tack as this one plainly isn’t working.
Good luck with that.
