Some Christian tried to make this comment on Mark Joseph’s post below, invoking a religious version of the “No true Scotsman” fallacy:
Frankie o keeffe commented on Guest post: A reader’s deconversion story
Its impossible for a true born again Christian to lose their faith..Jesus said you are in my hand and I am in the Fathers hand NO-ONE CAN TAKE THEM FROM MY FATHERS HAND…so what can a Christian observer say about Marks loss of faith Im afraid he never had one according to Jesus words.Ive heard atheists say exactly the same thing when some of their adherents leave atheism and become a Christian THEY WERE NEVER REAL ATHEISTS..but the difference is our assurance is from God yours is from a human perspective…of course Im sad that Mark no longer believes and if the people in his church didnt treat him with Christian love then Id question their true conversion.
Obviously, nobody in this story is a “true Christian.” I wonder if “Frankie O’Keefe” (I will reveal that this person is from England) would even recognize the problem with his/her argument.
Her argument comes from John 10:26-29. I didn’t realize that once you accepted Jesus as your savior, there was no way you could renounce that.
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That settles it, then. Mother Teresa was never a Christian.
To be honest, a subset of Protestants believe that this is the case anyway, with her being a Catholic and all that.
I wonder if the Mormons have baptized her yet.
They aren’t true Christians either… 😉
Just have to cover ALL the bases then, God damn it. SOMEBODY’S bound to take her in. (or up, as the case may be)
No need. She’s going to be made a saint anyway and her letters placed on The Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
“Let us hope that it is not true; or, if true, that it not become generally known”.
Srsly, the faithful already have Hitler, Stalin and Attila the Hun to berate atheists with – why add Mother Teresa to the mix?
<ahem />
Hitler was a Christian. Very publicly and proudly — and of the Theistic Intelligent Design Creationism variety, no less.
Stalin was an atheist, though he was also an excellent fit for the ancient archetype of emperor / deity (including the Caesars, the Japanese emperors, modern Korean heads of state, etc.). Stalin was also a seminarian before he went into politics.
I don’t think anybody knows Attila’s religious beliefs, which, considering the period, is a strong indication that he wasn’t at least publicly godless. Damned few people in the first millennium and before were godless, and they tended to stick out. (Of course, those with gods not favored by the government in power tended to get stuck with the “atheist” epithet — but that explicitly included early Christians.)
Cheers,
b&
Yes I know all that, but it never stopped any theist propagandist worth his salt, did it?
I also think that Attila the Hun, along with the Vandals and many other non-Roman tribes, probably got a bad press from Roman historians for obvious reasons. Ironically, Mother T may be the only one I mentioned who is a valid example of the ‘evil atheist’, albeit a reluctant one. (Reluctant about her atheism, that his, her evil obsession with suffering seems to have come from religious inspirations).
Sorry…hair-trigger reflexes and all that…I’m sure you understand….
b&
Course I do. And I knew as soon as I posted it, I was laying myself open to a riposte like that. I should maybe have taken more care to qualify my statement. But… hair-trigger reflexes and all that… 🙂
Has anyone else noticed how often the more “Christian” Christians tend to be bad at (or careless about) writing, grammar and punctuation?
I’m afraid that’s true of far too many people nowadays.
It’s a little known (and entirely made up) fact that the part of the brain that deals with grammar and spelling is shared with credulity. Unfortunately the brain has a limited capacity in that area so, consequently, the more credulous you are, the poorer your spelling / grammar.
Could this be the Law of Conservation of Grey Matter?
Sherlock Holmes would agree with that. 🙂
I refuse to capitalise christian or god.
And I suppose the “he” is always lowercase.
Do you also refuse to capitalize Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Zeus, Thor, Horus, etc?
Capitalization is conventional for all proper names, including those of gods and religions. No special respect or endorsement is implied. So if you care as little for Christianity and the Christian God as for all those other gods and religions, using the normal capitalization rule for all of them seems sensible. To break that rule for one religion in particular is to grant that religion special status.
Excellent point, Gregory!
Plus, when I dialogue with Christians, I hope to exert a positive influence on their thinking, and while accomplishing that is always a challenge I have learned that it is a WAY much TOUGHER challenge to exert a positive influence on them when we come onto them like arrogant petty-minded jerks, which is exactly how our not capitalizing “God” or “Christian” or “Christianity” or “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” makes us look to them.
When they as a group become respectful of me as an atheist I may reconsider, until then there is no respect and I won’t pretend that there is.
It is NOT ABOUT “respectfulness!”
It is about giving one’s self the best chance of positively influencing the (re)thinking of Christians.
At least that is what it is about for me.
If indeed you really don’t care about that, then fine, by all means, SHOW ’em that we atheists can be just as mean-spirited and disrespectful as they are — heck, show ’em we can be even WORSE — THAT’ll impress ’em and teach ’em to be respectful to us (oh yeah)!
If christians reciprocated respect with respect we wouldn’t be where we are. Christians view respect from their adversaries as weakness or as an opening, either way it is a sign to them that they have more room for nonsense. If good reasoning was workable it would have yielded results sometime in the last century because, that is what most atheists were using then trying to convince christians that their gods were not there.
What does work is to peal away the facade of christianity, to show christians that there is nothing to be respected about delusional thought. Christianity uses fear as a tool to gain obedience, the answer is to show them that their fears are unfounded and that their gods aren’t real and aren’t respectable.
Apparently, you are satisfied to go back to the age where the President of the United States would proclaim that there are no atheists, that there are no atheists in fox holes. I’m not willing to do that but, have a nice trip.
Let’s remember the simple rule about respecting people but not ideas.
(usually)
Some people idolize their cars so should Car be capitalized? In that case at least it is something instead of nothing as the christian god is. I don’t find any belief in supernatural characters without evidence to be respectable and I don’t generally capitalize their characters because I want them to sense that I don’t respect their playing their fantasy as real.
This argument seems like a non sequitur.
We routinely capitalize the names of fictional characters like Spiderman, Dumbledore, and Santa Claus, with no implication that we think they’re real.
Similar, we capitalize the names of creationists and other people we don’t have much respect for, and nobody gets confused by that.
And if somebody loves their car enough to name it Zelda, then yes, the Z should be capitalized.
So I’m still not seeing any principled reason to refuse to capitalize the names of gods in general, or of the Christian God in particular (where “God” is this case is his name as well as his job description).
On the other hand, there is good reason to refuse to capitalize “he” or “him” when referring to God, since we don’t do that for anybody else, and an imaginary God deserves no special treatment on that score. But to me, “no special treatment” also means not making an exception to the normal rule of capitalizing names. God and Santa Claus are in the same category as far as I’m concerned.
In addition to all that…well, it’s often necessary to distinguish between different gods. If you want to compare the head of the Christian pantheon in such a comparison, doing so without capitalizing the proper name makes quite the hash of the grammar.
One way to avoid the problem, and generally the simplest, is to refer to “Jesus” in that case — and to YHWH for the Jews.
But that doesn’t always work. In such cases, I’ll generally open by identify the confusingly-eponymous Christian god named, “God,” and proceed from there. Where necessary, I’ll remind the audience that the god, God, is the subject of discussion.
In addition to clarity and correctness, this has the rhetorical advantage of putting God on the exact same plane as Zeus (from whose name we get the “theos” prefixes) as well as Thor and Mithra and Krishna and Ra and Quetzalcoatl and all the rest. In this way, the god named, “God,” ceases to be some special and etherial theological construct and takes his rightful place on the shelves of the comparative religion shelves in the anthropology department.
Cheers,
b&
What disgusting book has been written to honor the Santa fantasy? Especially when considering how many people proclaim the christian holey hand book as a guide to a proper life.
The fictional characters you name aren’t idolized as reality by a significant portion of the human population. The christian gods are presented as reality by a significant portion of the population.
Because christians assign and expect such unwarranted respect for their gods, I think it is necessary to counter that expectation boldly, to show their gods for what they are, no more significant than any word.
But that’s precisely my point. Their god is no more significant than any other fictional character. You’re the one granting him special significance by inventing a new spelling rule just for him.
But hey, if that’s what floats your boat, don’t let me stop you.
(And I suspect that there are millions of children who believe that both Santa Claus and Dumbledore are real. That seems like “a significant portion of the population” to me.)
Maybe ‘car’ shouldn’t but ‘Ford’ and ‘Mazda’ and ‘Toyota’ should, surely.
Yeah, it wasn’t a good analogy but, I was at a loss for something to compare to something that doesn’t exist but is given unyielding respect. Cars seemed like the closest I was going to get.
Admittedly, it’s hard to come up with a good analogy at short notice. (Especially with rather literalist nit-pickers like me around 🙂
I’m afraid I can’t suggest a better one though.
Me neither, but I’m with notagod on this one. I try consistently not to capitalize ( the word ) god because it implies that I accept the notion that it just might be true. I much prefer to write “the christian god” or simply “a god” even though it’s obvious that it is yahweh I’m referring to.
