I think there are always two ways to talk to someone:
- Respectfully.
- Disrespectfully.
And I think there are two parts to every experience:
- The experience itself, as you witness and remember it.
- The narrative you ascribe to it.
I think that everyone's witnessed experience is their own, and should be considered immune to criticism. And that everyone is entitled to explore different narratives to help them understand their experiences. But when we voice our narratives in public, those narratives become part of the public space. And so at that point, I think other people should have a publicly recognized right to challenge them, discuss them, and offer competing narratives. And those competing narratives then also become subject to criticism.
It's important, throughout this process, that people respect each other. If criticisms turn to harassment or coercion, then it needs to stop.
But the initial assumption of nonexistence is really important. Not because I have any particular bias against gods or anything else. But simply because, for any one claim one person makes without evidence, another person could present a mutually exclusive claim without evidence.
For instance, if I say that the president of the U.S. is Joe Biden, you can say it's Donald Trump. So my initial claim (which to me was beyond doubt) becomes a coin toss - if neither one of us has evidence.
But we can actually make an unlimited number of mutually exclusive claims. Because someone else can say, no, it's Ronald Reagan. And someone else can say it's Hillary Clinton. So, rather than a coin toss, it becomes a die roll.
With each additional claim, we add another side to the die. And if none of us presents any evidence, the likelihood of each claim keeps going down. And if we add enough sides to the die, the likelihood that Joe Biden is president literally becomes 0. It's only when we introduce publicly observable evidence that we can (hopefully) conclude who the president is.
Ultimately, the burden of proof for positing something's existence isn't really that high. We don't need absolute proof of something - we just need some reason to believe the probability is greater than 0. But until there is evidence, then the probability literally is 0, and it is very important, just for logical consistency, to assume that it doesn't exist.
Does that make sense?
On a practical, personal level, I tend to think of myself as an atheist, because I'm an atheist with respect to the gods of the Abrahamic religions and other mainstream religions. Because they are all operating in a space where they make mutually exclusive claims, and don't have evidence to back up their versions. But I'm not necessarily an atheist to all gods. I just think people should respect the importance of publicly observable evidence in all public claims - including those about gods.
Does that seem like a fair ask that we, as people, can collectively request of each other?
