Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
If something has observable properties, then it is part of nature, as we could observe it, model it, and include it into our scientific theories. If something has no observable properties, then it is not distinguishable from something that does not exist. Supernatural phenomena thus, tautologically, are not distinguishable from something that does not exist. Indeed, I would go as far as even saying the definition of nonexistence is to lack observable properties. That is why i se supernatural phenomena as a no-go. It either lacks observable properties, so it does not exist as a matter of definition, or it has observable properties, meaning it is just natural and not supernatural.
Funny, I was saying a simplified version of this to my daughter yesterday: We can’t see the wind, but we can build a wind detector since the wind has an observable effect on the universe. We can’t see atoms, but we can build an atom detector since atoms have an observable effect on the universe. We can’t build a god detector or a ghost detector because gods and ghosts have no observable effect on the universe.
Ghosts and gods and magic simply do not fit in with how we have observed the universe working and they would cause a lot of basic problems with things we can observe, yet they do not. The simplest explanation is that there are no such things as gods or ghosts or magic.