Thread by @EveKeneinan

Give this a watch. Chris makes several important points in this one.

But What if It's True? - The Uncertainty of Doubt via @ctlansdown

The Rabbi’s terrible “Perhaps it is true after all” has a very specific force regarding the question of God. It would not have occurred to me that an atheist would reduce it to mere form, where “perhaps it is true” is meaningless. But of course that’s exactly what they do.

Chris does the work of explaining why this is not the same with respect to God, work it wouldn’t have occurred to me is needed.

For all I argue with atheists I often talk outside their understanding, which isn’t hard, because it is so narrow, so cramped.

The atheists who think it is cute and precious to equate God with a god are not really talking about anything. It’s an empty rhetorical trope used to avoid any thought.

It’s purely mechanical:

Step 1: Conflate God with a god
Step 2: Dismiss gods
Step 3: Pretend any attempt to distinguish God from a god is a bad faith move on the part of the person making the distinction to make his particular tribal god “special”

It’s the same trick postmodernists use:

Step 1: Reduce all truth claims to attempts to assert power through language
Step 2: Dismiss such attempts to assert power
Step 3: Pretend anyone trying to distinguish true claims from others is merely trying to make his claims “special”

Atheists tend to hate it when postmodernists dismiss science like this, but why should they? Postmodernists merely lack a belief in truth, including scientific truth. They just reject one more dogma than scientismic atheists do.

The postmodernist is as justified in demanding the atheist “prove truth exists” as the atheist is in demanding the theist “prove God exists.”

It has exactly the same structure.

The postmodern skepticism about truth perhaps shows how this superficial seemingly reasonable “prove it first” is often deeply irrational regarding the fundamental first things.

I think this is just an illusion of our age. It is no less irrational to reject God or beauty or goodness than truth—but the modern West has painted itself into a corner where the first three SEEM more “rational,” although they are not.

In a civilization (or former one) in which beauty and goodness denialism is mainstream, truth denialism inevitably follows. And the cries of “No! Don’t carry it through to its logical conclusion!” will always fall on deaf ears.

This is why Kant totally failed, by the way. For all his brilliance, his “solution” to the problem of modernity depends entirely on using his critical method up to a point—and then stopping, for no particularly compelling reason besides “it won’t work if you keep pushing.”

Fichte kept pushing.

The Schelling and Hegel pushes much further.

Then Marx and later Marxists pushed further still.

Nietzsche pushed on to the endpoint.

Nietzsche has the good taste to despise anything that reeks of Marxism. If you find any kind of Marxism attractive, including Gramscian cultural Marxism aka social justice, your soul is deeply corrupt.

Μετανοεῖτε!

How foul the likes of Sartre and Foucault are! To recognize with Nietzsche that nothing means anything and that truth and goodness are totally arbitrary—and then to reveal the hidden truth of your soul by embracing MARXISM!

Marxism was an attempt to inflame the most vicious passions of the common man. The common man, however, proved MORALLY BETTER. It was the sophisticated, articulate class that eagerly swallowed the poison—and still does.

Socrates already warned us. The ordinary man has a rough good sense that often protects him from total degeneration. The wise and just are also protected. The midwit sophisticated people though...

Admiral Stockdale, in his years of Vietnamese captivity, was proof against communist propaganda because he had studied philosophy and could explain the errors of Ho Chi Mehn as a Marxist and the errors of Marxism itself.

Also immune was the Sergeant from Tennessee without even a high school education who simply replied to everything the propagandists told him with one word: “BULLSHIT!”

Who was easy prey for the communist brainwashers? The midwits. The half-educated. The somewhat smart. In a word, the SOPHISTICATED.

This is my term for the articulate class, the intellectuals.

It means both “more than ordinary” and “like a sophist.”

Anyone who thinks intelligence makes one proof against ideological possession has never met academics.