I’m childish and a contrarian in this regard and I don’t give a damn if it doesn’t help to convert anyone away from their faith.
No not childish – I think it’s thought out. I don’t capitalize because it implies there is only one god, which is of course why it’s capitalized, as well as references to their god in the form of a capitalized “lord” & “him”.
Totally agree, and thanks. 🙂
If I capitalize god in writing I lend creedence to the claim that it may exist simply because god a lot of the time isn’t used as a name, it is used as a concept similar to what many of us call the universe.
The Christian concept of a god has a name; Yahweh. I much prefer to use that for clarification purposes instead of the biased word “God”.
To make the analogy work, you would have to postulate someone who, when referring to their car as it, capitalized It.
And, indeed, that is something I won’t copy when speaking of God or Jesus. I doubt any Christians would consider it mean-spirited if I were to spell “him” with a lowercase h, but if they do, I’m not going to mangle spelling rules just to appease them.
Proper nouns are capitalized, and God, when used as a name (or nickname for YHWH), is a proper noun.
Pronouns aren’t capitalized.
As for replacing the “o” in God with a hyphen, that’s just stupid.
For what it’s worth, I don’t capitalize “god” as you’ll see in my posts mostly because doing so implies there is only one (cue Highlander theme) but I do capitalize Christian. It is funny because Dave Silverman was having the same argument on Twitter a couple days ago about why we don’t capitalize “atheist”.
Also, my summer car has a name – Zoomy. I call my car that all so much that when scheduling an oil change I have to be careful not to say “for Zoomy” to the person on the other end of the telephone. 🙂
Interestingly, semitic languages don’t have uppercase letters; everything is lowercase. Also yhwh’s (or elohim’s) name is never to be said, therefore, I would not expect “God” to be used as a proper noun.
I would capitalise the Christian god when referring to him (i.e. “God”), as a matter of grammatical correctness – it’s his given name (like Zeus or Anoia, the Goddess of Things Stuck in Drawers). It doesn’t require or imply any proof or pedigree or exclusiveness IMO.
If you have given your car or your cat a name, it gets a capital letter too.
Yes, I know it’s a proper noun but I refuse to acknowledge it for its hidden presumption in becoming that proper noun. Moreover, even if I’ve named my car (I have, my car is named Zoomy), I don’t capitalize the personal pronoun associated with it (It) as is the case with the god proper noun.
Interesting long thread.
For quite a while I have not been capitalizing christian (or jew, muslim, hindu, god, him, whatever) for the reasons mentioned; it implies a respect that I don’t feel (and if I’m aligned with notagod, I must be doing something right). In fact, when I first sent my essay to Dr. Coyne, god and christian were not capitalized; he made the obviously correct editorial decision to capitalize them.
But, I’m intrigued by the counter-responses. I see the value in not *unnecessarily* offending people, and in not making up idiosyncratic rules of spelling. And, I’m wondering if I’ve gotten it out of my system, and maybe I can capitalize them without losing my lunch.
One thing I can state with the certainty of personal experience: truthspeaker is dead wrong when he says “I doubt any Christians would consider it mean-spirited if I were to spell “him” with a lowercase h.” I could introduce him to any number of christians who would be very greatly offended by exactly that.
I think it’s grammatically correct to capitalise Christ and God as these are proper names, but not ‘Him’ or ‘He’. The adjective ‘christian’ I flip-flop on; ‘Jewish’ rather clouds the issue as it’s also a term of ethnicity I think (hope I’m not buying into any arguments there!) and as such I think it would get a capital letter, like Flemish or Kurdish or a nationality like American would. But after a quick Google I think I’d probably capitalise Christian Jewish Hindu etc. (I know Wikipedia’s not infallible but…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization
Actually, another reason for capitalising e.g. Christian is for consistency of usage with terms like Baptist or Catholic or Mason or Democrat which have to be capitalised to distinguish them from the ‘ordinary’ meaning of the word.
Are there Christian Jewish Hindus? 😉
Sorry… I’ll leave now.
🙂
Quite possible. Hinduism is a religion of multiple deities and no supreme authority so it’s non-exclusive.
Just need someone with Hindu Jewish parents (probably exist – there are Jews in India) to embrace Christianity.
Everything is possible with Google…
http://www.christianpost.com/news/is-it-possible-to-be-a-hindu-follower-of-christ-29601/
Surprised me, too. 😉
I have noticed that. The problem exists particularly with the confusion of the use of the ‘s for plurals. I do think that there must be some kind of cerebral linkage here.
Sometimes it’s just that fingers do what they want rather than what you intend. But, maybe you’re right — some days my cerebral linkage to fingers may just not be there.
“Her argument comes from John 10:26-29. I didn’t realize that once you accepted Jesus as your savior, there was no way you could renounce that.”
According to Calvinism a true Christian can never lose their faith. This is, in part, because God has unconditionally predestined them to eternal life. According to them, if a Christian appears to fall away then either they were never a true Christian, or they still are, and will at some later stage be restored.
Arminians don’t usually accept “perseverance of the saints”, as this doctrine is called: they argue that true Christians can fall from faith and end up in hell.
I was gonna post a response but David nicely encapsulated the calvinism vs arminianism divide.
Sad sad indeed are the people who buy Calvinistic theology. The chief terror of a Calvinist is discovering that they are, already, doomed to spend eternity in Hell and are powerless to affect the outcome. Many feel that they are not good enough to be one of ‘the elect’ and strongly suspect they are one of those doomed to go to Hell. They try to live pious religious lives anyway not because it’ll get them into Heaven, because that’s already a done deal one way or another, but because they’d rather not learn that they are one of the Hell bound. They organize their lives in order to not find out the truth of a fate they think is already settled.
Many believers of all stripes live in a self-created hell of fear that their ‘loving’ god is going to fry them in hell, but of them the Calvinists are often the most miserable.
I have always asked Calvinists who believe that those who will be “saved” (and thus, also those who will not be “saved”) have already been chosen (or at the very least, are already known) by [alleged] God in advance (and that nothing can happen to change what has been forechosen or foreknown by [alleged] God( this question:
If you really believe that, then why do you bother evangelically pestering me or anyone?
That’s usually the end of it (thus far after 40+ years of my asking this of such Calvinists I have not heard a good answer that even they can make sense of).
Where do these Calvinists live? Seriously. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Calvinist.
Presbyterians, and (most)Baptists are the best known/largest group of Calvinists, I believe. It’s my experience, having grown up in a devout non-Calvinist home, that most of those that today call themselves Christians haven’t a clue as to whether they’re Calvinists, Wesleyians or ?? They seem to have very strong beliefs but little understanding of why they believe what they believe.
Yes, David’s explanation is spot on, and saves us the trouble of providing it ourselves. Thanks!
This leads to the one substantial point I’d like to make with respect to the original post.
In science, data, facts, and nature rule. If your theory does not fit with facts, then you discard it (or continue to maintain it, and become a laughingstock). In religion, there is no such touchstone; you’ll recall a recent poll in which 64% of Americans stated that even if science disproved some tenet of their religion, they would continue to hold it anyway.
So, the religious (at least the more calvinistic sects; the baptist denomination to which I belonged was not very calvinist, but was calvinist enough to accept the doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints,” which we always referred to as “once saved, always saved”) have a hypothesis–a true christian can’t lose his salvation. And, since religion in general and christianity in particular are black-and-white, there can’t even be a single exception.
Now, whatever else I’ve done, I’ve given them a conundrum. Here’s a datum, a true christian (at least in the eyes of those who knew me) losing his salvation. How are they going to respond? Scuttle the doctrine? Not hardly. So, they either have to respond in true calvinist fashion, and say I was not a true christian (hence the fallacy), which has been nicely dismantled by several people on this thread, or they have to metaphorically change the subject, which is causing them intense cognitive dissonance. That is what comes of ignoring facts and clinging to a hypothesis. It is, of course, the standard modus operandi of the creationists, too.
Changing the subject means that they won’t discuss religion with me (well, most of them won’t talk to me at all). Because they know that they would have to make what for them would be a doctrinally unpleasant choice.
As a number of commentators have pointed out, it is greatly freeing to not have to continue to believe the unbelievable, and to be able to follow the facts wherever they lead.
Well, it appears that I am still not capitalizing…
Hmmm. And the cat-licks generally ascribe to sainthood being unknowable (except to Ceiling Cat)… unless, of course, the person has been granted sainthood. (apparently M Teresa is one step shy there).
Waitaminnit… EVERYBODY can’t be correct, can they? I smell weasely ecumenical silliness again.
“All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness. The important thing is they should be part of our daily lives. — Dalai Lama”
But religion and its traditions/rituals have so contorted the meanings of “love, compassion and forgiveness.” We don’t have to look further back than the recent discussion about Mother Teresa.
The thing is, love, compassion and forgiveness can be part of our daily lives without the trappings of religious doctrine.
AHA! It’s all so clear now. THAT’S the way out of this humdrum conumbdumb.
That reminds me of Father Jack being taught the sentence “That would be an ecumenical matter!” as an answer to any religious question (as well as to prevent him from shouting “Girls!” In front of some bishops).
Or worse.
The best part of that episode was Father Dougal de-converting one of the bishops: “You’re right. It’s all nonsense isn’t it?”
/@
Yeah! In particular as it’s the *bishop* who says your quote, followed by “Everlasting life … Now Aliens! That’s something
Oops – sent by accident. So here’s the quote: “Everlasting Life? Big Demons sticking hot pokers up Your arse for all Eternity? The whole religion thing, I just don’t buy it. Now *aliens*, there’s something that might be possible!”
“… if the people in his church didnt treat him with Christian love…”
____
Love is love like science is science. As there is no Islam or Christian science there is no Islamic or Christian love. Love is derived from evolution not divinity.
Christians however are what I would call love junkies–they got to fix up on what they consider to be the ‘pure’ stuff. No wonder Christianity is so dangerous. They will do anything to get their fix–intellectual/emotional dishonesty, cognitive dissonance out of the kazoo, etc. 🙂
“Christian love” is not love. It is an excuse for whatever vile, hateful behavior they care to dish up. They are nasty to apostates (and anyone else who even mildly disagrees with them) because they “love” us, and want us to “do the right thing” so that we can go to heaven and be with Jeebus. (And, they can’t even agree among themselves exactly what the “right hocus-pocus is.)
I have a couple of reactions to that strategy.
First, they don’t admit, or maybe don’t even realize, that each time they choose compliance over sincerity, they’re admitting that their god is either to stupid to tell the difference, or too egotistical to care.
Second, I always wonder precisely who it is that they are going to “bring to Jeebus” with a strategy of nastiness. They’ll garner their fellow terrorists, who are attracted to the idea that they can be as ugly as they want to others and, as long as they label their behavior as “love”, get away with it. They will also get people who are spineless enough to be cowed by the thought of being hated on.
As far as I’m concerned, they can have both groups. The more unpleasant people they can garner, the more decent people will avoid them and their beliefs. L
I had a look at John 10:26-29. It seems to me that it says no person can cause another person to loose their faith through coercion, “no-one can take them from my Father’s hand”. It doesn’t say that a person cannot loose their faith through introspection and investigation.
Hey, interpreting Bible texts to mean what you want them to mean is fun! I can see why so many people do it.
Hi Andrew:
We always interpreted the “no one” to mean “not even ourselves”. As you implied, it’s all one big Rorschach blot!
This is an old argument I’ve heard put forth by all kinds of Christians when someone leaves Christianity. The person left because they never really did accept Jesus into their heart.
I don’t think I’ve heard atheists use “he never was an atheist” argument about atheists who become religious but who knows, it’s a common fallacy so it’s possible.
However, I should note that when used in reference to someone leaving Christianity this approach is used as a way to make that person feel like a failure and to make them ultimately return to their religion with more dedication. In other words, it’s purpose is to make you feel bad and them feel good.
I have heard atheists say this though, generally in response to conversion stories that kind of don’t ring true (believer defines atheism as something that it’s not, etc). I suppose that it would be safer to say that said person was not a good sceptic.
As for Christians, I tend to take them at their word that they are/were. Not my fault that there are all those different and incompatible flavours of Christianity. What does make me laugh, though, is when Believer B takes offence when Atheist A calls Believer C a Christian as their sects are incompatible. Ummm, that’s the atheist’s problem how, exactly? It’s not up to us to decide who the “True Christian” is!
Right, there’s a couple of reasons why phony confessions of atheism show up in conversion stories.
For an authentic conversion, one common theme of these stories is how sinful their lives before conversion were, and atheism is an easy one to add to the list. And of course, the welcoming congregation loves a win like that.
Another is an attempt to undermine the opposition. You see this in politics too, I used to be a Democrat, but then the party left me, I didn’t leave the party, now I’m an independent who listens to both sides, and the Republicans are making sense on blah, blah, blah. These are the more likely explanation if the writer is pseudonymous or anonymous, IMHO.
“I don’t think I’ve heard atheists use “he never was an atheist” argument about atheists who become religious but who knows, it’s a common fallacy so it’s possible.”
It’s very common and I think PZ has made it. I agree with it to a point: it all depends on how you define atheist. Someone who has never believed in the supernatural is technically an atheist, but doesn’t have the intellectual justification for the lack of belief. This person is probably susceptible to the psychological manipulations that lead to belief. PZ would say this person isn’t a real atheist.
For someone who was religious and was able to reject religion through study and reasoning, I would be skeptical that this sort of person would suffer a relapse, any more than an adult could relapse into a belief in Santa Claus. Could it happen? Well, given the malleability of the human mind, I suppose it can and probably has, and I would fully admit that this person was once a “real” atheist.
And as I thought about this more, I also thought that it isn’t always a fallacy to say someone wasn’t x ever if there is good evidence to suggest this.
This Christian argument from this post doesn’t provide any evidence that Mark was never a Christian, just assertions as to what a “real” Christian is. Therefore it’s the No True Scotsman fallacy.
For the atheist converstion to Xianity I’d apply the same logic.
“For the atheist converstion to Xianity I’d apply the same logic.”
It’s only a fallacy if you don’t have an independent means of determining what a True Christian or atheist is. The “No True Scotsman” fallacy is essentially a circular argument, but it might also be classified as “equivocation”.
PZ defines what a True atheist is, so it’s not a fallacy.
Yes he does, and I was told I’m not a true atheist because I didn’t reason my way to atheism. Apparently never being indoctrinated isn’t enough to make me an atheist. It’s one of the most insulting things I’ve been told.
Indeed, I was about to ask how PZ has become the judge of whether one is truly an atheist. The last thing I’d want to see atheists do is start formulating criteria for who should be allowed in the club.
I have no knowledge of the specifics of this matter, but if (as suggested elsewhere on this page) PZ has defined a “true atheist” in some non-trivial way, then it shouldn’t be out of line to determine whether this or that person is a “true atheist” by that definition. Whether there is any value in such an effort is another matter. I’m skeptical, but like I said… I am not familiar with the context.
PZ does, indeed, rail against “dictionary atheists.” It seems to make him quite upset that there are people who don’t believe in any gods but don’t have any solid reason for not believing them. Best I can tell, the only true Scottsm…er, atheists…are those who not only support their lack of belief with soundly reasoned arguments, but who’ve extrapolated from those arguments proper elevator etiquette.
PZ has never explicitly stated as much, but every time I read him on the subject, I’m forced to conclude that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Penn and Teller, and a great many others can’t possibly fit his definition of atheism. As such, I find his redefinition of such a well-agreed-upon term to mean something so utterly different from how everybody else uses it to be as dishonest and distracting as, for example, Christian practices of redefining terms like “love” and “faith.”
Maybe there’s some nuance to his reasoning that would let him apply the term to Richard and Sam and the rest. If so, that just makes his definition even more arbitrary and convoluted.
Cheers,
b&
I was thinking the same. I don’t have the context of PZ’s definition but we have a perfectly good definition already. To split hairs divides atheists (and we are divided enough by the fact that we are all sorts of people with no central dogma – kind of comes with rejecting religion which often accompanies the conclusion that there are no gods), as it a
gives off an air of “I’m more atheist than thou”
If I could specify a suitable penance PZ, it would be to write upon the board a thousand time, “I will not try to herd cats.”
Then again, maybe I’m just missing his perspective. I suppose it’s possible that PZ isn’t trying to herd cats at all so much as he’s trying to herd squid (can they be herded, either?), and he’s equally busy trying to turn cats into squids. In which case his penance would be to watch a loop of one of those YouTube videos of what cats do to squid.
b&
Yes, the Dictionary Atheists rant was what drove me away from PZ. I was a pretty big fan before that, but his position on Dictionary Atheists was so misguided and confused that I lost a lot of respect for him. Needless to say, that was just the beginning, and it all went downhill from there. But now I’m changing the subject. The point is, if you don’t believe in gods, you are an atheist. End of story. You may change your mind, and it does not mean that you were never a Real Atheist. That’s just stupid.
I don’t remember being more puzzled and annoyed by the Dictionary Atheists rant than that it being something that drove me away. Maybe your bullshit detecter is better tuned than mine.
But, yes, absolutely. In retrospect if nothing else, it was a sign of the Purity Tests to come.
b&
Of course it is wrong for someone to deny you are an atheist. An atheist is simply a person who does not believe in a supernatural being which meddles in natural processes. So if you claim you are one, it would be silly for someone else to deny your claim.
However, I feel that we are all obligated to continually test our convictions against the best available evidence. If an atheist does not continually compile evidence that supports her atheism and also keep an eye out for the possibility of evidence that could refute atheism, then she is not fully living up to her human potential, IMHO.
To be fair, it was a commenter on Pharyngula, not PZ personally who said I was not a true atheist. Growing up, there were always kids who went to church on Sundays but no one ever talked about it. In our family, religion wasn’t something to be debated, it wasn’t a subject at all. I honestly had no idea that anyone actually believed in a god until I was in my twenties and met my first born-again xtian. It was quite a shock, and I’m afraid I responded with more than a few aspersions as to her intelligence. As for testing my atheism against the best available evidence, that isn’t something I thought about until I found science and atheist forums a few years ago.
Sadly, those types of purity tests (on a variety of subjects) are quite common amongst the Pharyngulite Horde.
Ironic, innit? PZ’s attempts to make atheism so much more than it actually is wind up turning it into nothing but sound and fury.
If there’s an unforgivable sin of atheism, it’s catherding. Everything else — tone trolling, accommodationism, atheist chapels, the rest — they all quickly boil down to a form of catherding. “All you atheists should do and / or be x.” Fuck that shit.
Cheers,
b&
So PZ and the Horde doesn’t pass the purity test?
Ha!
No, they’re most definitely atheists. But they’re catherders, too. Catherders of any stripe piss me off, but the inherent hypocrisy of atheist catherders is what really gets my goat.
b&
OMG I consistently pronounced Catherder with “th” sound instead of separate sounds. I wondered what it was & thought it could have something in common with catheterize. My word is kind of funny too now.
Well, one does generally have the urge to catheterize catherders — and not necessarily with any anesthesia, either….
b&
Now, goats… they can be herded!
And milked! Just ask Linda….
b&
Well, “they” is legion and includes me. I’m a member of the dreaded Horde AND an official PZ minion and still had no idea what a “catherder” was till I read it over several times. Thought it was some kind of a clever play on “catholic” and sly reference to crackergate. I’m not always up on all that hip slang the kewl kids are into on the interwebby-thing.
As it is I don’t think the term applies, but the topic is off-topic for both the post and our esteemed host’s website.
A catherder is somebody who tries to herd cats, with the classic example of telling atheists what they really are or should be or do.
The following is practically an archetypal example of catherding, every bit as bad as the “atheists need Sunday services with chaplains and incense” variety:
So is this:
That’s not just No True Scotsman, that’s No True Scotsman to somebody named, “MacDonald,” eating haggis and wearing a kilt in his ancestral home in the Highlands.
I’ve not known you to do that sort of thing, even if you’re comfortable associating with those who do.
Cheers,
b&
If you don’t have any reasons for it now — you don’t believe in God but don’t know why you don’t, haven’t given it any thought, it’s all an incomprehensible black box jumble of words and you’re just sort of following the crowd you’re in — then you may be an atheist technically, but it’s pretty thin gruel. My guess is that PZ was making some point about how lacking belief due to ignorance alone is empty and that you weren’t giving yourself enough credit. You DO have reasons.
My understanding is that the “dictionary atheist” complaint was over atheists who are so eager to make atheism the default position that they’d count babies, dogs, and possibly even rocks as atheists (‘lack of belief in God!’) He wasn’t saying that it wasn’t technically correct — just that it didn’t mean anything meaningful in use.
The biggest problem I have with atheists-I-don’t-like-counting-as-atheists are atheists who don’t believe in the traditional Abrahamic form of God but who DO believe in what I’d consider a non-traditional or Eastern form of God/Spirit/Transcendence/the supernatural. Energy fields of love or some such nonsense, along with heaping helpings of pseudoscience and anti-science mysticism.
There are New Agers who want to count themselves as atheists mostly in order to stick it to the fundamentalists (they also hate the gnus.) Yes, I will argue No True Atheist here — but for reasons having to do with valid content and reasonable definition, not behavior. I think.
There’re also Christians who insist that they’re atheists because they say Jesus wasn’t a god, because gods are somehow false or something-or-other.
If you take an anthropological definition of the term, “god,” then it becomes obvious that not only are all three of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit three separate gods, but the whole Heavenly Host are all gods, and Satan is a god, and Mary is a goddess, and the Patriarchs and Adam and Eve and all the rest are all gods, major and minor, demi- and otherise. And ancestors, too whether in Heaven or Hell. Match them up with their Pagan counterpoints and it’s unquestionable. So, too, is Muhammad a god, even if a Muslim will have your head (all too literally all too often) for saying so.
…which also makes the Newage Transcendental Love Force every bit as much a god as Eros or Aphrodite.
Cheers,
b&
Among the (many) issues which need to be set up before an intelligent discussion on theism and/or atheism is possible is finding an acceptable definition of “God,” one which everyone agrees to.
Sometimes that ends up being the entire debate. I consider this an apologetic technique, usually one involving Calvinball and moving goalposts.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that’s also generally at the heart of the “dogmatic agnostic” position that it’s impossible to disprove the existence of gods. After all, somebody might define a “god” to mean “the belly button lint of one of the Lizard People whose live on Betelgeuse’s fourth planet’s second moon,” and therefore you can’t prove that those gods don’t exist.
Stuff and nonsense. If you really want to get down-and-dirty, present an actual definition of an actual god that somebody actually believes in. I guarantee you it’ll be either incoherent (especially if it’s remotely associated with traditional theology); inconsistent with known physics (especially after the LHC confirmation of the Higgs); inconsequential (“Money was her god”); or, generally, some combination thereof.
…and, at that point, the “argument” generally goes right back to some variation of, “Well, you can’t rule out all possible definitions that somebody might someday think up of.” Madness!
Cheers,
b&
The problem is that ‘god’ is an incoherent concept that cannot be defined in any meaningful way. The more you talk about what it means the less you know.
You’re a lumper; PZ is a splitter 😉
It’s not at all uncommon for Christians to go through an “atheism phase,” part of teenaged / young adult rebellion, where they realize they spitefully hate Jesus and so they’re going to do the worst thing to him that they can think of: refuse to believe in him. Then, later, as they grow up, they grow out of their petty foot-stomping mode and become born-again.
That type of “atheism” I have no trouble as dismissing as not real.
It’s easy to come up with all sorts of scenarios whereby somebody who doesn’t believe does come to believe, with most of them involving some sort of “spiritual” Road-to-Damascus type of experience (often induced intentionally by well-known psychological tricks by missionaries). For better or worse, there’s no denying that they had a real and very powerful experience, and I certainly can’t blame them for (incorrectly) interpreting said experience as evidence of Jesus. Indeed, I’d consider those types of Christians the most honest of them all; they’ve got very convincing evidence to support their conclusions. They just haven’t unravelled the Gordian knot far enough to see the true nature of the delusion.
Cheers,
b&
Yes, for a long time I considered the conversion experience the only good evidence that something supernatural might really be happening. Then I discovered a book that detailed the psychology underlining the process and how most religions (and many non-religions) could induce it under carefully controlled conditions. That was the final nail in the coffin for my religious belief.
Greg:
What was the book? Sounds useful.
I remember reading that glossolalia could be induced psychologically, and that it was not uncommon in non-christian religions.
Then you’re nicer than me. I do blame the people who have had powerful personal conversion experiences because they’re granting themselves too much power. I blame them for failing to distinguish between an experience and an interpretation of the experience, I blame them for neglecting to objectively consider alternatives, and I blame them for refusing to ask themselves the question “if I am wrong, what will change my mind?” And take that question seriously, if this is supposed to be a life-changing event.
But I only blame them individually and explicitly if they try to play the “I can know for sure what happens to ME” card as an excuse and explanation. Otherwise, my disapproval remains impersonal and as a matter of principle. After all, it’s hard to find a believer in anything — from God to tarot cards — who doesn’t claim to have personal experiences so powerful that they can admit of no other explanation. Which they never are, with just an ordinary amount of imagination and humility.
The reason I wouldn’t be able to blame them…well, a lot of reasons, really.
First, these experiences can be very powerful. Right off the bat, it would take an especially strong personality to be able to objectively analyze something like that at all.
Next, you’d have to have some sort of reason to consider the need to analyze it in the first place. That, in turn, requires a degree of education and / or experience that I myself didn’t formally get until I took a university psychology class.
And, perhaps most importantly…our whole society is so steeped in the notion that these sorts of experiences really are real that most who do attempt to objectively analyze the experience are going to find overwhelming support for it being a real experience.
If it helps, imagine how such a vision / hallucination would have been received in the pre-scientific world. Now, realize that huge numbers of people, even in America, still, essentially, live in a pre-scientific world.
Once you’ve made it into the light, the darkness of ignorant superstition looks silly and self-absorbed and absurd. But, without that rational perspective, it’s just the way the world works.
Cheers,
b&
Oh, I agree. Very well stated. My blame is tempered by my recognition that, as you say, skepticism is hard and goes against the grain of how we usually think about unproblematic issues. It’s perfectly understandable that people would find powerful subjective experiences extremely convincing. I do.
