Victor Reppert and Jeff Lowder Again On Ridicule

Reppert still doesn't get it and it stuns me. Maybe he refuses to consider anything I say because I'm, well, an atheist, and he knows atheists are wrong about everything! ;-) He thinks one must come up with a argument and be able to defend it--on the Harvard Yard or something?--before being entitled to ridicule a belief. For one must be careful not to end up ridiculing a true belief. Of course, Reppert surely wants to be on the committee that decides which beliefs are false and deserving of ridicule, I'll bet.

Is he serious? I think he is.

The fact is that no one has to justify the use of ridicule. Ridicule is self-justifying. The justification of ridicule is in the laughter from like-minded people, along with the existence of a real target audience that it targets. If no one laughed, or if the targeted audience didn't exist, then ridicule would be unjustified. It would fall flat. It would fail to achieve any results. No one would get it. For no one would laugh and no one would feel targeted. This is not hard to see Victor. Why don't you just admit you don't like it when it's aimed at you? I don't like it when it's aimed at me. I admit it. Yet I see a good reason for it. Why can't you say the same?

Lowder on the other hand, cannot recognize ridicule when it's obvious. So in a recent post he's arguing against some so-called "stupid atheist meme's" that are primarily examples of ridicule. Now THAT'S some funny stuff to see. The meme he's presently discussing is this one: "If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people." Now there are two things to note about these so-called "stupid atheist memes" he's taking to task. First, there is some truth to them. Second, they are exercises in ridicule. You cannot logically criticize something that is meant as ridicule. And they violate no principle of charity, since there is some truth to them--Or to say it more precisely, there are some people whose beliefs are being criticized by the memes.

For the record, and in defense of this "stupid atheist meme", I think faith is always present to some degree whenever there is religion, and that faith is always unreasonable. There is at least one logical fallacy in the way the mind of the believer reasons when embracing religion. So if we could reason with religious believers and they accepted reason, there would be no religious believers.

0 comments: