Thank you. I appreciate that.

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This post on anti-intellectualism is spot-on. Thank you for this.

Their “god” presented as being gob-smackingly silly. Do they not read what is on the page before them? Rhetorical question: obviously not.

Are you making a dent in this wilful ignorance and stupidity; can you scratch it up even; especially when acknowledging this deliquent behaviour is a feature, and not a bug, of the whole sorry charade?

What I observe across nearly twenty years of work is a person getting nowhere fast. 🙂 If you were to turn your hand to fiction, I’d probably read it.

Certainly if it were Science Fiction:

It is 503 years After Landing/4022AD and you are STILL dealing with fudamentalist Xtian terrorists whose cult originated from Texas; you STILL have an Established Church?

I’m quite fed up with this trope of “Good News from the Vatican.” – even if the Pope is now a robot!

Bel and the Dragon is apocrypha. It isn’t in most Bibles. It’s canon only in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles. Protestants declare it heretical; so, that tells you what they think about that. But yes, that’s the closest they get.

(Notably, of course, no one in the Bible ever tests Jesus or Daniel himself like this. Or any holy man. It’s only villainous pagans who get this treatment. And that everyone is murdered, women and children even, illustrates how horrific the Bible’s moral messaging is. So it’s not generally the sort of passage they can appeal to with pride.)

As I recall without looking it up, King Cyrus of Babylon worships the god Bel, and Cyrus’ counselor Daniel tells him that Bel is no god but just a statue made out of clay and bronze. But the king says, of course he’s a god, and he has proof! Every day the king brings Bel a huge food offering and every morning the food is gone! Daniel points out that Bel is served by 70 priests, each of whom has several wives and many children — hundreds of people — and it must be them eating the food. The king says, prove it or you die! So that night the king places the food before the idol as usual, but before he seals the temple for the night, Daniel sprinkles ash on the floor. The next morning they break the seal, open the door, and find that the food is gone! The king is exultant until Daniel points out that the ash has been disturbed by countless footprints running between the altar and a secret door the priests had made. So the king has the priests killed instead of Daniel.

[By the way, that’s the same test that Sherlock Homes devised in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez, although in that story the stakes were lower, and only two people died.]

So when Daniel was faced with an extraordinary claim, he formulated a naturalistic hypothesis, tested that hypothesis with a clever experiment, and involved independent observers who could verify the result.

Still, the moral of the story seems not to be “use the scientific method” but “believe the prophet of Jehovah”.

You are quite right. This has even been a focus of mine for the last five plus years: now when I write an article debunking false claims about history, I make an effort to also analyze what methods are leading people to those false claims in the first place. I’m thus slowly building a “crank’s toolbox” and finding it’s the same toolbox being used by every evangelist of falsehood, from Christians to Holocaust deniers. A good example (among now many) would be my article on Debating the Authenticity of Daniel: Methodological Analysis of Sheffield’s Case.

And you are right, I think too, about their emotional attachment to the bad argument itself; they need it to be true, because they need the conclusion it gets to be true (see, for example, my study in Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology). And psychologically, one of the defining features of cognitive dissonance is the need to convince people of one’s false belief, as succeeding at that produces the comforting illusion that you must be right. All ad populum thinking plays on this same emotional comfort-need. It is reassuring that Christianity is super popular and exploded in popularity and so on—even though neither is true (it wasn’t, and didn’t), it would be disheartening to admit that, as that would then start to sound like they backed the wrong horse. And people are more inclined to rationalize their own choices than admit being duped into them.

Theoretically there is a small chance of my seeing that world. Odds are very low, but a dim chance I could survive or keep my neural information intact long enough to see transversion into simulated universes. And odds are given a few thousand years of that, religion will fade as an organizing cultural concept.

There could still be false, toxic beliefs and worldviews to combat, so I might re-specialize in deconstructing and combatting those (whatever they end up being). But the spirit of your question is to imagine that even that doesn’t happen, that we end up in a world where everyone is a reasonable evidence-based thinker without any substantially harmful false beliefs.

