I’d like to apologise for starting the whole argument over misquotation, and any ensuing trouble it may have caused. In the cold light of morning, it doesn’t look nearly so obvious as it seemed yesterday evening.
I still think PRR has failed to address the entire substance of Guin’s objection, but I withdraw any and all assertion that this was done maliciously or with intent to mislead.
Because, as we all know, two wrongs make a right.
Or is it three lefts?
I don’t post here enough to consider myself part of tom’s ‘fan club’, but I’ve been lurking long enough to realize that as soon as badchad jumps into a religious debate, things are going to get nasty. He’s the Fred Phelps of atheism.
As an agnostic, I’m glad to note that the Christians here don’t recognize him as the official spokesman of…well, anybody.
BTW, if my disagreement with badchad’s posting style makes me a member of tom’s fan club, do I get a mug or something?
Did I misquote someone with a spelling error?
Not really, no. It’s not like we (the non-faithful) have any sort of united agenda that codifies our collective behavior. IOW, what badchad does – and how he does it – contrary to what some here have said, is no reflection on atheists as a whole. For instance, I don’t talke him to represent me, guess I don’t understand why anyone else would.
I suppose, being the tiny minority that we are, we’ve gotten used to walking on eggshells around believers. I know I do IRL and with my own family if I want to avoid protracted rejection periods – that is to say, we stop speaking altogether.
Sort of like “he’s a heathen, stay away. might be contagious!.”
OTOH, the internet is the one place that provides an open setting to say/write what you really think without any direct blowback.
Now, that’s not to say I differ in my thinking about religion/gods IRL, it’s just that I’m often forced out of politeness and a lack of desire to get into a heated argument, into keeping quiet while I listen to a bunch of nonsense:
Sister: “I speak to our Mom every day and tell her that I am happy she is in such a good place. I know we’ll be together soon enough and I know her suffering had a purpose.”
(our mother died a horrific death due to cancer this past Jan.)
My barely contained reaction: Bite lips and :rolleyes:
Mind you, she’s allowed to say this any time she feels like it. I’m just not supposed to answer.
I’m clearly not as obsessed w/the topic as badchad and those who debate him, thus I admit I’ve hardly read all of his theads/posts. But while I agree with you about “the other kind,” I also think any atheist that lacks sufficient knowledge to debate those who do should also be “handed their hat.”
Just haven’t seen it happen to badchad. Perhaps you could provide a link where it does?
Guess that’s where we part company right from the get go. If a book says “blue” and you, somehjow want to twist into a pretzel and claim that it really means “red”…well, let’s just say there’s not much to argue about. Someone’s clearly deluded and it’s not me.
Never said they/we did. In fact I said quite the opposite in that very post you’re responding to. I certainly don’t as you can see from what I wrote above…
My sole point being that if what makes badchad such an “asshole, troll, irritant” is the fact that he often outsmarts his debating opponents through a combination of logic and biblical cites, combined, to be sure, with a certain slick “gotcha!” attitude, well, so sad too bad. Bring better arguments instead of unwarranted labels such as “troll.”
Don’t think he’s here to win any popularity awards either. Debates are a whole 'nother matter.
I stated that it was against the rules to make merciless fun of people in GD. You responded that making merciless fun of their ideas is OK. I showed you that in this quote, you were making justifying making fun of the poster, not their ideas. –
“They” being the weaklings and losers, and therefore the antecedent to “them.” Sue, you’re in college now, and we expect college level work. Exposition requires clarity of expression. Ambiguity is frowned upon, which is why you see a Great Big Purple Frowny Face on your paper. (No red marks any more. Too rough on the psyche.) But not to worry, grades later in the semester carry more weight. It’s a process. I’m sure you’ll do just fine. And trust me, I do take into account your side job as a false moon. That can’t be very rewarding at all.
I am disturbed, however, by your apparent need to label people, and have fun at their expense. “Weaklings and losers” sounds like something the schoolyard bully would say about the funny looking kids who sit around and read books all day. That didn’t happen to you, by any chance, did it? It did to me, and it stopped once and for all they day I turned around from being chased and cold-cocked my tormentor. It was sort of like a physics lesson and and a social experiment rolled into one. I mean, one minute this guy is chasing me full out, and in what must have seemed to him to be just a flash of time his feet flew up and his head thudded off the playground. When queried by his mentor why he no longer chased me, he just rubbed his jaw and whined, “Mackie, he hits hard.”
After that incident, I was free from bullying, and free to take people as they come. Perhaps someone at the Counseling Center could help you understand why you still feel the need to pick on the helpless, rather than help them, you sick, sad, fuck.
If a kind mod – such as Frank 
– would fix my coding in the above post I’d be quite grateful.
For what it’s worth, tom is one of the best mods we have, and one of the best I’ve seen. I’ve gone toe to toe with him more than once, and I hold nothing but respect for him, even when I disagree strongly.
On the subject of Chad, to be honest, I’ve not seen much of his posting. What I have seen is often unpleasant for me to read, and I’m atheistic myself. I’ve not seen enough to make any firm statements about the content of his character though.
On the subject of “what should be done”, well… moderating is tough, and I know that my instincts regards who to ban and why aren’t in accord with the mods. Hell, before dealing with Chad I’d have banned Bible man as a troll, or just because he’s so freakin’ stupid. Although… I’ve been told we don’t ban for stupidity.
Pity.
I think Frank meant John Corrado, specifically for his “apotheosis” gaffe. Gaudere and all that …
Bible man is a troll and in fact has admitted to ‘yanking chains’ in a recent post.
Threads started by badchad concerning religion have had 2,124 replies and 59,000 views.