It’s just that I was making the point that my sympathy, empathy, understanding and self-recognition is also tempered by ‘blame’ (not shame, but accountability and responsibility.) The people who find themselves overwhelmed by their own personal experience usually know very well how careful other people ought to be about that sort of thing. We can do better.
“Blame”, for me, tends to evaporate when I encounter those who have escaped the clutches of religious thinking. I tend to think of believers more as victims.
Except that I can’t help but classify the most idiotic apologists as perpetrators. Those who have been exposed to evidence and argument and have willfully chosen to advocate for stupidity. For them I have contempt.
Knowing where the dividing line between the victims and the perpetrators is a problem though. It is a problem I wrestle with. If y’all have a solution to this I’d love to hear it.
Yeah, the “blame” word is what’s bugging me, too.
And even with the ones most deserving — televangelists, Ken Ham, and the like — it’s not exactly relevant. Whether sincerely thick or stupid, or simply cynically exploitative makes no difference. They’re toxic, which is all that really matters.
b&
I suspect that Bart Ehrman is this kind of atheist. He claims not to believe in God (though he prefers the word ‘agnostic’ for professional reasons)and wrote “God’s Problem” to explain why, but his religious defense of an historical Jesus makes me wonder if he isn’t still hoping that God will redeem himself, and he’ll be able to go back to being a Christian and going to heaven. I could be wrong of course.
Interesting speculation about Bart. His “Jesus was historical” book (whatever the title) read exactly like Christian apologetics, except he stopped short of embracing the Resurrection. He certainly doesn’t seem very far away from the fold.
b&
Look, denial is all they have.
They can’t give an intelligent response to a story such as Mark’s, because they don’t have one. L
God doesn’t want anyone eating parfait. It’s of the devil.
Would that count? Keep them out of denial and off in fantasyland?
O’keefe is trying to post many incoherent and religiously infused comments, but I won’t allow them through. I will say that “Frankie” tried to identify himself publicly as a male from Wales, and won’t be allowed to post here again.
Why censor his comments, unless they are personally offensive to you or Mark? It might be interesting to hear what he has to say. Your call, of course.
I’m guessing that Jerry is following his roolz which block religious proselytizing until the evangelist explains how they know what they claim and why all the other versions are wrong.
Yes, of course. Trust me to forget the roolz.
Meh. I suspect it’s preachy stuff instead of directly addressing the comments here. I trust Jerry’s judgement on this one.
Yes of course it’s preachy stuff. For Frankie to interpret the quote from John the way he does requires him to throw free will out the window. So, unless he’s a Calvinist, he’s making a dishonest claim. And if he is a Calvinist why bother trying to argue with us? We’re all already damned or saved, so what the point of jaw-boning about it?
I’d let him through — assuming that he is not just mindlessly “preaching” (meaning “a sustained monologue of statements outlining or detailing one’s faith, belief, or world view, with little or no effort to address the comments from others; droning.”)
A bad argument is still an argument. O’Keefe is probably an improved version of the kind of believer many of us have to deal with on a regular basis. If his email was worth posting, then I think it’s fine if he defends it. How can we argue effectively against religion if we can’t practice on the religious?
If practice is what you want, there are plenty of places for that.
Ah, but not with the same crowd! 😉
It’s Jerry’s call, of course.
Win!
Are there really still places? Most seem to have become silos, more or less. Back in the 90s there were lots of sites where everyone was welcome, even though there was a predominant view.
The Christianity Online Message Board was a lot of fun, up until someone decided only those who would swear by the whole Nicene creed could post there. That sure left me out, since I disagreed with all of it.
I think you’ll find lots of possibilities over at patheos.com
“… but the difference is our assurance is from God yours is from a human perspective…”
But wait, I thought rock-paper-scissors was a metaphor?
Accounts like Mark Joseph’s must drive the still-faithful crazy. I wonder if the ones, like Frankie O’Keefe, who try the hardest to keep the make-believe alive are closer to “waking up” than believers who are less agitated.
I’ve often thought that the first step towards atheism is sincerely caring whether or not your belief is true. If the believer is also honest AND willing to test their views against good arguments, then hold on.
I think you may be on to something. In the same way that it often turns out that the most outspoken homophobes seem disproportionately likely to be busted for hooking up with gay prostitutes.
Exactly.
Why is Ted looking so Haggard? From keeping (it) up with the Jones!
The bible contradicts Frankie and his doctrine:
Hebrews 6:4-6 For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.
Also, 1 John 2:19
“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.”
David, you must have some religious or theological background; that is the verse that we always used to “show” that someone who fell away had never been a “true” christian.
One of my all-time favorite internet comments: “You’re not going to convince me by quoting verses from a book that I think you’re insane to believe in the first place.”
+1! The simplest statements are so often the best.
🙂 Good one and simply true!
//
me too
“I didn’t realize that once you accepted Jesus as your savior, there was no way you could renounce that.”
Membership in the Mafia is like that.
Islam too, in a way.
Where, “in a way” means “in many countries they will execute you for apostasy”.
But mostly in those countries where they run the show.
Commenting negatively to something so moving as Mark Joseph’s confession only shows your own shallowness of character.
Bad boi frankie !
Bad and sad person, thinking of the unthinking irony. [I had to look up “born again christian”, but it was as I surmised.]
Similar to refried beans, but the process is more imaginary.
“our assurance is from God yours is from a human perspective.”
Actually, both are from human perspectives.
And that’s always a key point to make.
No gods ever show up to give their perspective — it’s always just some idiot claiming to speak for god.
Is there a definition of “True Christian” that doesn’t involve hindsight or omnipotence?
It’s a serious question. Mark was teaching the Bible and performing missionary work–not for money either. Surely, Frankie O Keeffe knows and trusts someone doing exactly the same kinds of things Mark used to do. Surely, Frankie learns, and receives spiritual guidance from such people. Surely, Frankie cannot know those people will not lose their faith in the future. If Frankie cannot accurately identify them as True Christians now, how can he know he is on the right path?
Right. A prediction is no good if it can only be made after the fact. That’s not useful.
I think almost everything Christian (or religious period for that matter) involves hindsight, omnipotence (& other supernatural-y things), revelation, other ways of knowing….you know the usual. So, we can’t expect this to be any different.
What about becoming a Christian? If being a true Christian is time invariant then those that were once not Christian can never become Christian. So there are no true Christians. Or, if the response to that is that everyone is born true Christian, then everyone is always a true Christian and even those giving up on Christianity must remain true Christians, which must include those this true Christian is disowning. And any invariance in being a true Christian makes a mockery of claims to free will and making a choice to follow Jesus is not possible. … The true Christian notion is full of holes. As is theism generally.
Jesus lost his faith: “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” [Mark 15:34].
So . . .Jesus wasn’t a true Christian?
Nope. The religion was only founded after he was defunct (assuming he was ever around).
Oh geese, well that is silly. What is strange to me is that I have gotten exactly the opposite response from the Christians in my life. They tell me repeatedly that I am still a Christian and that atheism is “just a phase.” My close relatives take relief in the fact that I was baptized and confirmed at least. I guess in their eyes that means I am locked in as a member of the Church. Must say it is upsetting to hear that my ideas are just a phase though.
I will have to email Mr. Bergoglio about my options for excommunication. Maybe then I won’t be a Christian.
I’ve heard those who have left Christianity say this as well. This may well be only the initial stages until some move on to “you were never a Christian” if they grow frustrated that you haven’t left this “phase”. Some even call it a mid life crises for those who become atheists in their 40s and 50s.
I believe it’s possible to officially renounce your baptism.
It is rare that someone who identifies as an atheist within the ‘atheism movement’ changes their mind and converts. Which is to say that those who hang out in atheist forums and discuss philosophy, ethics, and epistemology while making sense are poor candidates for faith.
What usually happens when this happens though does not involve atheists claiming their former comrade was “never really an atheist.” What happens instead are demands to hear their reasons — followed by a chorus of complaints that no, those are really BAD reasons! That doesn’t work because of this and this and did you even think about this?
Former atheists are not denied: their arguments are dissected.
Many former theists talk about how surprised and frustrated they were that their religious friends had almost zero interest in hearing any of the intellectual reasons for their change of mind. They’d just keep asking “who hurt you?” as if they’d announced that they’d stop believing in love.
Of course, as mentioned above, there are also lots of phony conversion stories, along with former “atheists” who were simply apathetic about the issue and didn’t so much change their views as finally have one.
I posted (and debated) for many years on the TalkOrigin/Internet Infidels religion forums (now FreeThought and Rationalism). One member was sort a believer sort of on the fence and at one point PM’d me to say he’d finally been swayed by my arguments to abandon his belief in God, and lingering Christianity.
