Nor does mine, of course. And I’m not advocating banning badchad, or even calling him a troll. Your point about how easily some believers can melt down when their beliefs are compared to belief in Zeus or in unicorns really captures the essence of my objection to badchad’s behavior. He frequently chooses the most provocative and inflammatory words at his disposal to make whatever point he’s trying to make. It is possible, even easy, for you to politely outline a reasonable comparison of belief in the Abrahamic God to belief in Zeus. Somehow you managed to not call Jesus a cunt while doing it. It is also possible and easy for me to explain that my beliefs are not scientifically verifiable, that they are in part a result of the convincing (to me) testimony of other believers and on personal spiritual experiences, and that they do not, for me, involve any conflict with science. Important matters can cause meltdowns, and we shouldn’t be so intent on politeness and avoiding offence that we render our discussions bland, but in my view badchad deliberately inflames feelings that are already prone to overheating.
I see no problem in criticizing the irrational and superstition. Like most fundamentalists you don’t see your own examples of irrational behavior. Here you are using the faith you have in your own interpretation to commit your own hateful acts and find some justification for them. It’s not very impressive.
IMO when we take the advice of Sam Harris and remove the special status of religious beliefs we come to a place of trying to understand how people come to whatever belief system they have. We can discuss the objective realities and what scientific evidence there is or isn’t. At some point we reach the limits of what science has been able to clarify and each person is left to decide what conclusions to reach beyond that.
Much of beliefs is about moral choices and motivations. What is it people put first and what is it they truly value? It is subjective. When you start to look at the subjective portion of individual belief systems you discover everybody acts on faith.
What I find interesting and hypocritical in your post is that you justify your own beliefs and hateful behavior by creating an imaginary link between hateful fundamentalists acts and liberal Christian beliefs. Do you have any solid evidence for that connection? Of course you don’t because it’s a ridiculous contrived justification for your bad behavior.
I see the benefit of getting people to examine their beliefs honestly in the face all available evidence. I see no benefit in belittling the beliefs of good people for the sake of your own pet bias, your ego, and entertainment.
What we have evidence for in your behavior is that losing what you refer to as irrational and superstitious beliefs doesn’t necessarily translate into good behavior.
And the more others get to make personal observations about you. Have you found anyone who claims to follow Jesus teachings to perfection? You set yourself as an accurate judge of what Jesus taught and then set yourself up as the judge of whether others are following your assessment of those teachings. Knock yourself out. It’s only your opinion after all and isn’t all that relevant except in revealing more about yourself.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA stop please. My sides hurt. What a delusional little ego you have. You are intelligent enough to know better. Annoying someone to the point where they refuse to discuss things with you anymore does nothing to change their mind or prove your point. It only reveals your own desperate childish need to declare “I win I win”
If that were true then Bibleman has proven all of his beliefs as well.
Remember, a mind is terrible thing to waste. Good luck with growing up. No time like the present after all.
Is there a rule that you have to debate someone? I couldn’t find it in the stickies anywhere. Perhaps it is one of those unwritten rules.
Isn’t that the one of the jobs of a mod? To decide what is and isn’t trolling? And if so why hasn’t badchad been banned for trolling?
As far as I can tell he does so for two reasons. When he annoys and /or insults his opponents enough for them to abandon the discussion he can declare “I win! I win” because they in his delusional little mind they were unable to properly defend their beliefs angainst his scathing intellect and vast Biblical knowledge {KJV}
2nd, if they get angry enough to hurl insults back then he can call them hypocrytes and point out that they are unchristian. Once again the goal is declare “I win! I win” and then fool himself into thinking thats some kind of accomplishment.
a third method revealed in this thread is if someone simply refuses to engage his childish games he can cry “Chicken! chicken!” and once again declare himself the winner.
Congratulations** badchad** I guess you showed us.
I’ve always just chalked it up to his being, at heart, a nasty little prick. 
There, he wins again (method 2).
Well, Scott Plaid used to crank out thirty posts a day IIRC. badchad has some ground to make up; though Scott at least gave himself a chance by posting on a variety of subjects.
I do not understand how you do not consider this trolling, probably because I disagree with the text I bolded. He very definitely holds and expresses certain views with the deliberate intention of pissing off his targets. He never argues a philosophical position in a detached way. That he thinks all religious belief is foolish is his right and is a position held by a significant number of Dopers. However, he does not enter an argument to challenge generalized beliefs, rather, he always makes it a point to attack the person in his crosshairs. In fact, he even pretends that it is necessary:
Now, to pretend this, he has to claim that his targets are “nominal” Christians (so, apparently, he is not even attacking “real” Christians), and, as his attacks on AHunter3 and cosmosdan demonstrate, he is quite willing to go after posters who are not even “nominally” Christian (in contradiction of his claim that I have quoted) as long as the poster happens to express any form of belief.