His style of argument may be objectionable, but it certainly is popular. I can’t assume from these stats that only badchad fans are visiting his discussions, but surely his opponents have better things to do than read a controversial thread just to get themselves worked up.
Any skip through Great Debates will find caustic and sarcastic comments by members. Nearly every thread on the front page contains both subtle and obvious examples of condescension for opposing viewpoints. Sure, a lot of participants are more adept than badchad at disguising contempt, but that doesn’t reflect civility- that just reflects passive aggressive behavior.
Many of us on both sides of the issue have agreed that religion is thus far undefinable and immeasurable. Dissecting both the Bible and religious belief in general is likely to insult some believers no matter how carefully the argument is crafted. It is an emotional topic, and tempers flare on both sides. I am one of those atheists who occasionally participates in these discussions, and I would rather avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. But I like badchad 's controversial threads because they are rarely visited by posters who tend to derail discussions with deliberately disruptive comments about syntax or attempts at cutesy wisecracks.
Whilst not agreeing with the thread title I find nothing wrong with Badchat’s approach.
He posts well-cited arguments and has a basic belief the bible means what it says. His opponents tend to counter with:
‘But - if you take this sentence from a completely different gospel that may not even have been written at the time the gospel your quote is from and marry it to this third quote you can in fact clearly see black is white’.
The end result just seems to be an attempt to evade the common sense meaning of Jesus’ words. It is not sophisticated theology - it’s just torturing the bible until it agrees with you.
No wonder he has an ascerbic tongue.
Oops. Yes, John Corrado. All them Johns look alike to me.
Sign of burnout. Probably time to find another source of supplementary income.
Exactly! See my reply to Lord Ashtar.
The whole “interpretation” business, to my mijnd is simply a form of Christian Apologetics disguised as “expertise.”
Oh and BTW, I have nothing against Tom either. By and large I’ve found him be mostly fair to views from all sides of the aisle – be it politics, religion, philosophy, whatever. Mayhaps a bit prissy for my own taste, but that’s neither here nor there.
Entirely apart from religious debates, that’s an entirely unsupportable statement. Any work of literature more complex than Dick and Jane is going to be open to multiple interpretations, equally supportable by the text, and often mutually incompatible. Hell, not just literature: any work of art, period, is open to multiple interpretations. Considering the highly metaphorical nature of the language in the Bible, and the great gulfs of time, language, and culture between what we read and what was originally written, this is especially true when it comes to debating the scripture. Anyone who claims to have a lock on the absolute meaning of any portion of the Bible should be viewed with extreme scepticism.
Don’t disagree with you Miller. Problem stands though: how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak?
For instance, it CLEARLY says Jesus woke from the dead, walked on water, turned water into wine, multiplied fishes and loaves, and was born from a virgin. What would make you believe any/one/all of those five examples? Impossible as we know they all are. Conversely, how do you accept one or two and discard the others?
There are going to be as many different answers to that question as there are people who have read the bible. Personally, I chuck the whole lot, but I’m starting from a position of non-belief, so that simplifies things a lot. Certainly, there are some interpretations of the Bible that I find to be self-serving or contradictory, but badchad and a few other posters seem to be operating from a position that any interpretation that does not match up with their own at all points is hypocritical and ill-considered. That’s not an attitude that’s conductive to useful debate, no more than the evangelical who fulmigates that anyone who disagrees with his interpretation is going to burn in hell. I’ve got precious little respect for the second type of fundamentalist, why should I have any more respect for fundamentalists of badchad’s stripe?
Okay, asshole, you’ve correctly identified my pronouns and their antecedents. Now would you please tell me what your complaint is with my use of antecedents, or are you just showing off your C- work in your freshman English course?
This stuff is amazing to me, that people have no shame about coming in here and busting chops about periods (that have ZERO impact on the meaning of the quoted matter and therefore are perfectly neutral and unobjectionable–you need use ellipses ONLY when the tone or the content is affected) or make up grammatical rules about antecedents when the antecedents (AFAICT) are perfectly clear. Don’t you fucking people see that you might as well lael your posts “I AM A FLAMING ASSHOLE WHO NITPICKS BECAUSE I DON’T APPROVE OF WHAT YOU’RE SAYING BUT I CAN’T FIND ANYTHING TO REFUTE YOU EITHER”? That would be so much more conveneient for everyone.
Looking over your post again, I now see that you have identified a place where I said that making fun of a poster, rather than of a poster’s points, is okay in GD–but my point still holds. You’re still nitpicking my posts to score minor triumphs instead of engaging with my conent. If you like, though, I’ll be glad to engage in a scrupulous reading of your future posts to point out stupid shit you say, and I’ll be quite dliligent about it, if you really need a demonstration of your weaknesses as a writer of English prose. Or maybe you’ll prefer to get into substance? Up to you. It’s always fun for me to bust chops of people other than my students, to whom I owe a modicum of politeness, and I rarely get to indulge myself.
As to my point about losers and weaklings, I’m addressing a peculiar subset of losers and weaklings here–intellectual lightweights who engage in serious religious topics where they lack the chops to support their points but nonetheless insist on “Well, that’s what I believe” and “Help, help, Mr. Christian Moderator! I got myself into some nasty doo-doo here, and** badchad**'s making fun of me. Help me, please, Mister Tom, oh, please.” Such mewling babies benefit from a rhetorical swat across the head now and again, if only so the big people can have a little peace and quiet in which to conduct their conversations.
I actually thought that maybe it was JohnM, who is also participating in this thread. I’ve come across his posts before and thought: I don’t remember posting that!