He lasted about 1 or 2 years that way, and then started posting that he’d gone back to being a theist. As I remember, he tended to cite mostly emotional reasons for doing so.
Drat, the one that got away!
Vaal
Atheists tend to approach the existence of God as a hypothesis. Theists do the same — but ALSO like to frame the acceptance of the hypothesis as requiring an emotional openness which goes beyond the standard ability to change one’s mind. Therefore, the “I was finally ready to believe” meme is reasonable in theism, but rightly smacks of subjective validation for atheism.
Most of the atheist-to-theist converts I knew on forums like IRC were very explicit that their change of mind had a lot to do with emotional, physical, and communal needs and not rational arguments. The 2 or 3 I can think of who fit this profile did NOT stick around to debate their former atheist friends. If they were debating, it was only with fundamentalists.
I can think of two atheist-to-theist converts who cited rational reasons. One of them was originally on Internet Infidels and claimed to be persuaded by — of all things — the Ontological Argument. However, he wanted to test it and after a few years on a listserve was persuaded that no, it didn’t work after all.
The other is Antony Flew. If you’re familiar with Secular Web and the discussion on that, then nuff said.
(Long story short: he cited an apologetic using physics; was persuaded that the argument didn’t hold; and then proceeded to carry on as if his original rationale had not fallen out and insisted he’d always been deist. Sad stuff. But note that none of his critics tried to claim he’d never been an atheist. On the contrary, they tried to use his old arguments against his new position.)
Yup,followed and participated in II discussions of A. Flew.
I have seen some atheists express skepticism that a theist was once an atheist. It’s kind of warranted in many cases though. Often the description of what the person thought “when I was an atheist” is pretty fishy and smells of salesmanship or standard apologetics straw men.
At the very least, one gets the impression that
these atheists were not people who’d thought very carefully about their beliefs, or lack of, at the time.
Vaal
I’d say it’s preferable to the way Islam handles apostasy.
I’m starting my blog today, and it seems about books, but it will probably be about science a lot. Now, I’ve just found this: http://eukame.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/the-bible-was-right-afterall-new-scientific-discoveries-that-has-proven-that-evolution-is-wrong/
Should I just direct the author to Why Evolution is True or should I try to answer point by point?
The author of that post is just babbling. You’d be wasting your time to respond, unless you think someone else is listening in and might appreciate real science.
If you are going to argue with a creationist, I recommend you first post this:
“Please read this essay and answer the two questions here on my blog; then I will be happy to respond to your questions.”
That will at least show if they are interested in learning and finding the truth, or just playing with words and pretending that they already know everything.
That essay is a great one to have in your arsenal…but, as the author notes, it’s essentially the rhetorical equivalent of the nuclear option. The conversation ends as soon as you play that card.
If that’s your goal, great — play the trump and walk home the victor.
But if you want to keep things going for a while, you can string them along with subsets of the argument.
For example, ask what would convince them that Darwinian evolution really is true, and offer an helpful suggestion. Imagine that the clouds parted and a Voice spoke from above, saying, “I am the Lord thy God that delivered you from Egypt and sent my only begotten Son that all who believe in Him may live forever with Us. And I tell you that Darwin was right, with the minor modifications that later discoveries have prompted.” Would that be convincing?
If not, what exactly would God have to do to convince them?
Cheers,
b&
As always, Ben, an incisive improvement. Thanks!
My pleasure.
And thanks again for all the seriously heavy lifting you’ve been doing on these couple threads of yours. I have a strong hunch that they’ll help open at least a few minds….
Cheers,
b&
Well, we can only hope so. Resistance to rationality seems to be ingrained in the American character (see, for example, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby).
Anyhow, it’s been my privilege and pleasure to contribute my two cents to the cause. I’ve learned a great deal on this list, and really appreciate the people who comment here. Plus it’s a strange, and rare, feeling to be liked.
Did you see that Seth Andrews, host of The Thinking Atheist, is going to be in your neck of the woods? His schedule is here. I’d like to hear his presentation, but it seems that he won’t quite be far enough west.
Didn’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Seth, but mainly due to there only being so many hours in the day. I’ll have to put that date on my calendar — thanks!
b&
Well, I hadn’t actually ever heard of him until, on the previous thread, Diana mentioned him and his book and website. Looking at his schedule I saw where he was going to be, remembered where you are, put two and two together and came up with an integer strictly between three and five…
…which, if I remember the Intel FDIV instruction correctly, is equal to 3.99483759352, right?
b&
Right; for very loose definitions of the word “integer” 😉
But, enough of this frivolity. Don’t you know that we atheists are supposed to be joyless automatons? Or would someone say of atheists having a good time and laughing together that they were “No True Atheists”?
Well, now that you mention it…I’m not overly fond of the bagpipes, and the thought of haggis turns my stomach. And, while I do like Scotch, one shot is my limit and I haven’t had any in years. Never worn a kilt, either.
I did have oatmeal for breakfast this morning, though….
b&
Haggis is good. The trick is to not overdo it. Mmmmm haggis!
I believe you. In fact, that’s why I’m saving my portion for you!
b&
That’s very generous. 🙂
Don’t mention it!
b&
Aren’t math jokes what joyless automatons make as attempts at humour?
Only as far as the 8ters are concerned….
b&
Yeah, ex-Chrstians get that one a lot.
A fun variant occurs if you try to introduce evidence that you were a sincere believer. If you merely say that you were a believer, the first responses from Christians would have been “it’s easy to say you’re a believer, but that doesn’t make you one”. If you gave examples of doing things you would likely do only if you were truly a believer, you get replies telling him that your faith was all about “doing” rather than “believing”, “going to MacDonalds doesn’t make you a hamburger”. This is cheating of the “heads I win/tails you lose” sort.
As others have said, using the definition of “Christian” which seems to be in play here, you can only truly call someone a Christian retrospectively after they are dead.
Paul:
You’ve cracked the code!
And, because I know both the code, and the game based upon it, I was careful to state my conversion using the “right words” (“accepted jesus as my personal savior” rather than any recitation of doctrines believed or good works done), precisely to eliminate a round or two of “let’s see if we can show that this christian is not really a christian”, a game which no longer holds any interest for me.
This depends on denomination. I grew up Southern Baptist, which do believe you cannot lose your salvation. But I then moved to a Wesleyan church in high school, where I attended regularly and was heavily involved for 10 years, but I refused to become an official member because one of their tenets is that you can lose your salvation if you turn from God.
In fact, after I went open with my newfound atheism, one of my good friends and former religious mentors told me basically what the person in the OP said — that I could not have REALLY, TRULY believed in the first place because if I had, it would have been impossible to turn from God. Boy was that a frustrating conversation.
To clarify — from what I understood in the Baptist church, you technically could renounce your faith all you wanted, but you’d still end up in heaven because it was impossible for Satan to grab you from God’s hand once you’d been saved in the first place.
Actually, it’s funny to try telling that to the old men handing out Bibles on campus. “Are you going to heaven?” “Yes, but I’m an atheist now.” haha
It is the old “once saved, always saved” saw. Which always seemed like a license to sin. In opposition to the deathbed conversion – “last will be first and the first will be last.” There is too much confusing stuff in the Bible – no wonder there are so many sects. I see the theist to atheist and the “evolutionist” (the dead giveaway creationist term) to creationist gambit as purely apologetic arguments intended to give street cred to the speaker. “I saw the error of my ways – the truth has set me free, etc.,etc.”
Bible sorely needs a FAQ
Yes! That would be helpful.
Ask and ye shall receive:
http://www.400monkeys.com/God/
Cheers,
b&
Yes, but who’s going to write it? Protestants? Catholics? Jews? Mormons? Atheists? Some namby-pamby ecumenical committee?
In any case, the one Ben linked to is much more concise…
Yeah, I meant that it was a huge oversight on the part of omniscient god not to have included a FAQ in the Bible to start with. The various sects like to think that members of other branches of Christianity are just willfully ignoring the true reading of the Bible, that if they would just read it with an open mind/heart they’d all see it the same way. The obvious reality is that the Bible is just a completely muddled, ambiguous, and contradictory mess. The proliferation of contradictory doctrines all citing the Bible as authority is staggering, and most of the common points of contention could have been solved with a simple FAQ provided by god…. if only god had had the foresight, or given a damn.
@ Gluonspring
Well, as a how-to-live-your-life manual (which is surely the Bible’s only practical purpose**) God could have cut the whole thing down to a couple of chapters, surely.
** Or would be, if there was any practical advice in it…
God could have cut the whole thing down
George Carlin already did it for him here.
Hi Cathy:
There are a fair number of ex-christians on this list, but sometimes I think you and I are the only ex-baptists. I really appreciate your posts.
As I mentioned in my long post above (response to David Duncan at #4), the few religious people who still talk to me don’t talk about religion. But I do have to wonder what I’d do if someone (other than the poster of the OP) told me that my apostasy meant that I was never really a christian. Might be interesting…
I here this stuff a lot. What Christians don’t seem to realize is that this supports the idea that believing is a work. If they keep saying other people aren’t ‘true’ believers they’ll have to start asking themselves if they believe enough to get into heaven.
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Interesting, to have the No True Scotsman fallacy cited here. I don’t buy Anthony Flew’s argument.
Firstly, there is clearly a prima facie case to be made for making statements like “No atheist would believe in God” and “No doctor would prescribe cyanide for a common cold”. We could easily find countless examples where no-one is inclined to dispute such statements.
Secondly, such statements as “No Scotsman would do such a thing” are obviously informal, rhetorical, i.e. stated bluntly for effect and it seems perfectly reasonable to offer a clarification on being challenged with an apparent contradiction. It is unreasonable to call “No TRUE Scotsman …” a modification of the subject as though it were an attempt to move the goalposts, hide a mistake in an equivocation of sorts.
Specifically, “No Scotsman would do such a thing” is clearly a hyperbole. It ignores the hyperbole to call it a fallacy for “modifying the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case.”
Which brings me to what should be the first thing said about this: Anthony Flew and whoever wrote the Wikipedia article are confusing fact and truth. Fact is different from truth. While all truths must be facts, no fact need be a truth. Those here who did Philosophy 101 might remember Orson who weighed something like 300 pounds. There were many facts about Orson – his hair colour, his love for pizza, his mathematical genius, etc. In fact, one quickly realised, on considering Orson, that there were probably more facts about Orson than there were parts. One was left wondering what the truth about Orson could possibly be and if such a thing were possible at all. Are we faced, in Orson, with a mere featureless mass of fact? But what is it then, that we call Orson? Then we discover that Orson wants to be an astronaut, that that is all he ever wanted, and it dawns on us that his weighing 300 lb is no ordinary fact, that it is the TRUTH about Orson. It is for this kind of fact that we ordinarily reserve the word “truth”. The truth is the relevant fact, the pivotal one, the one that answers the question.
So, to get back to Anthony Flew’s Scotsman, Hamish McDonald, who, on reading how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again” declares “No Scotsman would do such a thing”: Hamish obviously meant that there was something about being a good Scot that precluded such scandalous action. He means there is a pivotal fact, a primary feature, a principle, an ideal or something which defines a Scot and which precludes such scandalous behaviour. Now someone please tell me what is so fallacious about that.
I don’t know what that property would be which precludes such scandalous behaviour in a Scot, if it’s a pretty universal prudishness or impotence or whatever but certainly, clearly, it is more than merely being born to Scots or born in Scotland. It would have to also be a more subtle Scottish invention of etiquette or moral ideal. We may dispute what it is that might preclude a true Scot from maniacal sex, and the Scots might debate what an ideal Scot would be, but we cannot declare the statement “No true Scotsman would do such a thing” to be fallacious.
In the case of doctors and cyanide, it is a lot easier. Doctors take the Hippocratic oath. To be a true or good doctor you have to follow that oath. The truth about Dr Wouter Basson, alias Dr Death of the late Apartheid government, is not that he qualified and practised at doctoring but that he contravened his Hippocratic oath. Sure, it’s a fact that he was a doctor in the technical, boring, pretty-much-useless sense of the word, but was he a good doctor, a “true” doctor? Was he true to his oath? That is the question, and the answer is no. To object to “No doctor would do such a thing” by citing an exception among those who are technically doctors is not a clever exposé of fallacious thinking, it is just petty. It is an attempt to undermine the statement on irrelevant grounds – grounds it was not meant to defend.
The real fallacy is not the one committed by Hamish McDonald but the one committed by Anthony Flew. I like call a fallacy which confuses fact and truth a Pontius Pilate fallacy.
I’m not a philosopher so maybe I don’t get it. There are many facts you’ve just used in that comment. It is a fact that doctors take an oath, although apparently only 3 of 126 medical schools in the US reported using the Hippocratic Oath in 1989. Apparently only half of the medical students in the UK take an oath. I do not think that being a “true” doctor is a matter of complying with an oath.
So, you’ve use some facts up there, and I’m willing to assume that that they are true facts. But I’m not ready to grant that your argument is true if it requires us to ignore other facts.
GB and Mark, my replies to you were ditched, probably because they were too long, so it’s just as well. 🙂 But I do feel I owe you a reply so here goes with a drastically pared down version:
GB, the Hippocratic oath need not feature – especially nowadays. So yes, I am asking you to ignore some facts – irrelevant ones. All that need concern us here is that there ARE such things as good and bad, true and false doctors, however difficult it may be to establish a precise separation between the two, and Anthony Flew is being unreasonable in denying his Scotsman the clarification. To challenge Hamish McDonald by pointing out the brutal actions of an Aberdeen man is to challenge him on grounds he is not defending. Hamish is obviously not referring to a lowest common denominator such as being born in Scotland when he speaks of Scottish sexual ethics.
Imagine what your average statement would look like if one could not assume a little common sense and understanding on the part of the hearer:-
No doctor who is schooled in the Western tradition between 1823 and 1964 and who is familiar with the dangers of trepanning while at the same time being of a sober mind and having plucked his nose hairs, etc. would do such a thing.
My objection was not regarding Flew vs. McDonald in particular. My objection is to the suggestion that the True Scotsman Fallacy fallacy isn’t a fallacy. Goalpost-moving because some terms are poorly defined (“True Doctors, for example) is bad argument.
And I don’t like the idea that there are “facts” and then there are “true facts”, a distinction that I find makes no sense.
Yes, some facts are relevant in a particular context and others are not. But they are all true. And if statements about the world aren’t true then they can’t very well be facts.
You’re right, “true facts” doesn’t make sense, but the distinction is between fact and truth not fact and “true facts” (I don’t think I’ve ever used the term myself). “True facts” is tautologous because a fact must be true. All facts are true but not all facts are the truth. For a fact to be the truth requires more than that it simply be true; it must be the relevant fact, the pivotal fact, the one that answers the question.
As to, the issue of poor definition, I’d like to hear your response to my reply to Mark re definition.
My response is that “No True Scotsman” is not a definitional quibble, it is goal-shifing maneuver made in an attempt to gain a rhetorical advantage. It says very little about Scottish people and a great deal about the the speaker’s preferences regarding the subject at hand. Calling someone on the use of the True Scotsman fallacy is not done to dispute the nature of Scotsmen. It is done to force the person making the claim back into honest argument.
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. On the contrary, the most plausible interpretation of Hamish’s claim that “No Scotsman would do such a thing” is that it’s simply knee-jerk national chauvinism.
When confronted with evidence that Scotsmen do in fact do such things (and are by implication no better than Englishmen in that regard), Hamish compounds his error by arbitrarily defining “true Scotsmen” as those that confirm his prejudice. It’s a rhetorical strategy meant to immunize his opinion against disproof, regardless of the facts, and that’s what makes it fallacious.
If you don’t think it’s obvious, try this:
No-one born in Scotland would do a thing like that …
No true born-in-Scotland person would do a thing like that.
Your saying that it’s simply knee-jerk national chauvinism assumes too much of the speaker but proves my point. The speaker is clearly bringing more to the term – even if it is something like a national chauvinism – than merely referring to geographical location at birth.
If someone said something like the no true Scot thing to me, I’d be more interested in hearing what he means by it than in finding excuse to dismiss it.
I think we very likely already knows what the speaker thinks. He thinks that whatever the behavior in question is, he disapproves of it and does not like the idea that people from Scotland might do such things. But in fact they do, of course. The speaker is not talking about Scottish people, he’s talking about his own preferences and moving goalposts in an attempt to strengthen his rhetorical position.
Exactly. And, the actual instrument of the fallacious reasoning is ambiguity, as I pointed out up above.
Andrew:
What you say is interesting, but I’m not sure I buy it. The first problem that I see is in your statement “The truth is the relevant fact, the pivotal one, the one that answers the question.” That seems to assume what needs to be proved, namely that there is, in a given situation, exactly one fact that “is the relevant fact, the pivotal one, the one that answers the question.” It seems not impossible that there are many situations in which it is not the case that there is one single fact which reigns supreme over all the other facts involved in the situation, and hence to be called “The Truth”. Even with something that all rational people agree on, that evolution is true, what is the Truth? Nested phylogenies? Or the convergence of the evidence from comparative anatomy, paleontology, and molecular biology? Or maybe something else? In addition, your definition of truth seems to me to be a bit too idiosyncratic. However, if you are ever to establish your definitions, I do like your formulation of the “Pontius Pilate fallacy.”
As for the No True Scotsman fallacy, it is categorized as an informal fallacy. No problem with that; it’s in good company with the appeal to authority, appeal to force, appeal to consequences, and others.
