You’ve switched now from genetic fallacies and red herrings to the strawman, while retaining the personal attacks. That is, you’ve mischaracterized my views to make it easier to overcome them.
Granted, I do criticize both conservative and liberal Christians, although I do so for different reasons. Conservative, literalistic Christianity is premodern and nakedly archaic. Liberal Christianity is fake because it’s modernized and co-opted (and thus anti-Jesus), and its’ often indistinguishable from secular humanism.
But that doesn’t mean I make it arbitrarily impossible for Christians to operate. You’re leaving out what I say about authentic Christianity. A follower of Jesus should be a counterculturalist, not a consumer who’s “adapted” to modernity by selling out Jesus altogether.
The best a late-modern Christian could do is apply Jesus’s antiestablishment style to the modern context. That means adapting to modernity by dispensing with conservative literalism and criticizing secular norms (such as consumerism) from some visionary standpoint. Such a Christian wouldn’t be dogmatic about the Christian creed and would be Christian more in spirit than in letter. Frankly, I’m a model Christian in that sense. I’m probably closer to Jesus than 80 percent of “Christians” in the developed world.
Who says I’m a “materialist”? I’m a naturalist who redefines “supernatural” as “artificial” (as resistance to nature-as-wilderness). I’m not a materialist since I think qualia are real, and I reject mainstream capitalistic values (social materialism). So that’s a strawman.
Why expect a general audience’s criticisms of the philosophical writings of someone with a Ph.D. in the field to be especially compelling? Most folks aren’t experts in philosophy, so it’s not surprising that I’m able to fend off most criticisms in this forum. The best comments I receive aren’t criticisms or hostile takedowns as much as insightful suggestions for related work or questions about how the arguments hang together.
Also, I honour constructive criticisms precisely by engaging critically with them. That is, I honour the pursuit of philosophical truth by testing criticisms, by defending my views to see how far they can be pushed. I’m not interested in winning arguments, but in seeing what’s true, and we don’t discover truth by meekly admitting defeat. We argue and we ponder the results of debates.
Far from thinking I have everything worked out, I write to figure things out for myself. So in writing, I’m in the very act of figuring things out.
Your second-last paragraph’s account of my epistemology isn’t quite right. I don’t say objectivity is impossible. I say we should be pragmatic about objectivity. Thinking objectively is about empowering our species.
I’m also not opposed to all psychological observations about authors. What I’m opposed to is ignoring or distracting from an argument with personal attacks. Suppose some pessimistic philosophy were indeed motivated by personal trauma. So what? What would that prove? Not that the philosophy is false, because that trauma could be universal. That’s what the existential predicament is. I suffer sometimes like everyone else. I apply my experience just as everyone does. But I don’t just vent my emotions. I think critically, I read widely, and I assess the difference between a kneejerk expression of idiosyncrasies, and a reasonable generalization.
Your criticism here, then, is uncharitable. It’s also unoriginal since Christians have long been saying that atheism is caused by daddy issues, and so on. This is hackneyed, and your problem is that you’re on a fishing expedition. You lack data about my life, so these personal attacks are just empty. And again, even if you had data, the attacks would be fallacious because you’d be launching them as a substitute for engaging with the arguments and explanations in my articles.
I’m sure my articles can sound dogmatic from the standpoint of someone whose views I’m repudiating. But that’s an illusion. I write forcefully and bluntly to save the reader’s time, and sometimes to entertain. Don’t forget, though, that my writing rests on decades of study. I advocate a viewpoint strongly here because I’ve already tested out various alternatives and found them wanting. My writings are just explaining why I’ve come to those judgments, and you can do what you like with them.
