Sir_Russ Dismantles Victor Reppert On Ridicule

Vic complains about the commenters here at DC, saying they attack him. They most certainly attack his ideas. By contrast his commenters personally attack atheists and have little substance beyond that. So compare them to what sir_russ wrote below. There is some snark going on in it, but his reasoning and writing are very good.
Victor, you said, "But the main criticism of the New Atheists is that they ridicule religious beliefs without studying them well enough to know what they are talking about."

But, it is only necessary for one to work to understand an interlocutor's subject matter at a high level when the subject matter is real. If the subject is roughly the same intellectual content as fairies, gnomes, pixies, dragons, werewolves, and leprechauns, then it deserves no more respect than any of those. And, it's clear that the fables, myths and legends you label as your version of a Christianity are not respect worthy. No one need try to understand what you think your Christian words mean when none of the individual minds, including yours, working on Christian ideas can show it to be anything plausible or coherent, and when the thinking of the best minds are taken as an aggregated whole all you have is a load of completely garbled incomprehensible bullshit. Why can anyone outside Christian social influences safely dismiss it just as two-thirds of humanity does?: because Christianity is intellectual garbage. Rabbis reject it; Imams reject it; and, one version of Christianity damns and rejects the others.

Would you feel obligated to put a lot of work into understanding astrology before you criticized it for taking people's money in an act of fraud? No you would not. Palm reading? No. Phrenology? No, again. For that matter, have you studied deeply all the rarefied subtleties of all the world's religions to know that you are justified in rejecting them? No, you surely have not. But, you would demand the same Christianity's critics?

Religion is really no different than astrology. You, Victor, are one of the best that the Christianities have to offer and you are powerless to show any Christian-specific claim to be true. What's more, whatever your esteemed Christian intellectual elite opinion is on any given Christianity-specific topic - even the existence of a god - there will be similarly esteemed Christian intellectual elites who will contradict you. Not one of you heavy-duty mucky-mucks knows a damned thing about a god. You are all just making it up. Since there is no god to set you straight, you are all free to spew bullshit till the cows come home. You want always to distance yourself from the Christian extremes which means you think much of Christian thought is just as stupid as any atheist thinks it to be. The world and the rest of the cosmos show no signs of supernatural influence, and the God hypothesis offers no explanatory power.

You said, "So ridicule is going to persuade only the biblically ignorant."

And, who is it that are so woefully ignorant of the Bible: Christians, that's who. Do you pay any attention at all to what the knowledge, understanding and beliefs of those self-identifying as Christian actually are? I will guarantee you Richard Dawkins has far greater understanding of Christian ideas than almost all Christians alive. What you imagine is your own understanding leaves you far apart from the great mass of Christians. Your own fellow Christians don't listen to you and they would never work to understand what you have to say about grace, atonement, exegesis, hermeneutics, salvation, heaven, hell, original sin or all the rest. Poll after poll, and study after study show that Christians do not know what they are supposed to believe to be part of their particular Christianity. Why don't you know that? Why do the likes of you and DR. David Marshall have to be schooled by atheists? You want to demand that Christianity's critics understand what the pew-warming nickel-plunkers don't understand, and even heaven-as-carrot and hell-as-stick can't make them try.

Oh, though, let me guess, you, Mr. Christian Intellectually Impotent Heavyweight, imagine yourself as always have the perfect ace in the hole: faith. Right? Faith as conceived in the Christianities is a completely useless notion. Faith in Christian ideas still today leads to people being burned alive as witches. Oh, but, that is just one of the dumbshit Christianities, right? That's not the subtle, refined, nuanced, intellectually and soulfully satisfying Reppertism, is it? No, no, no. Faith in Christian ideas still leads to people dying due to their relying on prayer: hundreds of Christian Scientists a year in the US. Faith in Christian ideas leads to Arizona legislators saying church attendance should be mandatory. Ideas derived using the Christian faith model for acquiring knowledge have conflicted with naturalistic science and sensible secular moral reasoning hundreds of times, and every single time the Christian way has lost. Not once has a Christian idea shown it to be superior to the science which completely ignores gods or a secular moral reasoning which places real humans above silly notions of deities.

Do you really imagine that a supernatural system of thought that has always shown itself to be inferior to a completely natural one is worthy of faith? Really? Being always wrong deserves faith? If that is what you think, then you need to be rescued; your mind is screwed up.

0 comments: