If you can read Comic Book Guy into the Confessions, then you can read Comic Book Guy into anything.
Or perhaps there just isn’t anything better than that to be read into it. Being illogical and false doesn’t make something deep and profound.
Is Anselm really the guy you want to hang your hat on? We’re talking about the inventor of the Ontological Argument after all.
Summation of Cur Deus Homo:
God made the rules, therefore God has to follow the rules. God has to punish sin because if he didn’t punish sin, he wouldn’t be following the rules he made up. God has no ability react to sin except by wrath. The only thing that can satify God’s wrath is God. So God become God-Man so God can satisfy his own wrath by killing himself.
Are you really confident that I can’t find any holes in this?
What does “embrace the irrational” mean? I imagine you also have to embrace the irrational to fall in love, to make confidence judgments about matters where you have insufficient facts, and to live a normal human life that is not some Pyrrhonian hell.
If you are going to look something up, please at least make more of an effort to learn it and characterize it with some fidelity.
And plenty of stupid people do not believe, and plenty of stupid people are drug addicts as well. It remains to demonstrate what conclusion one can actually draw from this.
Life’s a piece of shit when you look at it.
I’ll go to bat for Anselm, even though I as an atheist obviously do not buy the ontological argument.
I am sure you can find fault in it because it is a thoroughly anemic summary.
It means denying reality, denying logic. It’s more like falling in love with a serial killer, making judgements about matters where your opinions outright contradict the facts ( to use your metaphors ).
There is no reason to assume that Christian dogma is correct, any more than there is reason to assume Hindu dogma is correct. To latch onto one and declare, absent of any evidence, that it is the correct one is irrational. Is that put simply enough?
I’ll thank you to actually try to discern my point. 
You really should try harder. Seeing as you are such a devotee of spurious rationales for believing in fairy stories, the least you can do is attempt to understand things spoke plainly.
Being an atheist has no bearing on intellect. Some are stupid, some are smart. Being a theist means you specifically have chosen to ignore logic and embrace a children’s fairy story for no reason. Belief without evidence is innately irrational and a stupid act.
So if we know nothing about an atheist and a theist, we can at the least figure that the theist has committed an irrational act.
That said, plenty of theists are fine people and no doubt very smart. But all of them ignore logic when it comes to their beliefs.
You should read it in the original Latin.
Seriously, it’s all just pompous, self-important, hair-splitting, overly serious expostulating on fictional characters and made-up premises. What’s the difference between them and Star Wars nerds? They both even have arguments about “canon.”
The whole thing seems a rather lame exercise. Basically, his death was not in anyway unique to the deaths of many before and after him. Then after 3 or so days (depending on the verse) he comes back to life. Doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice at all.
Serve it up. If you throw Anselm at me, you’re just pitching BP.
What crucial point am I missing?
Well, to be fair Star Wars nerds have less of a history of killing people over it. And they seldom claim that Darth Vader is real.
I have a Latin copy at home. I’ve read it.
I’m going to try to read the Republic when I get home in a Star Wars nerd voice. They’re all just self-important, made-up characters expostulating on pointless abstractions like the soul, justice, and the good. Sounds just like arguing about the Force, or the capabilities of TIE fighters, or whatnot.
Much of the human condition is ‘irrational’ but that doesn’t make it invalid.
That’s the problem, people use ‘irrational’ which means motivated by something other than logic, as a synonym for stupid or invalid. EVERYONE is irrational about one thing or another. There is no one that is perfectly rational. Hell even in Star Trek, Spock’s ability to be irrational is his advantage over other Vulcans.
You casually dismissed all of Christian soteriology as inane crap that doesn’t survive scrutiny. I said this is pretty much your opinion. Empirically speaking, it’s false. I pitched Anselm back as a way to show that by way of fact, soteriological arguments have not just evaporated over time at the first sign of scrutiny. One day I will be paid to teach this stuff, but sadly, that day is not today. Reread the first nine or ten chapters (about 20 pages worth) if you want to refresh your memory.
How is the “soul” any different from midichlorians?
If all they were arguing about was “justice,” and “good,” they’d be philosophers. That’s not all they’re arguing about, though, is it? They’re arguing about magical creatures, and what kind of powers they have.
How so? What am I missing empirically?
Beliefs in them haven’t evaporated, but, in fact, they have no logical weight whatsoever, not only because of internal contradictions, but because the premises are completely unsupported.
I read it all in college. If you think I’m missing some kind of airtight argument from supported premises, let’s see it.
If the cranky atheists would be so kind as to find another thread to be rude in, that would be peachy.
Your guess is as good as mine. Ask Plato, he talks about it a hell of a lot.
To kalon is pretty magical. En katharōi ouranōi is super duper magical.
I’m not trying to say that Anselm was another Plato. He wasn’t and he didn’t try to be one. But Plato talks about a heck of a lot of magic for a philosopher. And every time he can’t actually prove anything, he just tells a very convincing story. The point here is, once again, if you are sufficiently determined, you can read Star Wards Fanboy into pretty much anything. It probably is not a great measure of the worth of the dialogue as a literary form.
It’s not a race though. The big MP still gets tired, still works out his muscles, still experiences the act of swimming, can still get injured, etc, regardless if he’s swimming in the regular or Special Olympics.