It is fundamentally opinion-based. You have obviously expended enormous energy to assuage your fear of consequences in the next life. I respect that - your emotional involvement is quite evident. May I point out the following: Your own reductionist reasoning is circular at the top as well - in (negatively) not assuming God's existence you implicitly, POSITIVELY, assume His non-existence. Your use of Ockham's Razor fails to account for built-in prejudice. There is no such thing as neutrality - yours is pretended and the product of the cumulative experiences that comprise your noetic make-up.
Your real motives, from what I can see, are emotional in nature. Which is quite understandable...
Is there a needle embedded in this haystack?
Well of course it is. I do not have any axioms, just a lot of nominally rational beliefs.
You have obviously expended enormous energy to assuage your fear of consequences in the next life.
You spent more energy typing that sentence than I've spent on its subject in many years. I do not care about this subject generally, and am mostly trying to correct an egregious misunderstanding of mathematics. Most people are bad enough at math as it is, and there is no need to perpetuate it.
May I point out the following: Your own reductionist reasoning is circular at the top as well - in (negatively) not assuming God's existence you implicitly, POSITIVELY, assume His non-existence.
Uh, no. You clearly are not getting it. I make no axiomatic assertions. There are an infinite number of hypotheses, and I select the best hypothesis at the time using Occam's Razor, itself based on the hypothesis that the axioms of mathematics are generally correct. Occam's Razor makes no assertions about correctness, just rationality and probability of correctness. Apparently you are unfamiliar with "non-axiomatic systems"? It is well-known in philosophy, as there is a robust non-axiomatic epistemology that was created by a protestant theologian.
Many of my current beliefs are probably incorrect. But they have been selected in such a fashion that I am maximizing the probability that they are correct, which is the best any of us can do. I do not fear being wrong since I assume I must be wrong at least part of the time.
Your use of Ockham's Razor fails to account for built-in prejudice. There is no such thing as neutrality - yours is pretended and the product of the cumulative experiences that comprise your noetic make-up.
Apparently you do not really understand Occam's Razor either. Occam's Razor is purely inductive, which in common English means that it assumes evaluation in a subjective context. If we had objective observers, we would not need Occam's Razor. Come on, it does not do your credibility much good that you missed the main theoretical point of Occam's Razor when attempting to use it.
Your real motives, from what I can see, are emotional in nature.
Huh? This is a discussion of mathematics and formal construction. Where does emotion enter into it?