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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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You might have missed the line about mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That's pretty darn close to the central claim of most atheists, especially the ones 'round the internets who would be most apt for not-kid-gloves treatment.

a lot of old-school atheists got really uncomfortable about "atheism+" or "New Atheism", and those are the steps that really defined the transition. I could also argue that this confuses correlation and causation if 2010s atheism was really just a corpse piloted by SJWs.

But that's kind of the whole point. They created the corpse! They knew what they were doing when they killed it. But like any social fad, they shrugged it off, thinking that nothing could possibly go wrong. Only after they saw the fruits of their labor did they start feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing. Let's put it this way, I've seen arguments that Christianity is to blame for wokeness, and some of those arguments are actually not all that bad. But if you look at, like, a random Protestant 'barely believer' church that is now headed toward wokeness, you probably wouldn't say that they caused the rise of wokeness. You certainly wouldn't use that in particular to claim that Christianity in general caused the rise of wokeness. But you might say something like, "Look at these churches who have basically abandoned any real faith, are honestly basically agnostic already, don't even really believe in any sort of real morality. Those choices have left a corpse of a church which was just too vulnerable to 'woke mind virus'." In a sense, those choices caused wokeness to rise up in those churches rather than in others. In the same sense, that's what a lot of the 2010s atheism did to large portions of the masses.

You might have missed the line about mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory.

What does this mean?

But that's kind of the whole point. They created the corpse! They knew what they were doing when they killed it.

Why would it matter? The truth value of a statement or belief stands independent of whatever it may engender.

Science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality. Rather than building an actual metaphysical theory, they just declare that their constraints handwave the whole problem away.

Why would it matter? The truth value of a statement or belief stands independent of whatever it may engender.

To be as flippant as the commenter two posts up in this thread, because the atheists are wrong. /thread

It's only bonus badness that their wrongness led to one of the very things the OP was complaining about.

Aaaaand here we have one in the wild, folks. This is like maybe five comments away from someone saying this is a weak/straw man.

  • -15

Listen man, see Entelecheia's comment. Then go back to rippin' your bong all you want.

It's a meaningless argument against the concept of knowledge itself

No, it's an argument against your proposed criterion of knowledge on the basis of it being self-contradictory.

does absolutely nothing to actually advance the notion of god existing

That's because it's an argument whose goal is to figure out what knowledge is, not whether God exists. If you want arguments that advance the notion of God existing, you should look at those, rather than looking at an argument about knowledge and observing that it doesn't prove that God exists.

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