The Vacuous Sermonette

The Forge will be off for a couple of weeks, one for the holiday and the other because my USDA job wants me to attend a school for learning how to use an iPad. Which means, I get to sit there and listen to someone explain to me for hours how to do something I already know how to do. But for all of that, let’s send the Forge off with a bang.

The subject is this vid I recently loaded on tektontv:

It took some time, but Sam Harris fanatics eventually found it – and gave me a perfect opportunity to discuss a fave tactic of fundy atheists: the vacuous off-topic sermonette. 

What do I mean by that? Well, check some of these comments on the vid:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins

Nailed it. The devil was a saint compared to god. Silly people, myths are for kids.

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Come on! How can anyone arrive at the conclusion that the bible s correct? Surely, you wouldn't believe that if it wasn't in your interest to do so. You believe it because it offers you hope and provides you with comfort. That's great but don't use the word truth to define it.

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This video still doesn't take away the fact that there are some barbaric sayings in the bible to begin with. Yeah, of course people can speculate about whether something was a "metaphor," or meant to be taken literally. But that is besides the point. If God is supposed to be omni-benevolent, as well as all powerful, then why have the confusion in the first place? He enjoys watching humans fumble around for meaning, and if they guess wrong, they are punished for it? It's all really bizarre.

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Spin away, you ridiculous loser - it says what it says, and this is only one example among many. I'll bet you that not one in a million xians has the faintest clue about your tortured "reasoning" and will take this at face value, making even more tortured excuses for it! Your only saving grace, as it were, is that you can't be a biblical literalist.

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Why are we even debating the scribbles of people from the Bronze age? When no one had any answers. No idea what caused crops to fail, weather patterns, celestial events, disease, atoms, gravity. Yet people believe that the all mighty omniscient God visited only these people in the desert, one time in history? This is so wildly insane and illogical that only a baseless, fact free, 'faith' could ever lead you to believe a word of this book as truth.

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Sugar coat it and put a pretty face on it but it still doesnt hide the barbaric nature of the culture that wrote the bible. The bible is obsolete, written by desert dwellers with delusions and sheeple still lap it up as a word of god.

Notice something missing? Give yourself a steak dinner if you guessed, “they didn’t even touch the arguments in the vid.” That’s right. The vid is filled with details about things like the dramatic orientation of the Biblical world, human psychology, and so on. But not one fundy atheist deigned to address any specific point in the vid. Not one fundy atheist, not one point.

Not all were long-winded. Some were short, but no better at addressing arguments:

Tell me this is a joke...

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STRAWMAN! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! The stupid, it burns!

And here was the funniest of all:

Euthyphro's Dilemma.



Yes, that was it. What that was supposed to have to do with anything, I can’t say.

I re-read Keen’s book Cult of the Amateur this past week, and I know what’s going on. It’s not that hard to discern. Basically, a vid that presents such complex concepts is too far over the head of the typical fundy atheist – leaving them little alternative but to resort to pre-fabricated speeches or dismissive sound bites. Do we expect them to actually argue something like, “Well, no, their world wasn’t one of dramatic orientation”? Or, “the literalist reading of Ps. 137:9 is better because…”?

Perish the thought. Because their thoughts perished long ago.