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From: tim@unc.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Rational discussion
Message-ID: <5437@unc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Jun-83 13:12:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.5437
Posted: Fri Jun 24 13:12:30 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Jun-83 20:51:05 EDT
Lines: 106


            Tim:  I think your attitude of not wanting to
        reply to Larry's articles is not very rational either.

    It is not rational in its motivation.  It comes from a very deep
frustration.  I consistently go out of my way to present intelligent
and rational arguments, and Larry consistently responds by ignoring
the points I am trying to make, preferring to take one (or at most
two) sentences out of context and follow them with some Bible quotes,
or tell me to "remember those words at the judgment".  I am
counterinclined to continue to bash my head against a wall.  Larry is
obviously not listening with his intellect, and thus my continued
efforts would be a waste of time.

            I can understand your not accepting his throwing
        verses at you, but as far as reasonable discussion is
        concerned, I don't see why he shoudn't [sic] expose
        whatever flaws your arguments may contain.

    I don't either.  I wish that he would at least try to do so.
Instead, he ignores the argument as a whole and focuses on things
which are at best exemplars.  Further, all the evidence and argument
that he uses rests on acceptance of the Bible; this sort of argument
is by definition not rational.

            In any case, what may be a trivial matter for one
        person can be important to another, so to say that he
        is "picking at small things" and not answering the big
        ones (which I don't think is true) is very relative
        anyway.

    No it isn't.  When I explicitly present A PARTICULAR ARGUMENT and
Larry ignores it, it is not a relative statement to say that he has
not responded to my argument.

            You often use a sarcastic tone which I don't think
        is proper to "rational discussion", as you put it.
        Personally, I don't mind it, but some people might.

    I'm glad to see that you have been appointed guardian for them.
This sort of unasked-for restriction is one of my big gripes with the
whole Judeo-Christian moral approach.  (Not all Judeo-Christians are
like this, but the brother's keeper attitude is encouraged by the idea
of absolute right and wrong.) If you are telling the truth, that is,
you don't mind sarcasm, then why are you even talking about it?  If
someone does object, they are capable of saying so themselves.

            Besides, I think you (and too many other people)
        tend to dismiss as irrational any conclusion that does
        not confer [sic -- read "concur"] with yours.  Take
        for instance the resurrection case.  Larry took his
        arguments from McDowell's book.  Now McDowell was not
        a Christian to begin with; he studied the evidence and
        found it conclusive.  Do you mean he has no use of
        reason?  Or that his mind works worse than yours?  C.
        S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer -- so many people have
        embraced Christianity on a rational basis!

    I disagree entirely.  If the flimsy and pathetic arguments in
"Mere Christianity" REALLY converted C. S. Lewis, then I have no
qualms about saying, yes, Lewis's mind worked worse than mine.  Those
arguments have holes you could fly a cargo plane through.  I find it
hard to believe that they could convert anyone who didn't WANT to be
converted.  I don't think that these people's true motivation was
rationality; if so, then their intellects must have been very weak.
These are harsh words, but they are an honest statement of the facts.
There is no rational reason to prefer Christianity to any other faith.
To quote Bertrand Russell:

            "Of course I know that the sort of intellectual
        arguments I have been talking to you about are not
        what really moves people.  What really moves people to
        believe in God is not any intellectual argument at
        all.  Most people believe in God because they have
        been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is
        the main reason."  [From "Why I Am Not a Christian"]

    (I would like to make it clear that I have a religion, and that I
have adopted it for reasons that are not rational but do not in any
way conflict with rationality, for instance by forcing me to believe
in possibly unreal historical events, or non-existent sentient beings.
My choice of a lover is not rational either, and I would never degrade
it by making up these spurious "rational" arguments for it.)

    The fact that someone became a convert is in itself no evidence
for the truth of what they converted to.  For instance, a good number
of people have studied astrology with an eye to disproving it, but
wound up converts.  Does this mean that astrology is valid?  Of course
not, and neither does it say anything favorable about the rationality
of the convert.

    I can't talk about Schaeffer, since I don't know anything about
him, but about McDowell -- where have you been?  There have been quite
a few articles in the last few months about his "evidence", finding it
wanting in a variety of ways.  In particular, it seems that he does
not examine evidence critically, ignoring the possibility of later
Christian interpolations in historical records.

    In summary, the reason that I am no longer replying to Larry is
not that he maintains his contrary position, but that my repeated
efforts to get him to engage in rational conversation have always
failed, both on the net and in private mail.  Given this fact, I see
no reason to continue to waste time when my arguments fall on self-
deafened ears.

    Tim Maroney