Lots more garbage and harassment there from you. Where to begin unravelling these distractions and fallacies of yours?
How about with your lame attempt to make atheists and scientists seem equivalent to Christians? Scientific methods are very different from the Christian’s. Science is self-correcting whereas Christianity is dogmatic. Scientists deal with well-formulated, empirical questions that have testable answers, whereas Christians deal with meaningless or with ultimate questions that have no testable answers and that call merely for “faith” or naïve intuition. Scientists have technological applications of their models, whereas Christians scare children into agreeing with them, by threatening them with hellfire in the afterlife.
And atheistic philosophers like me are likewise not equivalent to Christians. I’m just philosophizing here, by myself, presenting some critical questions and conjectures. I’m not claiming my views are absolute truths. I’m not dogmatic either, but that doesn’t mean I have to suffer fools gladly. I defend my ideas with critical thinking, whereas Christians defend their creed with fallacies and guilt trips. What fallacies do I commit in my articles? You don’t even address my arguments, and yet you have the nerve to accuse me of being as irrational as Christians who take the Bible to be literally true? Why do I have to take that seriously?
The atheist “carefully constructs a scaffolding” so the Christian will fail? What a laugh! The scaffolding is called “modernity,” as in the history of the developed world over the last several centuries. I’m not responsible for that history which shifted the intellectual default from Christian theism to atheistic naturalism. You’re just shooting the messenger.
You’re free to question scientific theories because modernity affords you that freedom, whereas medieval Christendom wouldn’t have permitted me to question Christian orthodoxies. That’s why it’s lame and obnoxious to speak of scientific “orthodoxies” as being equivalent to Christian traditions.
But if you question scientific theories, you’d better back up your doubts with more than just conservative prejudices. You need evidence, logic, and alternative, testable explanations. If you come at science with just conspiracy theories and fallacies of distraction, you will indeed be laughed at because you’ll have proved you don’t know what science is, and that you’re not prepared to engage with the modern, post-theocratic discourse.
What does originalism have to do with anything? I reject conservatism for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with this article. You’re saying Christians are caught between a rock and a hard place. But that’s their fault, not mine, because they’re holding onto an archaic worldview. Christianity is an anachronism in the modern world, so of course Christians are going to have trouble fitting into progressive culture. What does that have to do with me? Adapt or defend your beliefs as best as you can, and I’ll try to do the same.
Again, no part of your comment addresses my article about the Gospel of John’s criticism of Doubting Thomas. That means your comment is a red herring. And your comment is filled with personal attacks that are likewise fallacious. The fallacy here is that there’s an article sitting there, and you’re trying to distract from its argument by launching into obnoxious accusations. And then you criticize me for having thin skin, and you shoot the messenger who’s pointing out that Christianity’s no longer the intellectual default in the developed world.
You say, ‘My argument here is that every person's "rational" world view derives directly from personal experiences and emotional responses to trauma.’
That means your “argument” is just the genetic fallacy. Now, did I invent the thinking on that fallacy? No, I learned it in logic textbooks. Again, you’re shooting the messenger.
But you’re also not engaging with what I’m saying in the articles. I incorporate existentialism into my worldview. I’ve argued lots of times that our worldviews are stories that grapple heroically or otherwise with our existential predicament. But that kind of explanation isn’t an excuse to ignore the stories’ contents. That’s why in this article, for instance, I engage with the Gospel of John. I don’t just lazily accuse Christians of dealing badly with harsh existential facts, so that I end up begging the question against theism. No, I criticize Christianity in lots and lots of ways. That’s why my existentialism isn’t fallacious. I don’t commit the genetic fallacy. You do, so again there’s no equivalence here.
You’re not my therapist. My personal life is none of your business. And my writings stand or fall on their merits. That’s what it means to offer arguments and explanations. For instance, I explain why I call nature “monstrous” in several articles (links below). Now, those arguments may or may not be motivated in part by my personal experience. But this psychological perspective is lame and anti-philosophical. If all ideas are just expressions of trauma, that applies to psychological theories too. No ideas would be taken at face value, and no other intellectual systems would have emerged. Instead, therapists would have all the fun, diagnosing intellectuals and assigning pills. Nope, that scientistic gambit isn’t going to work here. Not on my watch.
No “joy” in me? Again, the personal attack is just obnoxious. It’s not that I’m thin-skinned. Rather, I’m offended by bad art. And I take joy in great art, including art that’s made of ideas.
