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[aesmael]

    Responding to one of my posts just below, stacis_leak  mentioned the blasphemy challenge. I was going to say that one of the purposes of the challenge was to raise awareness of disbelief and let people know it is okay to question their church but now I have checked the site itself and see no mention of any purpose but the winning of free DVDs so I suppose that was a post hoc justification.
    I do think that, as a tool for persuading others to investigate it may not be so effective (no evidence either way for me, right now) since one of the main responses from Christians seems to be horror that people could risk themselves so carelessly and utterly (that and attempting to define away the blasphemy), not the thought that 'these people are so confident of their stance, I wonder if there is anything to it'.
    So, I wanted to consider what might be a counter-challenge, something to mirror it from the other side. What I came up with was people demonstrating their belief in an afterlife by arranging for the posting of a video of their suicide. That would certainly produce horror in those who do not believe there is an afterlife and it would certainly not make me wonder if there was something to their beliefs; without some evidence apart from mere conviction I would simply think them deluded to the point of self destruction.
    Well, it does not make a perfect analogy. So far as I know most religions prohibit suicide (which I suppose is necessary for a religion promising paradise to be successful).

Comments

[stacis-leak.livejournal.com]

Ermmmmm been done.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/6494523.stm

More to the point most religions believe that suicide damns you to hell so it wouldn't really be much of a challenge.

A better test of faith would be forgoing modern medicine in favour of prayer, which some people actually do, the bloody idiots.

That's not really an instantaneous one-off action however, so perhaps injecting yourself with a disease which isn't immediately fatal (not suicide) but which science cannot cure.

The trouble with that however is that most religions, especially Judeo-Christian flavour, all say not to test God like this, even though that's kind of like telling the followers to put no faith in their deity whateoever.

I suppose that'd be the advantage of science over religion, science can be tested, repeatedly, and with hilarious results on shows like Myth Busters and Brainiac: Science Abuse.

On a total different point, committing suicide would be a way of testing faith in one extreme scientific theory: Quantum Immortality.

You know the whole Schroedinger's cat thought experiment?
Well if you combine these and look at it from the viewpoint of the cat, since reality kind of splits to one with a dead cat and one with a living cat, since the dead cat can't experience it's lack of life, from the cats point of view it always lives on in a universe where its survival is increasingly unlikely. So even if it only has a 0.0000001% chance of survival, from the cat's point of view it always lives.

And you know the theory that on a quantum scale, things are so random that there's a minuscule chance that you'll vanish right now and reappear on Mars? Well the chances are so incredibly slim that you'd have to wait out many times the lifespan of the universe to see something like that happen.

Well if you take these two theories and apply them to someone jumping off a building, the jumper would cease to exist in all universes except the one where a bizarrely unlikely quantum event saved their life at the last minute.

That said they could still be horribly crippled and continue to exist...

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

XD

Yus... if they supported suicide but also said there was a heaven, everybody would be going off to kill themselves xD

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

If they did not damn people to hell they probably would not have many followers left. But, my main point was not to devise an appropriate test of faith, I was trying to imagine something that would inspire in me the horror I attribute to believers in the face of the blasphemy challenge. Although what you suggested would do the job too.

Speaking of quantum immortality, have you ever read 'Permutation City'?