2.1 billion people can’t be wrong!
Honey, I hate to tell you this…. but yes, yes they can. We’re going to call her Sarah, mostly because I’ve never really had a friend whose name was Sarah before, and in fact a good portion of the Sarahs that I’ve met have been complete bitches. So Sarah, obviously not her real name, has made the famous argument that 2.1 billion believers can’t be wrong.
It’s a stupid argument. Nobody argues that Christians are wrong because the 4 billion other people on the world “can’t be wrong”. What if I told her that the 1.3 billion muslims in the world “can’t be wrong”. Or that the 1.1 billion people described as “secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist” also “can’t be wrong”. It’s just a really dumb fucking argument to make.
Because the fact of the matter is, any number of people can be wrong. It’s actually not all that hard. How many children are there in the world who believe in Santa Claus? Probably a whole hell of a lot. Do we argue that because there are so many of them, they can’t possible be wrong? No. Because we already know that they are.
There are a lot of stpid reasons to argue that Christianity (or any religion) must be right. But the “2.1 billion other people believe the same stupid crap I do” is one of the worst ones out there.
What’s the boundary? How many people does it take to be incapable of being wrong? A few thousand? A couple million? A few hundred million? Or does it depend on what you’re arguing for? But at the end of the day, whichever arbitrary number you decide… yeah, that number of people can be wrong. They can be brainwashed or gullible or lied to, and they end up believing something that isn’t real, and at the end of the day, you end up with 2.1 billion who can be wrong — and in the grand scheme of thing… 2.1 billion people who are wrong.
Because there is no god, no guy watching out for you, no Jesus that rose from the dead, no sacred text inspired by an all-knowing deity. I’m an atheist, and I’m convinced that I’m right, but it’s not because x amount of people agree with me. I don’t give a crap about how many people agree with me or disagree with me, because it doesn’t matter. There’s no good reason to believe in god, but the billions of other people believe it too is a really shitty excuse to be stupid.
