Religion vs. Another Religion vs. Atheism

It all starts off with Pascal's Wager. You know it! The notion that atheism is a bad bet because the atheist loses nothing and potentially gains immortal life. It has been criticized from the very beginning because it is, in fact, such bad reasoning. Still, it gets trotted out with almost mind numbing regularity, and nowadays it seems to be given life as a general critique of religion over non-religion, ignoring the mutually incompatible nature of most religions.

Which happens to me almost constantly, nowadays -- people will argue for religion generally, when in truth they're all actually promoting a specific form of a specific religion. It's a deeply insulting argument! Like I don't know that these very Christians that can't tell me why I should prefer Christianity to Islam, or why people who "open their heart to god" sometimes choose wrong in their own view . . . like I don't know that these very people aren't equally condemning most religious people on earth to eternal torment. That it is not religion in some sort of abstract sense that they're promoting, but very specific forms of religion.

We're not talking Buddhism or Taoism, here. We're not talking about the rights of aboriginal people to maintain their lifestyle. Uh-uh. The people who are talking to me are uniformly evangelical Christians. So, they go from talking to me about the rights of "religion" to condemning other religions for their various faults, condemning them all to hell!

Of course, the biggest group of people who do this in America are intelligent design supporters. You want to find out how religious intelligent design fans are, just try suggesting that the designers are gay aliens from the Dog Star. It's like they think we're too stupid to see that the people who advance ID are all fundamentalist Christian nutjobs.

This dishonesty annoys me. So, I'm going to be trying a new technique. Rather than focus on the concept of religion vs. atheism, I will focus on the differences between religions. Rather than trying to prove that religion, in some abstract, is foolish, I'll try to get them to tell me why I should accept their religion over someone else's. Really twist in them that it isn't choosing "god" over choosing atheism, it's choosing a specific god, a specific religion. That the issue is not, and has never been, choosing generic belief in god over atheism, but exact faiths. I think that by focusing generically on religion vs. atheism we're giving these people a pass -- religious people hate each other at least as much as they hate us, condemning each other to various hells. I'm gonna try focusing on that when people try to convert me or argue from a position of generic religion.

And, as a bonus, a story from my youth!