Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Has he checked a mirror?

     The person running the blog Atheist Watch has written a post entitled "The arrogance of ignorance." If you switch the sides of pro-religion and anti-religion, he is easily talking about himself.
     Now, he is quite correct that there are educated christians. I have run across a few and read the works of others. The generally recognize that it is not possible to prove the christian god is correct. It is just something they believe. I can actually respect that. I don't agree with them; but I don't agree with anyone on everything. However, educated christians generally respond to criticisms of their positions with arguments and references to back them up; and even recognize impasses caused by defferences in worldviews. They do not respond with, "You're stupid. Go buy a logic book."
     In his "Fallacious Reasoning" thread, I responded that, if he would actually provide a reference to the text where he gets his definition of "appeal to authority," I would be happy to check it. It doesn't conform to the way I have heard the term used anywhere. I also pointed out that I checked the site where he said he quoted it and couldn't find a citation, making his claim of accessibility suspect. Unsurprisingly, he deleted that post. I say unsurprising because I expect he created his own definition for his own purposes and does not want to be called on it.

     Update: He apparently let the comment through after all. I guess I was wrong. But it had been a full day; and he did make a new post.

3 comments:

Xian said...

I appreciated your comments over at "atheismsucks". What a meltdown over there! Who'd they piss off?

Pvblivs said...

Xian:

     I expect no one, actually. Based on what I've seen, two main possibilities stand out. 1> Someone likes to go to sites that seem to be popular and trash them. 2> A christian spoof acted in that manner to allow the blog owners to say, "See, this is what atheists are really like." The fact that one of the authors started a post saying "Atheist apologists..." is consistent with such a plan.

Reynold said...

Well, I had gotten him to change that "atheist apologetics" from a plural to singular, but he still takes a shot at atheists in general later on.


They should just start moderation like many other blogs.