Of course he can only offer his. However, his basic axia are so far removed from those of most other people that they do not provide a means for common-ground discussion: the underlying assumptions themselves must be debated or rejected if any discussion is to happen with him on almost all issues. And that gets really old: he knows that his underlying assumptions are different from almost everyone else’s, and we know that he knows that, and yet he keeps pushing them front and center.
Try a thought experiment. Personally, I don’t believe that logic is necessarily valid, that the universe necessarily corresponds to the principles of reason. (This is true, by the way, but is another discussion that I’m not having now). For the next week, every time you open a thread, imagine there’s a post from me about halfway down the first page making some oblique reference to how the OP is incorrect, given that the universe doesn’t necessarily correspond to the principles of reason. Imagine that these references are occasionally very insulting, suggesting that people are sheep if they believe so naively in the principles of reason.
I’m not saying to imagine that in every thread dealing with metaphysics. Open a thread about whether Michael Jackson is guilty? There’s a post there stating that we can’t believe in any evidence proffered by the court, because… Open a thread about Freedom Fries Guy? I’m right there, suggesting that you can’t show FFG ever said that FFG because… Looking at a thread about the use of tasers in police stops? Guess who’s got a post excoriating everyone for assuming that statistics on police stops have any sort of meaning, since everyone knows that cause-and-effect is just an illusion?
Seriously, try it out. See how old it gets, how fast.
Now imagine that every time I make one of those (sincere, from-my-heart) posts, half a dozen people jump on it as either easily dismissed, bizarrely intriguing, or simply unignorably outrageous. Whatever the thread you were reading was about, it now is about whether the universe operates according to the principles of logic and reason.
We’ve all got our own nutty views of the cosmos. Most of us are capable of recognizing them, and setting them aside for the purposes of discussion. For the purposes of discussion (and many other purposes, I should add), I act as if the principles of logic and reason hold sway in our universe. Lib very rarely will set Libertarianism/Propertarianism to the side for the purposes of discussion. And that’s what’s so frustrating.
I agree, and I’ve stopped debating him on these issues. The problem is that so many people don’t stop, either because they’ve never seen the ontological “proof of God” before, or because they lack the self-discipline to ignore yet another argument about whether taxation really equals robbery. And so the discussion, no matter what it was about, is now about his pet issue.
Daniel
