Saturday, March 28, 2015

John Moore: In Serious Denial, Or...

....possibly John Moore lives in a cave... really far back in.
John Moore: The new atheist just doesn’t care

“If we do have issues with religion it stems from the fact that an awful lot of conflict and abuse in the world seems to be rooted in faith and sectarianism. We’re weary of head-shaving, penis-snipping, knife-carrying, face-covering, genital-mutilating, gay-shaming and pork-evading; practices sacred to some, superstitious to the rest. We’re at odds with the notion that because you are born to a certain set of parents you must refuse blood or chemotherapy, eschew technology, shame women, dispute evolution, hit yourself in the head with swords or shake sticks out of cans.”
Atheists and Atheism have been at the root of the violent deaths, eugenic mass murder, and violent cultural eradications which include orders of magnitude more humans than all religions combined, and they are still at it. Atheist denial of this demonstrates their intellectual dishonesty; it can't be ignorance, but it could be a mental disorder. But it remains a common justification attempt regardless of its falseness and regardless of the ease with which the truth can be demonstrated in order to destroy it as a useful argument in favor of Atheism. The inversion is a clue to the mental processes of the the person who invokes such a position.

The remainder of this list of infractions against Atheism is childish by comparison to the Atheist assaults on mankind. The ignorance of this seems egregious especially in the arena of evolution worship, when Darwinian evolutionary theory has collapsed internally at the hands of evolutionists, five years ago. But evolution invokers are universally worshippers, not science lovers, and Moore is no different.

"Eschew technology"? Does he think theists are all Quakers? What sort of argument is he making?

He actually is not making an argument. He is listing stuff that arouses his ire, while trying to convince us that there is no Atheist ire any more.
“We’re also dubious about the argument that religion makes one better. I know it makes some people better but the absence of faith is not some kind of character deficit. Indeed to insist as Black does that “without God, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are just pallid formulations of like and dislike” is to argue that humans are too stupid to know that it’s wrong to kill or steal. It’s even arguable that there is greater character to living a moral life in the absence of the promise of divine reward or retribution. And certainly when people kill while shouting “God is great” it calls into question the moralizing force of faith.”
And nowhere in that paragraph do we find actual Atheist moral principles. What we find is actually false: entire Atheist cultures are controlled by killing and torture and limiting education: there is specific evidence of Atheist lack of character in the history of Atheist cultures.

Next he makes the very common error of conflating fear of breaking laws, and moral principles for behaviors. And then we find the standard use of Islam to define the generic term “religious belief”, the Fallacies of False Association and Equivocation.

Finally, he resorts to the argument that theists are moral purely out of terror of their own deity, an argument designed to impugn rather than to understand any theist arguments or positions. I.e., he has produced only caricatures and cartoons set up as straw men – the cheapest form of rhetorical fallacy.

“Black writes that intellectual Christians become more convinced of God’s existence with each remarkable new discovery of our universe’s sophisticated interconnectedness. The reverse applies for non believers. I recently learned there is a leukemia unique to children with Down’s Syndrome. Where is the divine hand in that?”
The old “God is Evil” argument (or rather whiny complaint), so easily disposed of, yet used so stultifyingly often by the uneducated Atheist. One might expect the FSM meme to pop up next. But he skips that and goes for the ridiculous:
"In religion, politics and lifestyle it never seems enough to hold fast to what you believe; your world view must also be under vicious attack from rivals and bullies. I’m sure there are plenty of yobs and provocateurs who poke at the faithful like mosquitoes, but the age of the “angry atheist” is past."
After listing all the stuff that pisses him off about theism, he claims angry Atheism to be past and sees no internal contradiction in what he has written. Yet he has produced a compilation of accusations which could have come from Dawkins, and with a similar degree of intellectual non-rigor and ill-concealed rage and arrogance. He presumes that there is no refutation to any of his "issues", and presents them as axiomatic premises for his presumptive conclusion, a conclusion which doesn't follow from the angry and arrogant list he produces.

And he doesn’t even seem to comprehend that the attacks by the FFRF, the homosexual/LGBTQSBFGSHRBSDFGRRSFGRGBPNBOV lobby, the Humanist associations, not to mention the SPLC, the DNC, and at least one third of the US Government are ongoing and hate-filled, conquest-minded, intolerant, tyrannical attacks on individual religious persons and small private businesses with the intent of destroying them unless they obey Atheist rules. (They lose their attacks on large businesses with the resources to fight back, even to the Supreme Court). They do stop just short of beheading, but the angry Atheist philosophy is the very same totalitarianism as that of Islam: obey or be destroyed - that is the definition of tolerance. The age of the angry Atheist is raging full bore and even at the level of government attacking dissenting theists every day.

This author is either blissfully ignorant or he is a blatant liar. There is no in between possibility.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Is there symmetry here? Do Theists in turn have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Atheist theories?

Stan said...

Placido,
Of course. And it is done in the right hand side bar in the Challenges to Atheists and Evolutionists.

But at the base level it amounts to theists rejecting the empty rejectionism of Atheism, which commonly claims no responsibility for presenting any reasoning or evidence for rejecting theist claims. So that part is easy: Theists reject the Basic Atheist Premise: Atheists have no responsibility for Burden of Rebuttal, and Atheists will argue that point rather than give disciplined deductive logic and/or empirical, experimental evidence which "proves" that there is no deity.

Thus the entire issue devolves to dealing with ignoring theist claims against the intellectual propriety of empty denialism, Scientism and Philosophical Materialism as "proofs" of any sort, given that they all are internally non-coherent and thus irrational positions.

When theists make those arguments, Atheists generally circumvent them entirely, or run away.

So you see, the theist position is already covered; it is completely up to Atheists to present proof consistent with their own worldview belief system, proof which legitimately and incorrigibly validates their beliefs with actual logic and/or empirical proof.

Robert Coble said...

In Dr. Frank Turek's newest book, Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case, he states that it is better to frame the discussion in terms of which better corresponds to reality: theism or atheism. This requires both sides of the discussion to present positive arguments in favor of their position, rather than either (or both sides) evading the responsibility for presenting reasoned arguments and evidence (not limited to physical evidence a priori) for their specific worldview.

The thing I dislike is continually having to define (and redefine) terms in non-equivocal terms. There are only so many times that I can stand to see the evasion of defining "evidence" clearly. If by "evidence" the person means PHYSICAL evidence ONLY, then state that position succinctly at the beginning, instead of evading discussion behind the "no evidence, no evidence, NO EVIDENCE" assertion. The same applies to assertions by atheists that theists have "no arguments" for their position, just "blind faith." If the atheist refuses to even acknowledge the mere existence of the wealth of reasoned argumentation by theists, then a reasoned discourse is impossible.

Having to continually deal with strawmen of almost hysterically ludicrous dimensions (such as invisible unicorns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters) does not auger well for reasoned discussion.

Phoenix said...

Having to continually deal with strawmen of almost hysterically ludicrous dimensions (such as invisible unicorns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters) does not auger well for reasoned discussion

I just realized something after reading your comment.I have never seen Atheists employ a successful deductive argument using the FSM and pink unicorn gambit against theism.

Atheist logic:I don't believe in X (God) and I don't believe in Y (unicorns) which also lacks evidence.Therefore X=Y

The Atheist argument is a non-sequitir,as well as an argument from incredulity.X seems inconceivable so it must be false.