{"id":169,"date":"2012-10-09T15:44:09","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T19:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/?p=169"},"modified":"2012-10-09T15:44:09","modified_gmt":"2012-10-09T19:44:09","slug":"the-boogiemans-greatest-trick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/2012\/10\/09\/the-boogiemans-greatest-trick\/","title":{"rendered":"The Boogieman\u2019s Greatest Trick\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I keep telling people that the Boogieman is real. He hides under people\u2019s beds and in their closets and he makes them do horrible things. He is the cause of all that is evil in the world. His greatest trick has been to convince people he doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n<p>What? You don\u2019t believe me and reject the belief in the Boogieman? Then you are proving just how great his trick has been. Of course this is ridiculous but try telling that to someone using this argument to prove Satan or a similar argument to prove God.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, the world looks exactly the same with or without Satan. Either he is just that good or he just doesn\u2019t exist. Personally, I\u2019ll go with option two. But let\u2019s say I\u2019m wrong and Satan or the Boogieman are real. So what?\u00a0 If they are so good as to not have any evidence for their existence then it doesn\u2019t really matter. On the other hand, if Satan isn\u2019t real and people just do bad things on their own, then we can learn why people do the things that they do and we can actively try to get them to do something else.\u00a0 Not only is belief in Satan not true, it also isn&#8217;t useful.<\/p>\n<p>Satan is just a made up Boogieman that people use as an excuse to blame the ills of the world on. This is of course obvious to us, but to the religious it is almost impossible to convince them otherwise. So next time someone confesses a belief in Satan to you, tell them that Satan doesn&#8217;t exist, but that the Boogieman does. Then use their arguments against them to support your belief. Have fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I keep telling people that the Boogieman is real. He hides under people\u2019s beds and in their closets and he makes them do horrible things. He is the cause of all that is evil in the world. His greatest trick has been to convince people he doesn\u2019t exist. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[38,183,1066,1069],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satan","tag-atheism","tag-boogieman","tag-god","tag-satan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/dangeroustalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}