Religious Dogma is Absurd

The reason why the majority of people don't believe in Scientology, reincarnation, Mormonism, Greek Gods, etc. is not because they have extensively researched the historicity and veracity of the claims made by these faiths. It is because they don't believe that the types of things these faiths claim actually happen in the world. Miracles, resurrections, battles between gods, parting of seas, angels visiting earth, humans flying up to heaven, chariots carrying the sun across the sky, and the rest are things that supposedly occurred long ago in the ancient mythology of these religions. They don't happen today. Everything in our experience tells us that they probably didn't happen in antiquity, either. In other words, common sense tells us that when someone makes an absurd exaggerated claim, almost anything is more likely to be the case (i.e. they are lying, they are delusional, they are relying on misinformation, they are relating myths, or they have been fooled) than for the absurdity to be real. As Carl Sagan said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". There is nothing more extraordinary than a claim of eternal life after death, the existence of heaven and hell (and maybe purgatory depending on your particular branch of Christianity), angels, demons, an all-powerful god with an unusually strong interest in a certain species of primate (us), who has a special relationship with a small bronze age Semitic tribe, and a particular preacher from that tribe, etc.

Those claims are far more wild and outlandish than the more mundane claims we sometimes hear of perpetual motion, anti-gravity, time-travel, transmutation, bigfoot, telekinesis, ESP, UFOs, or extra terrestrial life. For any of those we would (and should) require an incredible amount amount of highly reliable, repeatable, clear, unambigous, and demonstrable evidence. We would be naive and gullible to accept them without hard proof. Even more so for the far more extravagent claims that most religions make.

The Bible isn't proof. A book cannot be the evidence of its own veracity. That requires outside corroboration. Christians are so committed to the habit of quoting passages from the Bible to make a point - these are called "proof texts" - that they either forget, or are unaware, that the words of a sacred text are not acceptable evidence to an unbeliever. Reading passages from Moby Dick is not proof that an enormous white whale exists.

Even if the greatest scientists in the world all gave testimonials, endorsements, and signed affidavits to the truth of some amazing scientific claim, we would still need to produce the phenomenon in a controlled environment before we should begin to believe it ourselves. If Louis Pasteur announced that he could cure smallpox, had written a scholarly article about it, got all of his associates to vouch for him, but refused to show us that he could do it, no one would have believed him. Likewise, no one would or should believe that a person has ESP or Telekinesis, or that belief in a certain scripture will make you live forever, in the absence of an immense volume of high quality, reliable, repeatable evidence.

Christianity makes hard and definite claims about how events in the real world happen - it is not only about praying, singing hymns, listening to sermons, bingo, and bake-sales. It lays out in precise detail what a "soul" is, what happens to that soul after you die, what happens to your physical body on judgement day, how the world came into existence, how life forms emerged, the age of the earth, how the first man and woman came into existence, the formation of the earth, the sun, and the stars, and the origin of morality. It contains descriptions of a large variety of different miracles. It describes exact rules of human relations, like endorsing slavery, subjugating women, exterminating enemy tribes, and outlawing homosexuality - but over time it has softened opinions on some of those.

But, the only evidence for Christianity are anecdotes, personal testimonies, mind-bending logical discourses, rationalizations, and a 2000 year old book, itself a hodgepodge of chapters by different writers (none of whom actually knew or ever saw Jesus) long after the main events supposedly occurred, and a billion or so believers. The only physical evidence is the one book. Without that book, there would be absolutely nothing backing it up other than legend. It is possible or even likely that a person named Jesus did exist (as described by Josephus and Tacitus), but they don't mention any miracles or resurrections - just his execution and the religion that was springing up in his name. I wouldn't accept a claim of transmutation, cold fusion, ESP, levitation, or any other extravagant phenomenon just because it was written down in a document, nor should we accept the even wilder claims made by Christianity.

The claims made by religion, and Christianity in particular, are indeed extraordinary, even though we have grown used to them, having heard them all our lives. The standard of evidence - the rule of evidence - should be proportionally higher, as it should be for any other extreme claim.