(Transcribed from Scathingatheist.com podcast dated 20141023, Episode 88 titled "Oh Danny Boy")
Sectioned labled "Diatribe" narrated by Noah Lugeons
"So I got the whole 'You atheists are as bad as religious people' speech the other day.
"It's not the first time I've encountered it, of course.
"And I'll admit that many moons ago, I fell for that same intellectual seduction.
"It's so tempting to just wipe away the whole debate with the same 'They're all full of shit' dismissal that we use for politicians.
"You got Group A that says there's a God in some other dimension that made the universe.
"You got Group B saying there isn't.
"Neither of them can prove it.
"So fuck it - I'm agnostic.
"And sometimes, especially in politics, that's a completely justifiable position.
"You got Group A saying that raising the minimum wage will destroy the economy, and leave our nation a zombie-ridden shell of its former self.
"And Group B saying that raising the minimum wage will eliminate poverty and cure puppy cancer.
"Probably you're better off planting your flag somewhere in the middle.
"But when Group A is saying God exists, and Group B is saying God doesn't exist, there is no middle.
"One Group is, in accordance with logic, WRONG.
"Now let me clarify two points, because I feel like I just pissed off everybody that identifies themselves as either Atheist or Agnostic.
"So first of all, I know that the Agnostic position ISN'T that God is somewhere between existing and not existing, but rather that the answer is unknowable.
"We'll get back to why that is a stupid position in just a second.
"But I also get the feeling that the formal logic is standing up on the backs of the necks of the Atheists, too.
"So secondly, let me address the whole Agnostic/Atheist thing.
"Now, I'm not going to dive too deep into this since I've talked about it before, and so have plenty of other people.
"But yes, if I was in a formal debate, the position I would be defending would be
THE BURDEN OF PROOF REQUIRED FOR THE BELIEF IN GOD HAS NOT YET BEEN MET
"It would be the same way I'd phrase things if I were in a formal debate with somebody who believed that Big Foot or Atlantis existed.
"But if I'm just chatting with a group of people about Big Foot, I'm going to assert that Big Foot does not exist, and then I'll offer the logical reasons why the evidence is insufficient to sway me.
I'll tell them about the evidence that should be there, and isn't.
"In other words, I'm not going to introduce myself as a 'Big Foot Agnostic, with a tendency toward "A-Sasquatch-ism" '
"Insomuch that a thing can be proven not to exist, this thing has been proven not to exist.
"Now I'm not trying to downplay the importance of Burden of Proof here.
"That's how thinking works, after all.
"But the basic Atheist instinct here..... you know, you hear, 'you're just as bad as the Theists;' .... your instinct is to dive into that distinction between Agnostic and Gnostic Atheism.
"I'm not saying I KNOW there is no God. But I'm saying I don't BELIEVE there's a God based on the evidence that I've seen so far.
"And like I said, that is correct.
"But in most circumstances, I feel like we can defend a position that is way higher up the chain of knowledge.
"I'm unable to refute the claim of God to precisely the extent to which God is undefined.
"As soon as you attribute a property to God, I can show why that's at least logically unnecessary, and at most logically impossible.
"Any claim that you make about a God can, if not be refuted, at least be dismissed with Occam's Razor; or - hell - Occam's Butterknife."
"So sure, it's not incorrect to offer these militant Agnostics a quick lesson on Burden of Proof.
"But I also don't think it's the most effective direction to take most of the time.
"When you're dealing with a believer, sure. May-be.
"But generally that non-committal Agnostic holds their position because they think it's the most logically tenable one.
"And THAT is incorrect.
"So when I was accused as being intellectually inflexible as a Theist, I point out to the accuser that I was every bit as inflexible on the subject of GRAVITY.
"If we're applying the same standard to all claims, the spoon falling the last 6 billion times doesn't tell us anything about the spoon falling this time I drop it, does it?
"Now his first attempt to escape this was through a meaningless distinction.
"He says 'Gravity, unlike God, can be directly tested.'
"And as tempting as it is to point out that that's probably because Gravity, unlike God, EXISTS, I instead pointed to the fact that Gravity CANNOT in fact, be directly tested.
"We can test the EFFECTS of Gravity on an object, but we don't even know how the spoon knows that there's an earth below it.
"We can detect Gravity in a number of ways, but we can't look at "a Gravity."
"If God existed, we should be able to test his effects on the world in the same way.
"Now apparently I was prepared to dive a lot deeper into this argument than my opponent, because the only effort at refutation I encountered from that point on was of the 'I know you are, but what am I?' variety.
"He said, and I believe this is verbatim, 'Forgive me if I withhold judgment on one of the most difficult questions in the Universe.'
"So I forgave him.
"But then I asked for some clarification.
"What question exactly are you calling one of the most difficult in the Universe?
"Is it 'Does God exist?' question?
"Or 'Which is the right God?'
"Or 'Where does the Universe come from?'
"Because none of those are very hard.
"No, none, and insufficient information. There you go. Done.
"But particularly, what question are you withholding judgment on?
"And of course the real question was the same question that's ALWAYS the real question:
IS THERE AN AFTER-LIFE?
"The fear of death is almost certainly the primary driver when it comes to religious belief, because all of us are tempted to believe in our own immortality.
"But that doesn't make the question difficult.
"Is there an after-life?
"No. There's no reason to think there is.
" This is a pretty damn easy question.
"There's absolutely no evidence to support the notion of an after-life.
"An after-life would be fundamentally unlike anything ever observed in nature.
"Even the most desperate effort to provide a shred of evidence for life after death have consistently failed.
"But not wanting the obvious answer to be true doesn't make the question difficult to answer.
"What happens to barns when they rot?
"What happens to computers break down?
"What happens to leaves when they crumble?
"They break down into their constituent parts and cease to exist as a whole.
"There's nothing at all challenging about that question.
"Believing in an after-life for leaves and barns would strike us all as silly.
"But it's actually less silly that there's only an after-life for the one being that you happen to be.
"When it comes to the after-life, or any God question, really, it's not the question that's hard.
"It's the answer.
"Agnosticism, when used in the sense of withholding judgment on the God question, is not the intellectually honest position.
"It's just the nominally less cowardly answer than the religious one.
"Rejecting an unprovable hypothesis in the absence of evidence isn't rash or intellectually inflexible.
"But failing to reject an implausible, un-evidenced hypothesis because you don't want to rule it out, IS."
