GASLIGHTING - WHEN SOMETHING IS PUT OUTSIDE THE REALM OF TESTING AND VERIFICATION ---

 
A claim that cannot be tested is no good for it can be denied or ignored as easily as it can be endorsed!  Unless a theory tells you what it takes to refute it, it is not a theory but a doctrine.  Religion goes on as if no evil can show God cannot exist or cannot love us so God does not deserve to be dignified as a belief never mind a theory.  It is not exactly a lie but still dishonest.

The claimants are trying to take advantage of others because nobody has the right to say a claim is the truth or to be taken seriously just because they say so regardless of what evidence is there or not.

What cannot be tested to see if it is true or probably true is no good.  Such a test implies you are testing to see if it is false or probably false.  To test to see if something is true is also to test to see if it is false.

To assert there is a God means you have to admit there is a way that God can be refuted. Those who claim to have faith in God or religion end up with a faith that cannot be shown to be false. For example, they would say God is good even if all creatures were in Hell forever. This is not about faith or evidence but prejudice and obstinacy. On the ethical side, it is simply bad to argue that nothing that happens to another is bad enough to disprove a loving God.  You have no right to do that when you are not going to be one of those creatures in Hell.  The best beliefs and the best people are open to being shown to be wrong. Putting a belief outside the reach of the truth and the evidence is a sign that you are insincere and not a servant of truth.
 
Hypothetically, if the person might be sincere you cannot be expected to know or think that they are. You have to address what looks like prejudice and bigotry.
 
When say a Muslim commits terrible atrocities in the name of religion, the believer and his enablers might say that no true Muslim does such things. And they will say it again if worse atrocities are committed by another Muslim. They are putting the dark side of religion outside the realm of testability and identification. They do not care about the consequences - they just want to seem too nice to see the bad in any religionist.
 
Making something unfalsifiable is a necessary ingredient if you intend to engage in a terrible form of abuse and manipulation called gaslighting. This is where you influence others so that their perception of reality is impaired. For example, if you want to get society to respect and endorse someone evil, you may spread confusion about morality among them so that they become more susceptible to your influence. This form of abuse tends to keep the gaslighter safe for he or she is looked up to and his or her schemes are hard to uncover.
 
Gaslighting is when you stop a person trusting in reality. It is the ultimate form of abuse for it has the biggest chance of putting the person permanently in a haze. The person becomes a thing to be used by the gaslighter and is unable to see how to help themselves or that they should help themselves. Gaslighting tends to make the victim feel good enough and happy enough which in fact further enables the manipulation and makes recovery from gaslighting even harder. And gaslighting to be successful has to start off small and gradually come between the person and his or her place in reality. The victim is out of touch with reality and to the degree that he or she is out of touch, there is a risk of depression. Depression can be caused by instilling a sense of helplessness in the person.
 
Religion is fond of gaslighting. It encourages children and the vulnerable to believe what it wants. When they believe, all the evidence they see is seen through that psychological filter. They do not see evidence and truth as they really are. The Catholic Eucharist depends on non falsification. The blessed wafer is supposed to be a living thing, a living man, Jesus. When it seems no different from any other wafer that is not blessed, excuses are made. Namely, its inner reality is changed but what appears to the senses remains the same. With such a doctrine you can sell lead and say it is really gold. That even Catholics would not tolerate you saying that you have faith that the lead has been turned into gold shows they are into religion out of habit more than anything else. Surely if they can say a wafer is a man you can believe another version of that and have lead being gold. Stating doctrines so that nothing can disprove them is a form of gaslighting - indeed its ultimate form!
 
The gaslighter gives you doctrines and principles in such a way that you will feel that questioning them or doubting them is pointless. The gaslighter tells you the emperor is wearing fabric so fine that you cannot see or touch or sense it. And the truth is that the emperor is wearing nothing.
 
If somebody creates a theory in such a way that it cannot be tested then it is useless. For example, if you pray to God to be able to live a perfect life and it does not happen, God did not help you. But religion will say he did - he helped you by not helping you. They say he has a mysterious purpose that we cannot fathom. God if he exists should be more to us than a theory but he should be a force that is active in our lives. If there is no evidence for that force, if we have to invent excuses for why we are not better people than what we are despite asking God to make us good, then instead of believing that God exists, we simply guess that he does.
 
