It's ironic that you cite “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (which, by the way, was cosmologist Martin Rees’ aphorism, not Carl Sagan’s), to introduce using what is absent (what wasn’t said, what isn’t there) as evidence. Indeed, this “absence of evidence” maxim is one you should unlearn, since it is false. Frex, if you investigate the Monster Under Your Bed by looking underneath your bed, and find an absence of evidence for said monster, that is, in fact, evidence of the monster’s absence. Or to put it in mathematical language: P(monster|~evidence of monster) < P(monster|evidence of monster)

This reminds me of something I a comment I left on a Christian blog, to a user who deplored "soulless and bloodless rationalists": If by "bloodless", you mean "devoid of emotion", if you imagine we rationalists are incapable of such feelings as love, then it is you who are lacking in empathy.