Your food may or may not have been deliberately poisoned with colourless, odourless, tasteless toxins. Assuming that sophisticated lab equipment and testing chemicals are unavailable to you, you can't prove or disprove this claim. What do you do?
- accept the idea and refuse to eat. You can get your nutrition through those dietary supplement milkshakes or something (which are safe for the purposes of this analogy - don't know why, but since I'm inventing the analogy, I get to make the rules
).- at first, neither accept nor reject the idea, but instead only eat after you see other people eat the same food and live.
- reject the idea and eat your food without worrying about poisoning.
The first option is analogous to theism. The second to agnosticism, and the third to atheism. Do you think you can see how a reasonable person might choose the third option?
Which one would you choose? Remember: you can't prove or disprove the claim, and if you reject it and it turns out to be true, you'll suffer great harm.
At this rate, they may be able to reach the number of religious communist societies in only a few centuries.
