Why I Started Applying the Same Standard of Evidence to Everything

I spent a long time not noticing the inconsistency, and once I did, I couldn't stop seeing it. In pretty much every part of my life, I apply some basic evidentiary standard before I accept a claim as true. I check reviews before buying something expensive. I ask a doctor what a diagnosis is based on. I don't believe a rumor just because a lot of people are repeating it confidently.

Religious claims were the one place I'd never actually applied that same filter. I'd absorbed them early, before I had the tools to question anything, and by the time I did have those tools, the claims felt too foundational to poke at. Once I finally did ask the question I'd ask of literally any other claim, what's the actual evidence here, testable, independently verifiable, not just internally consistent with itself, I didn't find much to work with.

That's not the same as saying I found proof of absence, and I try to be careful about that distinction. I'm not claiming certainty that no deity exists. I'm saying that when I hold the claim to the standard I hold everything else to, it doesn't clear the bar, and I don't think it's intellectually honest to grade one category of belief on a curve just because it's the one I happened to grow up inside.

That single shift, treating extraordinary claims the same way I treat ordinary ones, is really the whole starting point for everything else I've written or will write on this topic.