Yep, after I spoke for CFI’s Extraordinary Claims Panel in Canada this former Mormon Bishop came up to me and introduced himself. Afterward we talked over a Foster’s Beer. Someone overheard us talking who said to me, “Mormon’s have some really weird beliefs, don’t they?” Yes they do. But then I see no difference between their beliefs and my former Christian beliefs. I learned to think this way because of my wife. She grounds me. I used to say the same thing about other religions and every time she would tell me they are no different than Christianity. It finally sunk in. She’s right. Then it stuck me. There are people who have never been religious at all. When I tell them I am a former evangelical they must shake their heads and wonder how in the world I could ever have believed what I did. I too am stunned at times. Do natural born atheists think about me the way former evangelicals-turned-skeptics think about Mormonism? Do they shake their heads and wonder how stupid I must be to have believed what I did? Some of them probably do. If so, I hope to show that children are taught to believe in their respective cultures because of indoctrination, brainwashing and enculturation. It could have been them too, ya see.
I cannot possibly check everything I believe. There is a trust element involved. I trust the sciences. I trust the consensus of the scientists. Why? Because in those areas where I have studied I agree with them. In fact, if believers were to stop and think about it they trust the sciences too, in an overwhelming number of areas. They just disagree with them in those few areas when the sciences contradict what some pre-scientific ancient agency detectors claimed in a group of canonized texts. -- John W. Loftus
Here are the notes from my talk for the CFI Panel in Ontario, Canada. Enjoy.
Check this out! Derren is a genius! Think you can be completely rational and uninfluenced by your cultural surroundings? Think again. And then think religion. The cultural influences for Christianity are everywhere in America. This helps to explain why Christians are not usually reasoned out of their faith because they were never reasoned into it in the first place. Really!
I have a number of Christian scholars I regard as friends that I allow posting here at DC for comment (hit the tag "Christian Scholars" to see a few of them). Doug is writing his magnum opus titled, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Christian Faith, which should be out by August of this year. He emailed me and asked that I publish a short article of his on the problem of evil which appeared in The Christian Research Journal, asking for comment. He'll have a chapter on this topic in his book too.
After reading it I responded:
Doubt is the adult attitude. And only people who refuse to doubt will ask that I doubt my doubts. Doubt is a filter that helps me sift out what to believe from what not to believe. I cannot do away with that filter and remain an adult person who thinks critically.
In every era of history there were gaps in our understanding. We knew how women got pregnant through sex but we didn't know the internal bodily process, so guess what? God did it. We knew rain fell from the sky but we didn't know the process so guess what? God did it.
But look what's going on here, okay? Science closes the gaps. When it does it creates deeper problems and with them come the recognition of new gaps. The whole discussion about wormholes and cosmic singularities has been brought to us by the same science that closed a thousand previous gaps. Believers have been wrong to find God in the gaps of the past just as they are wrong to find him in today's gaps. To argue like they do is an informal fallacy called the Argument From Ignorance based in negative evidence, that is, we cannot explain something so therefore our particular god did it. This is not considered positive evidence for a god just as the negative evidence showing that an object is not a door tells us nothing positively about what that object is. The ONLY science that supports a god faith is therefore based in a logical fallacy. Christian, if you think otherwise then provide me some positive evidence that your God exists or acknowledge that you got nothing.
All you got is the centuries old claim that science can't explain this or that, and when it does you move the goal posts.
I maintain there is no way to conclude Jesus bodily arose from the grave even if he did. I can even grant you for the sake of your argument the existence of Yahweh and that he does miracles, but this changes very little. For the evidence shows us that an overwhelming large percentage of the Jews in Jesus' day did not believe even though they knew their Scriptures and even though they were there. So why should I believe? Why should anyone?
This multiple choice poll is closed and here are the results below. There were a couple of surprises.
Now there's a statement I endorse. What's more likely, that a believer or a skeptic wrote it?
I just wanted to throw this out there in a post all its own. I aim to show there is nothing divinely inspired inside the pages of the canonized set of texts that were written by some ancient agency detecting barbaric superstitious people. If I succeed then what could the believer still believe? In any case, this is my niche. I'm arguing a negative case against Christianity because I know it best. Along with it I'm offering a good rational tool in the Outsider Test for Faith to examine all religions by the same standard.
, p. 195-6).
more and more forceful. See also my online essay 
Come on now. Think about this. Like the Mormons you were raised to believe and you now defend what you were raised to believe in a Christian culture despite the evidence just like they do because they were raised in a Mormon culture. Or, at least consider this a real possibility.
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