Sorry. To me that is consistent with trolling (looking for a fight for fight’s sake). That he may actually hold some of the positions he argues usually keeps it from being out and out trolling, but it remains consistent with trolling behavior, (which I how I usually express it). However, when he does his little victory dance, then his need to declare “I win” seems to trump his actual opinions and move it into the realm of actual trolling.
A “mission” to respond non-responsively?
Oh, my.
You might want to take note that I had not attacked badchad on any of his little provocations until he opened up a specific thread with the intention of whining and pounding his little fists on the ground because I urged him to behave himself in GD. It has been his habit since his first appearance on these boards to single out posters who had identified themselves as Christian and attempt to attack their beliefs. He has even tried it with me when I have corrected him on issues outside belief, insisting that I was required to tell him my beliefs despite the fact that they were outside the scope of my comments.
I am on no “mission” to be non-responsive. However, I have no obligation to post on topics not of my choosing. An analogy would be that simply the fact that you have posted that you are divorced would give me the right to demand that you explain all the details (including your personal failings) that led to the break-up. badchad operates under the position that he has that right. I operate from the position that I may comment on what you have actually posted, but that if you do not offer to discuss the break-up, itself, then I have no right to demand that you explain it. Since I do not choose to discuss my personal beliefs–and have not discussed them for all the years before badchad’s infestation–I reserve the right to continue to post in the manner to which I am accustomed without bowing to his intrusive demands that he poses for the sole purpose of picking a fight.
We are not in this thread because I created some odd situation of “non-responsive responses,” but because badchad wanted to pick a fight with me over his own inappropriate behavior in GD. Just as people who engage badchad on his terms are subject to the rules he establishes for a fight, so if he picks a fight with me on my terms, he is limited to the interaction that I will grant him. If that bothers him (or you), it does not bother me.
On a board dedicated to fighting ignorance, within which the desiganted forum for discussing the great questions of our time is called “Great Debates”, I think it’s useful to consider making a distinction:
Debate as Rhetorical Combat —the verbal skills, the construction of the logic, the well-chosen vivid example, the tenacious pounding on an opponent’s argument’s weak points, the dismantling and exposing of unquestioned assumptions in an opponent’s statement, the demand for cites and critique of methodology in response to a factual claim, the flourish of a well-turned phrase… the technique, in other words, of winning a debate as an adversarial contest, on the one hand; and
Debate as Combat Between Ideas — the attempt to make the superiority of one’s position manifest, the campaign to convince the person who is promoting the oppositional position that they are wrong and you are right, or even, less adversarially, the effort to make one’s position understood well enough that someone previously inimical to one’s viewpoint would say “OK, I have a lot more sympathy for your perspective now, even if I don’t agree (yet)”, the hawking of one’s conceptual wares in the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ if you will, the bridging of gaps between intelligent folks with different understandings of things.
Now, I have a great spectator’s admiration for —as well as (I daresay) a better-than-mediocre participant’s prideful zeal in — the first-category stuff. I’ll pull up a lawnchair as fast as anyone to watch someone show off their chops.
But ultimately my heart is allied with the second understanding of “debate”. And that’s where badchad and I part company. It’s all Death Cage Match, Im-gonna-win, rhetorical wrestling holds; his responses to my posts have invariably been naught but the search for weaknesses, and his own posts move like a varsity competition: OK you have said this, which allows me to categorize your position as a Type X, (::pins one arm to mat::), now you must either ascribe to Position B on this here (::maneuvers knee around back:
or you therefore have to accept that your entire balance depends on a Type Y (::forces center of gravity around deliberately chosen pivot point: and now your argument is flat on its back, ha ha (::pins opponent to mat and slaps canvas:
The thing is, one gets the sense that badchad would like to be convincing people on this board. To be pulling people in droves from the inferior perspectives of liberal christianity (and other religious viewpoints, liberal christianity is just his main target and the one he’s best armed for) and towards an understanding and acceptance of atheism.
