srehn's blog

Since religions can't actually deliver on the promises of unreasonable bribes, they have to get around that part somehow.  A very effective way to do that is to claim to make good on the promise only when or where nobody can verify it.

The most common way to "deliver" on a bribe is after death.  Heaven, reincarnation, nirvana, seeing dead family members and some more exotic stuff all "happen" after the recipient is dead and can't tell anybody alive about it.  The human mind, if it has faith, will often convert these failures of religon into successes; e.g. "Grandma's in heaven now," so heaven exists.

One rather exotic case of this meme is the super powers promised by Scientology.  They say that the classes that give you super powers will be available when the building is finished, which will happen when they get enough money.  That has been expected "pretty soon now" for a couple of decades.

A similar category is things are predicted to happen in the future.  Among many Christians, the rapture is an event which will happen in the future and will change the world enough to remove all doubt of their religion's truth.  If you do the reasonable thing and wait until this has happened to believe, they say, you will be too late and won't get the easy access to heaven.  You'll have to suffer through the end times.  And since everybody who's ever predicted the exact date of the rapture so far has been wrong, you should just believe now.  There are similar, though generally less manipulative, issues with other religious timelines.

If nobody you can communicate with has any evidence for or against a proposition, the only reasonable assumption is the null hypothesis; in this case that nothing much happens.  The trouble is that with enough indoctrination and reinforcement, people with faith tend to assume that the less probable option is actually the most reasonable (for reasons I'll post on soon).