To simply assume that God has a purpose for the bad things that happen to you, is flippant. If you truly respect a person, you will not even think there is a purpose unless you are reasonably sure.
 
It is said that the atheists can play the falsification game too. They can dismiss miracles and all the evidence for God (we are assuming such evidence really exists). If an atheist sees a statue of Jesus coming to life that talks to him and has tea with him for a few hours, he will reason that it was some trick of the mind or a temporary mental illness that caused the experience. Nothing will make him think that the experience was real. It is made unfalsifiable.
 
Christians who believe the Bible, claim that the universe is only about 6,000 years old and that the devil planted all the evidence to the contrary. By blaming Satan's supernatural power, they put their claim outside of the reach of evidence and reason. Their doctrine is really a guess not a belief. Evidence is good for nothing at all if Satan can tamper with it. Belief needs evidence - you cannot believe in anything unless you believe that evidence helps in the search for truth. An atheist can just be as bad. He might say the world is 6,000 years old as the evidence that it is astronomically more than that is fake. He may not say the fakery is supernatural but down to some undiscovered scientific reason.
 
The Christians and the atheists who stop admitting that evidence and truth are valuable and useful will soon lose motivation for seeking truth and adopting beliefs that are in harmony with reason and evidence. They are the enemies of progress.
 
Making the non-supernatural unfalsifiable is not in the same league as making the supernatural falsifiable.
 
One reason is if you make the non-supernatural unfalsifiable, there are risks and problems and the chance of erring is huge - that is bad enough. Don't make it worse by assuming there is a supernatural. There is too much as it is to make unfalsifiable without doing that. If we are going to deflect falsification to make assumptions then at least we should try to use the explanations that seem the most mundane and the simplest and avoid guessing that some hidden or supernatural powers exist.

Another reason is that you cannot test the supernatural with sense experience the way you can the non-supernatural.
 
* Non-supernatural scenario - the gaslighter tells you to drink poison for it will do you good not harm period. If you drink the poison and get very ill, the gaslighter will be proven wrong.
 
* Supernatural scenario - the gaslighter tells you to drink poison for it will do you good not harm as long as you believe enough. If you drink poison and get very ill, the gaslighter will say you did not believe enough. Thus he makes you see the proof that he was a liar as something else - a proof that you need to believe enough for it to work. He does this by implying that belief has the magical power or supernatural power to make the poison affect you favourably like a vitamin tonic would. Nothing can really prove he is a liar. But for practical reasons, we judge him as a liar. We assume the supernatural is nonsense and behave and think accordingly. We know what kind of world would result if people believed or tolerated all supernatural claims. We know the risk of gaslighting has to be considered, so we simply refuse to enable that risk. We refuse by dropping the supernatural as a possible explanation. Even if it is, we do not want to think about that. And we shouldn't.
 
If something cannot be falsified then the inability to falsify is a necessary evil. If you cannot prove something wrong, there is a danger that you may think it is right when it is not right. This risks error and error harms truth and risks your wellbeing and that of those who are inspired by you. Error makes people spend money and time and suffer to fix it down the line.
 
Ideas and beliefs or assumptions that cannot be disproven or at least shown improbable are necessary evils which means you keep them to the lowest minimum possible if it is not possible to avoid them completely. Also, try to stick to the ones that are minor. Major ones need to be avoided if possible.
 
God is the major assumption. Belief in God is an unnecessary evil. You cannot say God is right to let people suffer so terribly when belief in God is an unnecessary evil.

To assume the existence of an all-perfect and all-powerful God and evil are not necessarily contradictory is to assume no evil is great enough or bad enough to prove only an evil God could allow it to happen.  But it is up to evidence to tell you that.  You cannot just assume it.  People really suffer.  It is as insulting to assume as it is to assume that nobody really suffers much but only acts as if they do.  It evil to declare a question that demands evidence to be satisfied with an assumption.
 
We conclude that if God or the supernatural cannot be disproven, that is actually a reason not to believe in them.  Occam's Razor warns you that if theory a is the most straightforward way to account for the evidence then use it and not theory b which is good but is a bit more difficult.  The Razor is what tells you that you really are active in the real world now. It says it is not a demon putting dreams in your head. It is not schizophrenia making you think you are in the real world. There is no reason to accept any possibility than that your life and world are real because saying otherwise is unfalsifiable. Focus on unfalsifiable.