In that universe, I may focus more on my work in history and in positive philosophy. For example, getting more in depth into the history of science, expanding my work on ancient science, and doing more to shore up and generate consensus on the fundamentals of moral facts, epistemology, aesthetics and political theory, and ontology. I would then be able to focus on conclusion-building, not having to waste time debunking bullshit first. Examples of this stuff already are the bulk of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire and Sense and Goodness without God, respectively.

If most of that gets done already, if society pretty much works all that out, so there isn’t even much more for me to do, then I’d reinvent myself as an author of fiction, in which domain I have many ideas, but at present no relevant skills. Plus I might just open up a restaurant, and partake in the aesthetics of the eatery.

The problem is that parents claim rights to protect their kids from any education in critical reasoning. And there is a legitimate problem with granting governments power to “decide” what kids are taught or told. That is a lever of power too easily used for corrupt purposes. So we have to keep this democratic. But that leads to a Catch-22: we can’t get a rational electorate until we can educate them to be a rational electorate; but we can’t educate them to be a rational electorate unless they vote to let us do so; but they are too irrational to do that.

This actually isn’t unique. You mention “transferring knowledge of medicine” but look how fraught that is, with parents trying to prevent any actual correct medical education to kids (whether about STDs or vaccines or abortion or even basic epidemiology). Parents also actively oppose teaching the truth in many other domains, anything they panic over. They don’t want kids told the truth about our country’s history of racism and genocide; or taught usable math skills (hence the hostility to the Common Core skills method); or indeed, even empathy! … yes, American parents are actually attacking teaching kids empathy (Google “Social Emotional Learning,” and if need be, “Florida”). It took us a decade of legal and cultural battles to get parents to let us teach the truth about evolution even.

So I am not optimistic here. But yes, we do need to persuade the voting public to allow us to improve all domains of children’s and teens’ education into skills-based and teach-to-mastery models, with a unifying theme of critical and evidence-based reasoning in every subject. And yes, the primary cause of opposition to our doing that is…Christianity.

Correct. That video is a response to preachers even more extreme than the one preaching, thus evincing Evangelical awareness of their own extremist tendencies. It also evinces the illogical way they respond to this problem in their own ranks (much of the argument is a non sequitur based on scripture, rather than an actual correct case for hewing to science and critical reason).

And yes, I did not say all Christians are those extremists. I said there are plenty of those extremists (far more than makes a fringe), which is the problem at that point. And then I note, even those who aren’t extremists still employ and defend the irrational epistemologies of the Bible, even on the farthest left of the field.

Christian adoption of real methods is a product of the secular Enlightenment, not of Christendom; and even when that happens, it’s usually compartmentalized, or Christianity is chucked altogether (e.g. Princeton, Duke, Oxford are now de facto secular institutions most of whose faculty now are atheists or agnostics).

The usual tack now is that you can be a critical reasoner and a scientist—both secular skills nowhere taught in the Bible but actually denigrated there—when you are engineering a bridge or writing an “objective history” of something, but not when deciding your core fundamental beliefs, your philosophy of life, a.k.a. your religion. Then, chuck it all. Compartmentalize the “nonreligious” stuff; and for the rest, reverse your methods into the irrational.

Note the reason Eastern religions didn’t get the good stuff is that they lacked a Secular Enlightenment, which they lacked largely because they didn’t have an ancient one either. The West got the good stuff in spite of its Christianity, not because of it. Whereas the East had no such tradition in secular reason. For all their philosophers, they never had a Greek Enlightenment. And consequently, never got to have a Modern one either. It had nothing to do with any differences between the religions of the East and West; they are equally useless epistemically.

See Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? and No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West.

In fact, his failed rebuttal and bigotry against critical thinkers/philosophers is in my opinion part of his personal fight against those who exposed him as a fraudster/con-man and his doctrine either like a bunch of non-sequitur nonsenses (greeks ) or a missinterpretations of the scriptures (jews). It is funny indeed that Paul himself tries to imitate the style of those foes: of the first ones (greek philosophers) in his Epistle to Romans and of the second ones (jewish pharisees) in Galatians.

It is a legend that Paul ended up with martyrdom in Rome. As a con-man it seems to be more likely that he run away to Spain with the money collected from “his” churches for the allegedly Jerusalem saints as one can read between lines from Clement of Rome .