Quote of the Day by Dr. Hector Avalos, Chiding Pop Christian Apologists For Pretending To Know Things They Don't Know

Don Camp has roosted here at DC, viewing himself as an apologist whose primary goal is not to learn from us but rather to dismantle our arguments against his faith. He's posted so often I limited his comments to ten per day. What Camp should tell us is why his god was so incompetent he enlisted apologists like him to set us all straight. Enter Dr. Hector Avalos. Camp had strewn together a lame response to a video Dr. Avalos made, so Hector responded here. Undeterred, Camp thought he could respond further. So Hector chided him in a letter below, which also serves as a warning to other pop Christian apologists and professional apologists as well.

Dr. Peter Boghossian has defined faith as "pretending to know things you don't know." It's a stipulative definition, one that's polemical in nature yet accurate from the perspective of atheists and skeptics. No, we emphatically do not have to use a word such as "faith" in the same way Christians use it, when the concept behind it is the debate itself. Although, if faith is trust, as they say, there is no reason to trust faith. Anyway, just like the sophists in the days of Socrates, who pretended to know things they didn't know, most all apologists for Christianity do likewise (otherwise they wouldn't be apologists). By contrast Boghossian wants us to practice the intellectual virtue of authenticity, whereby we admit we don't know something if we legitimately don't know it. No one can know everything. So apologists who are pretending are not authentic people. The question is why anyone would take seriously the pontifications of an inauthentic person? The lack of authenticity, all by itself, should tell us such a person is indoctrinated, brainwashed and delusional.
Mr. Camp,

What you seem to be saying is that you don’t have the time or inclination to do proper apologetics and biblical scholarship. Nor do you seem to have access to the the scholarly resources needed to evaluate a scholarly question.

This is particularly ironic in light of your response to Zeta: “you could look this up if you were really interested. But you are not. Your interest is in refuting God not understanding him. That is a waste of your time and mine.”

You also are asking me to do your homework because you don’t have the time to read what I already have said.

If you are going to have a blog that purports to provide proper and accurate information, then it is your obligation to understand the issue in depth in order to avoid foisting bad information upon your readers.

Finding the truth about an issue often demands hard work, and you should be willing to undertake it or avoid discussing the issue until you have done that homework.

For that reason, you should have read as much scholarship as possible on the Amarna letters before publishing such a poorly informed post.

Again, if you don’t have the time to do the proper vetting of claims and websites to which you are appealing, then it seems best to avoid writing on that issue until you have done the requisite homework.

Would that be a fair observation?

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