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Sunday, November 18, 2012

They will never know



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.

1 comment:

  1. 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