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Saturday, June 25, 2011

Why atheism fails

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/06/the-christian-delusion-why-faith-fails-a-philosophia-christi-review-of-john-loftus-book.html

5 comments:

  1. Triablogue. Dead as a maggot.

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  2. You may not have noticed, but Papalinton is now the front man for Loftus when Loftus wants to argue and make sarcastic remarks but at the same time act like he is above it all.

    He goes around to various blogs and deals with criticisms of his master.

    Just today at Victor Repperts blog I mentioned this and Loftus himself Immediately showed up.

    An odd coincidence, at the very least.

    Anyway...

    What is amusing is that Avalos is now over at the Loftus blog attacking this review and making Moral Judgments while avoiding facing the fact that he is a Moral Relativist...except when it does not suit his argument, and then he is not.

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  3. A fun exercise: Run through how many times Loftus accuses critics of failing to understand the OTF.

    This is completely anecdotal, but when so many people fail to understand an author, I find it is usually because the author is an inept writer. Kant accused the post-Kantian writers (Fichte, Reinhold, Jacobi, Schelling, et. al.) of failing to understand him. We can excuse his successors on this point. And we probably can excuse Kant, who revolutionized an ingenious (even if flawed) system.

    Returning to the fun exercise: now ask yourself whether Loftus is another Immanuel. I'd venture that we should not confuse excusing someone like Kant for being unclear with excusing another for writing bullshit and getting away with attempting to belittle critics.

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  4. @ James A Gibson - fun exercise; run through how many people DO understand the OTF.

    The concept is not inept and nor is the author, but nice ad hom anyway.

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  5. Paul: I wonder about your exercise. How many people - or more easily answered - which persons claim to understand OTF as a method for evaluating belief systems, reject that method, and are accepted by the OTF tribe as really understanding it? This is not a rhetorical question with the implicature that there are no such persons. Names please. This will provide some reason to think that Loftus is not as bad a writer as Kant given the exercise I recommended.

    But I am glad that you spotted the ad hominem. It almost went unnoticed!

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