http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3zNL4b0INE&feature=watch_response
Drugs. When I was in grade school, our teachers warned us that we would soon be approached by drug-dealers who would try to cajole us into taking just enough drugs to become addicted, then would start charging a fee for them. They warned us that one thing the drug-dealers would say is that everyone else is using. These teachers then asked us to consider, what if everyone was lining up to jump from the roof of a skyscraper? Would that make it right? Would that make it wise? Would that make it other than moronic? Of course not.
And why not? Because popularity establishes neither sagacity, nor fact. This is another popular logical fallacy called ad populum. It’s one I myself have been given many times.
Eratosthenes was the first person in the world to figure out that the world is round, yet for centuries afterward, the vast majority of people in the world continued to believe it was flat. For centuries, this notion was backed up by majority acceptance but it was still dead wrong.
The same holds true about Galileo Galilei and his discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice-versa. The Roman Inquisition sentenced him to decades of house arrest and got away with it because of the unpopularity of his conclusions, but this was not enough to change the laws of physics. These laws, these principles give no regard to popularity, neither to conform to it, nor to avoid it. They are what they are and we can either do our best to figure them out and work with them, or we can be content to helplessly leave ourselves to their tender mercies.
The Earth revolves around the Sun and even if every single person in the world insists it is the other way around, it still isn’t so. You can either deal with reality or you can leave reality to deal with you. But in figuring out what reality is, you must first learn to ignore whatever you want it to be.
As an atheist, the form of this I get most often is, “The vast majority of people in the world believe in God. Are you really willing to suggest that they’re all mistaken?” The funny part is that the vast majority of people in the world believe in different gods and most of the believers in the world have no compunctions about calling the gods worshipped by others either nonexistent or false, including those who offer this argument as some kind of polemic. The vast majority of people in the world have no compunctions about the rhetoric that, where others disagree, it is they who are mistaken.
The vast majority of people have no reservations about suggesting that everyone else is mistaken, including you, Mr. fundie-apologist. Are you really suggesting that something is wrong with this practice? If so, then I must ask you to give it up yourself. If not, then get off our backs. In either case, let’s be rid of this double-standard.
Ah, but wait. I now have something to clarify. One could suggest that the Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Mormons all worship the same god, so it could be argued that, yes, there is one god accepted by the majority. I disagree, though. Before it can be established that any two groups of people, or for that matter, any two people, receive their guidance from the same being, that being must be established to exist. The gods worshipped by these groups clearly do not.
Every religion which has ever existed began with a bare handful of people. Those people, at the time, were the only ones who believed that way. The vast majority believed differently. Did this handful take this as a sign that they were mistaken? No. Why should it be different for us?
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