Is he succeeding? Is there anyone who, as a consequence of reading these various exchanges, finds themself more inclined to think of the liberal-christian (etc) religious perspective as flawed, or the atheist perspective as he lays it out as clearer and more compelling than you did before reading his posts in these various threads?
stupid freaking smilies
He did indeed show us…who he is.
That was most kind of you, good sir.
Nothing like having one’s rhetorical flourishes eaten up with inadvertent smilies…
Badchad and debating points.
It seems to me the man seems to be debating a number of things, at once.
A: There is no god. Also, his only begotten son is not Jesus.
B: Miracles don’t happen, and people who think they might have are ignorant.
C: The Bible is a bad standard for anything, as it is contradictory and contains many immoral standards.
D: You, sir, who claim to follow a god, are a hypocrite.
E: You, sir, who have tried to debate me, are a hypocrite.
F: I am being persecuted.
G: I am superior to all of you.
H: Anyone who follows a god is not a good person.
Seriously. I think he flows from one to the next midargument, swapping from complete failure to understand the various codified pieces of the bible are quite reasonably contradictory, to bitching about injust stories and morality plays, to howling at arcane and quite stupid rules, to pointing out that since person X does not follow point Y, they are clearly No True Scotsman.
Might be better served to set a point, define terms, and stay within the argument. Cause, frankly, he’s just turned it into a howling incoherent mess.
You are so right about this. I am in general agreement with Tomndebb that I find it pretty fruitless to argue beliefs. But even if I was inclined to get into such a debate, I swear I can’t follow the threads badchad is involved in…half the time they don’t make any sense at all.
Perhaps it might be easier if he just used E-Sabbth’s list.
You could say Jesus says this in the bible and he could reply A, C.
Much easier.
You know, there’s really no response to “You’re totally incoherent.” That’s the perfect squelcher. What, you think you can just answer, “Yes, I am coherent. My posts make perfect sense to me, and you’re just calling me a bad articulator of my own ideas because you have no actual response”? How about instead of protesting what a bad writer badchad is, you just get out of the pile-up? You’re afraid he’s going to accuse you of being a pussy for not engaging him? He probably will–but guess what? You ARE being a pussy if you cling to this weak “badchad is totally incoherent/a troll/ a jerk/ an agent provocateur/etc.” crap. If you don’t want to discuss your religious beliefs, then you’re simply going to have to learn to tolerate people mocking your religious beliefs in your absence. You don’t get to claim the high ground-- “I’m morally similar to badchad but I won’t explain my position in response to his direct questions because I don’t care for the way he expresses himself.” That works for a little while, but if you keep coming into a thread to explain how you refuse to dignify the argument by voicing your response, over and over and over, that finally adds up to a weak response.
I’m not claiming badchad is being civil or polite, or that civility and politeness have no place in debate. Just that they have their limits. The point has long been made that **badchad’s ** debating style lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, a deference to his opponents’ virtues, a sense of humility. But beyond making that very limited point, you’re going to have to deal with his content, his direct questions, his method of debate, or else you’re going to to have to absent yourself from the debate. And if he draws the conclusion (correctly IMO) that he’s kicked your asses all over the planet, you really can’t come back and remind the world “Well, you’re rude.” We all got that small point the first four or five dozen times it was made, and you’re scoring points with it only with those who agreed with you in the first place that “rudeness” is the single most critical factor in a debate. To anyone else, you’re just another loser who has no idea how badly he’s lost.
Hmmm.
Is this not the same claim, only wrapped differently?
I’m trying to deal with his claim that J.B. Rhine’s research is associated with Duke University, and that the Rhine Institute found lots of evidence for ESP. Falls under the category of “content.” His absence is the only notable one. So far, naught but crickets.
Whenever he has been pitted it is for being rude. To an extreme degree. Not a comeback at all, but a First Premise.
I’m not objecting as to his coherency. I’m objecting due to his wavering offense. He is not debating one topic, but a cluster, wavering from one to the other where he senses a tactical advantage. However, while doing so appears impressive, he completely fails to convince or otherwise actually debate the issues at hand.
Also, he’s an asshole. And I say that as a person who was raised completely without religion.
Doesn’t matter. In PRR’s world, the only people who could possibly object to badchad’s posts do so out of fear that he will demolish their belief system if they listen. Any time a poster criticizing badchad mention that they’re an atheist, PRR’s brain edits out the word “atheist” and replaces it with “Southern Baptist.”
I guess he learned how to do that during his PhD program.
Huh. I thought he was a one-trick pony.
Doesn’t really matter. He’s a rude asshole. Let’s ban him.
Bloody partisan!