Anyone that has experienced the radio show "Coast to Coast AM" understands how strange the discussions are. Alien abductions, psychics, and the paranormal are taken as basic fact.

Recently, a caller shared that he believed alien visitations (again, it's just accepted that the visitations are a fact) are not aliens, but the hand of God at work, sending angels in disguise to bring the End of Days. His call was taken quite seriously and discussed at length. I've never been able to determine if the host believes this himself or is just riding the gravy train, Jerry Springer style.

One thing is certain, the callers believe. It's a scary thing to observe, but when examined, how much removed is that from religious belief?

Religion asks us to disregard logic and accept supernatural claims on faith. The only real difference is in the number of believers. With mainstream religions, nobody is telling you that you're crazy to believe XYZ. The claims of the Immaculate Conception are no less strange than aliens that travel billions of light years to abduct us for sexual experiments. Actually, the alien scenario is less strange since it doesn't involve anything supernatural, only advanced technology and sex starved aliens.

I don't think most religious people would consider their beliefs to be stranger than alien abductions, but honestly, aren't they?

Religion doesn't ask us to disregard logic. There's your flaw right there - some people just can't believe that there are those who studied the evidence of Christ and logically determined that he is the risen Lord.

Granted, many beliefs are illogical and contradictory, but faith and reason never are contradictory.

Do you have a supporting argument for this, or are we to accept it on faith?

Well yeah, pretty much by definition in this case.

In general, there is no means of arriving at truth that does not require premises taken "on faith" (or whatever equivalent term you prefer). Only naively zealous believers in certain Kool-Aid epistemologies argue otherwise.

Do you have a supporting argument for this, or are we to accept it on faith?

This right here is a problem, in that in order to believe that "christ is lord" then the resurrection story must therefore be true. unfortunately for those who you claim have logically determined jesus to be the risen lord, resurrection is by definition illogical as there is no scientific evidence for it, and the results have NEVER been duplicated.

"Strange" is not a good word choice. "Far-fetched" is better and to answer your question, yes both claims are far-fetched.

That depends on what constitutes "far-fetched". Not that that even really means anything. 100 years ago it would be really far-fetched to believe that this desk my computer is on is mostly empty space.

And 200 years ago it wouldn't have seemed very far-fetched that life on earth was created in its present state by God, and not evolved over hundreds of millions of years into their present state. Now we have information that shows otherwise.

this...sort of. we dont have evidence that can disprove god is the same way we have evidence for jib's example. but imo it keeps getting more and more far fetched as time goes on due to a number of factors.

Just because something is not reproducible by scientists doesn't mean it is 'illogical.'

Something that can't be done is illogical - making a stone so heavy God can't move it, for instance. Saying Jesus both rose and didn't rise from the dead is illogical. But He did rise from the dead - just supernaturally.

There is not scientific evidence, but there is PLENTY of historical evidence for it.

Your criteria for evidence seems very suspect. The only historical evidence of the resurrection are the accounts of the Apostles. So, the historical evidence of the truth of the accounts of the Apostles are the accounts of the Apostles?

Are there independent sources that corroborate these accounts? I just don't see this "PLENTY of historical evidence" you mention.

John 20:29

'Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."'

Not a verbatim command to ignore logic, but the message is clear that it is a blessed thing to simply accept on faith rather than to demand evidence. There are numerous examples in the Bible where faith is a virtue and worldly knowledge is looked upon with disdain. The message is clear that faith trumps knowledge/logic.

Aliens don't exist.

You can’t prove they don’t.

I don't have any first hand knowledge that tells me my desk is mostly empty space. I believe it is because certain people I trust told me this is the case. I believe my desk is mostly empty space as a matter of faith and not as some fact I have personally verified. I haven't actually peered into each atom that makes up my desk to see how much empty space it contains.

Now because I believe my desk is mostly empty space, that idea doesn't seem far-fetched to me. If you believe in alien abductions then that idea probably won't seem far-fetch to you. To an ardent catholic the Immaculate Conception is not far-fetched.

I would wager that St Bernadino believes in neither alien abductions nor the Immaculate Conception.

Agreed for sure. There seems to be ONE instance of historical evidence, that of the bible. And blindly believing a book written by what can either be one or numerous people is simply illogical. That is no different than me making up my own text, burying it, and having it be discovered a century later and believed as absolute truth. There is plenty of illogic there.

Its a strange paradox that while religious belief is considered considerably more sociably acceptable than belief in alien abduction, never the less alien abduction stories are infinitely more likely to be true than most religious beliefs.

We already know that faith trumps knowledge and logic, as useful as the latter two are. This is not unique to the Bible. It is an inherent property of systems of knowledge and logic that they are built on arbitrary (within the system) premises, taken "on faith" or the equivalent, which always trump conclusions.

An ironically faith-based calculation of probability.

Not really. If there are alien abductions there are intelligent aliens, whose story will be quite similar to ours; they will have evolved from more primitive life forms somewhere else in the universe, and have developed, among other things, the technology necessary for space flight. We already know this can happen, we are the evidence.
For theistic religion to be true ( the big three anyways), there has to be an immaterial being with all sorts of supernatural powers; no one has so far been able to demonstrate that this is even a meaningful possibility, so there is nothing unreasonable about claiming, that alien abductions are more probable than the existence of a theistic god.
Something that we know is a possibility will have to be a favorite over something that, for all we can tell, does not make any sense.

They better not for the biblical Gods sake.

This is asinine, and the exact reason that religion always has and always will be bull****.

Once you observe something super natural you can't really call it super natural anymore since what you observed occurred in nature. Supernatural is really a meaningless concept.

You can't prove they do

Yes, it does.

There is absolutely nothing logical about believing that a person was born without two people having sex to conceive him, and this person was able to transform physical properties of the world and heal the sick by merely touching them and come back from the dead for a quick visit, and now after a priest says a few magic words and transforms a cracker and some wine into this dead godchild's body and blood, you can ingest him, and if you believe in him in spite of absolutely zero evidence that there ever was such a magical person anywhere in this world except for in one book (which says a lot of the same things that a lot of other books say but is actually correct and all those other ones are false even though you haven't read them), then you get to go live with the magical dude forever instead of burning forever, because, although he loves you, he will fry your ass if you reject his love.

The fact that you cannot support any of those claims with evidence, and the fact that those claims stand in direct opposition to all existing evidence regarding human biology, physics, etc makes it the antithesis of "logical".

I was kidding a little bit in my answer; the point is that this is the argument the religious side always falls back on. If I say there is no god, they say you can’t prove there is not.
The larger point is, that if you are justified in saying there are no aliens, because we can find no evidence of their existence, I am equally justified in claiming there is no god, because we can find no evidence of his existence.