I'm shutting down Google+ for the night and quite possibly for the weekend. Why? This stupid #gifwars thing people are so proud of. This Adam Black guy said he doesn't like gifs and now everyone is mass trolling him. Having been mass trolled like this I can relate to him easily enough. Have an opinion and the collective might of Google+'s lower class denizens jump on a bandwagon. I just saw a post where someone wanted to jump on board and had to get clarification she was tagging the proper Adam Black. She wasn't even connected to him ! Nor was she a part of the original discussion. She just wanted to follow the herd. When I called her out of it she claimed, "one gif doesn't make a troll." Perhaps not, but she's contributing to a larger troll effort. One straw doesn't break the camel's back, but thousands will. So, tonight, Google+ disgusts me. It probably will tomorrow as well. And possibly Sunday. I gave up Google+ for two months this spring
Comments
There is an infinity of things in which we all do not believe. That does not make all of us "believers in an infinity of non-things". Same with atheists. We simply reject one more thing than most people do. But anyone with a bit of mathematical saaavy knows that infinity + 1 is just still the same value of infinity.
And no. Consensus plays no role in truth. We cannot form a commttee to decide whether 2 + 2 = 5. Or rather, we could, but it's deliberations would be meaningless.
And Eli Fennell, I'm afraid you've got the problem induction exactly right. I can no more disprove the existence of god than I can the existence of the easter bunny. But if you have good inductive reasons to believe in some kind of god -- or the easter bunny -- then it is rational (e.g., from a Bayesian perspective) to believe in said god or bunny. But it's an inductive inference and so never guaranteed to be right.