In any case, there is one thing you should know about me. You may think I'm wrong, but I am clearly not ignorant. That option is not available to you.
True. There’s a third option:
Loftus is both wrong and ignorant.
I appreciate Loftus drawing
our attention to the false dichotomy. It’s not as if we’re forced to choose
between his either being wrong or ignorant, when it’s clearly a both/and
situation.
I have studied with the best and the brightest…
The fact that a teacher is
the best and the brightest doesn’t make his student the best and the brightest.
A teacher’s intellectual distinction doesn’t automatically rub off on the
student. You can have mediocre students of terrific teachers.
Stu will be missed, just like Kantzer and Feinberg before him. It's too bad they will never know they were wrong. They will never know they were on the wrong side of history.
In other words, since Loftus
denies the afterlife, dead Christians will never know they were wrong.
Of course, if the Christian
afterlife is true, then dead Christian won’t know they were wrong because death
will confirm that they were right all along. They will live with Christ.
Conversely, if the Christian
afterlife is false, then dead infidels will never know they were right–for once
you’re dead, the decedent is in no position to know anything, one way or the
other.
If Loftus is on the right
side of history, then when he dies he will never know that he was on the right
side of history. By his own lights, dead Christians won’t know that they were
on the wrong side of history while dead infidels won’t know that they were on
the right side of history. So what difference does it make to either
party–given his assumptions?
For that matter, how could living infidels
know if they are on the right side of history? They’re not living on the future
side of history. They only know the past. So they don’t know how the story will
turn out, do they? History is only over a day at a time. That's a long wait.
What good will it be to dead
infidels to know (before they die) that they were on the right side of history?
Where’s the consolation in that? These are the beggarly scraps that infidels
take comfort in–like a dog gnawing a bare bone.
So, they guy uses the memory of a dead person to defend his own intellectual merits! Anyone else find that a tad bit perverse?
ReplyDelete