I think there might be a hidden equivocation here. On the one hand, a “Scotsman” is anyone born in Scotland. That’s just a definition. On the other hand, there is the True Scotsman of the fallacy; the one who states by fiat that anyone who doesn’t adhere to a certain set of practices and beliefs, or who doesn’t have certain traits, is therefore not a *True* Scotsman. The fallacy comes in switching one definition for the other, made clear at the example on the Wikipedia page.
Of course, the Brighton sex maniac story is more or less just a joke. However, the equivalent “No True Christian” fallacy is (quite literally) deathly important; as all or most christian groups throughout history have defined their own group’s biblical interpretations, religious practices, and adjunct character traits (such as political persuasion) as the “Truly Christian” ones (I know, you’re shocked), while denigrating or denying the christian-ness of other groups (who, mutatis mutandum, do exactly the same thing in mirror image). Which still would not be such a big deal, if it weren’t for the fact that until some time in the last 200 years or so, as the concept of secular government spread, the groups spent quite a bit of their time killing each other, and much of the rest of their time teaching their children how bad those other groups were.
Furthermore, even modern christians do the same thing, just without the killing. Conservative protestants, to choose the group that I know most about, for the most part think that neither mainline protestants nor catholics are christians at all (the mission that I worked with sent missionaries out to convert catholics, for example), and tend to look a bit askance at other conservative denominations, especially but not only along the Pentecostal/non-Pentecostal and Calvinist/Arminian divides. Now, I’m not sure if you want to call the “we define our group to be right and everyone else to be wrong” mindset a fallacy or not, but it’s real and it needs some term that captures its essence unambiguously.
Mark, a key feature of a definition is that it is a convention, an invention, usually a social collaboration and often a hotly contested one. Hotly contested definitions such as that of “feminism” are usually hotly contested because feminism itself is contested ground; refinements are being made, new precedents are being set, redundant traditions are being done away with, etc. It is no different for “Christianity”. So it is strange for you to say “the one who states BY FIAT …” as though there is something wrong with inventing a dentition or movement or nation. These things are inventions of convention, law, tradition, precedent, etc. That is the natural reality of it. Someone who says “No true Scotsman …” is either participating in inventing/building what it means to be a Scotsman or referring to the what he believes to be the current state of the construction. The fact that it is “by fiat” in no way makes it meaningless, inconsequential or purely a matter of personal opinion.
Re. equivocation, to equivocate you have to switch reference, usually under the guise of the same word. As I see it, Anthony Flew mistakes his Scotsman’s initial reference and then accuses the man of equivocation on being corrected. A change in reference need not be a lateral change. It can also be a change in focus. This is especially the case with words like Scotsman or Christian. Being born in Scotland is very much a lowest common denominator and an unlikely reference for an emotional statement about sexual behaviour. It is reasonable to assume that the speaker is being more specific; referring to national ideals and suchlike.
If your doctor said “Its cancer” and you said “But I have no lumps in my breast”, would he be equivocating if he then said it was lung cancer?
So it is strange for you to say “the one who states BY FIAT …” as though there is something wrong with inventing a dentition or movement or nation.
I might be dense, but this sounds to me an awful lot like Humpty-Dumpty’s proclamation, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
Gregory Kusnick’s response, a little above, is *exactly* the way I see it. But, moving from Scotsmen to Christians, I seriously doubt if you can even identify a LCD–is it those who self-identify with jesus? Those who believe specific things/doctrines (and if so, which ones?)? Those who act in a “christian” manner (again, who gets to decide the criteria?)? Or something else? But in any case, once you get a definition of christian (which will be held by only a minority of those who self-identify as christians), that very group, should someone think or act in a different way, will not hesitate to define that person as Not A True Christian. To get to Mr. Kusnick’s money quote:
Hamish compounds his error by arbitrarily defining “true Scotsmen” as those that confirm his prejudice.
Perzackly, as we often say on this not-a-blog. I could name any number of individual christians and christian groups who resort to this whenever another christian acts or thinks in a way they don’t approve of. Remember the very first split in protestantism, when Luther said about Zwingli, “Yours is a different spirit from ours.” And this was about a point of doctrine so minor that I can’t even in good conscience explain it here, as it would certainly cause many fine atheists to lose their lunch.
It’s a rhetorical strategy meant to immunize his opinion against disproof, regardless of the facts, and that’s what makes it fallacious.
I called it equivocation; maybe that wasn’t completely accurate (though I still think it is). But, it might just be moving the goalposts. In any case, clearly fallacious.
A very safe definition of a Christian from an outsider’s anthropological perspective is anybody for whom Jesus is more than a mere mortal. After that, you can start getting more specific as necessary.
Cheers,
b&
Good definition (which also just begs for the No True Christian fallacy to be committed; as “more than a mere mortal” can be interpreted in many different ways). Of course, most christians, true or not, go ballistic if you give an anthropological definition instead of a theological one.
The Emo Phillips joke might be my all-time favorite; I’ve used it often, even once when I was teaching Sunday School!
And yet there are those who self-identify as Christians who wouldn’t agree with that definition.
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Indeed, which is why I think that the only legit definition is “those who claim to be Christians”.
Which I suppose just opens the door to “No True Unchristian Person” fallacies.
Well, I suppose that has legitimacy of a sort. But such a definition never seemed meaningful to me, in the way that taking the defining characteristic to be (say) belief in Christ as the only way to eternal life would be.
Nor is it consistent with how we’ve argued here that people who don’t believe in ant gods are atheists, even when the refuse to self-identify as such.
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* any gods
Of course, ant gods do exist and are awesome.
Writing from personal experience, eh?
b&
* they refuse
Of course ant gods exist!
The real question is who gets to define what a “real” Christian is?
While they wouldn’t necessarily agree with the definition, they almost certainly would fit the definition — and that’s what matters.
Yes, of course; many Christians define “True Christian™” as one who has been properly waterboarded by a certain shaman, or who has had a psychic heart-lung transplant with the infinite-regrowth zombie, or who has been equally psychically birthed (or pooped?) by a decidedly male figure in a process that’s carefully never actually described, or whatever.
But to grant them their definitions is as silly as granting any other primitive tribe’s superstitions as being really real — something that would never occur to any self-respecting anthropologist.
All we need is a definition that, as neatly and cleanly as any other definition in any other context, reliably separates the Christians from the non-Christians, and a belief that Jesus is more than a mere mortal fits the bill nicely. It gets all the real nutjobs who can’t tell a cracker from a pound of flesh as well as the “I don’t think Jesus rose from the grave but his philosophy wasn’t of this Earth” milquetoast ones. It doesn’t include “cultural Christians” such as Richard Dawkins, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
Cheers,
b&
Im not sure I agree, Ben. Some time ago on this website, I argued with someone who self-identified as a Christian but didnt consider himself to be a theist, and didnt claim anything supernatural for Jesus or his wisdom i.e., he held that Jesus was just a mere mortal But I fear theres a no true mere mortal argument coming
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A few thoughts come to mind.
First, absolute precision isn’t necessary in these sorts of fuzzy matters — just as in that other discussion about where to draw the line between life and non-life (or, equivalently, biology and chemistry). I think it’s reasonable to suggest that this “mere mortal Jesus” “Christian” represents a vanishingly small portion of Christians; as such, I don’t think that sort of outlier poses a significant problem to this definition.
And then…well, the only such people I can remember encountering (with the open admission that my remembery is far from perfect) had definitions of “mortal” and “natural” that did not match the standard such definitions. In a much more pronounced example than the one you give, I’ve known Christians who would agree that Jesus was in no way supernatural while simultaneously insisting that all of the supernatural stuff really happened — virgin birth, zombification, the whole works. They just considered that what sane people realize is fantasy is the real way the world actually really naturally works, and reserved “supernatural” for the claims of other religions. And what set Jesus apart from other humans wasn’t his spiritual nature, for we share that with him as evidenced by the fact that we are also immortal spirits; what made Jesus different is the wisdom that he preached and that he’s the one privileged to dictate our after-death living arrangements.
A good litmus test for the “more than a mere mortal” part of my test is the person’s perception of the Resurrection. If the person believes that Jesus actually did appear to his followers after the Crucifixion in any manner, whether bodily or in dreams or on the spiritual plane or whatever, that’s more than a mere mortal, no matter if the person with that position thinks the appearance was remarkable or not. And if the person thinks that Jesus wasn’t resurrected but does think that they’ll meet Jesus again after their own death or even just that others have done so, that would also qualify as more than a mere mortal.
I won’t rule out the possibility of somebody who accepts an entirely naturalistic world in which Jesus really was just a regular Joe who preached some good sermons and got executed for it and thus became worm food and nothing more…and who also thinks that this truly mortal Jesus was so remarkable in what he had to say that it’s worth identifying as one of his followers. I’d just suggest that those people are so rare that they constitute an insignificant rounding error at most, and trying to decide if they’re “really” Christians or not is as fruitless an exercise as trying to separate blue from green.
Cheers,
b&
So, this guy was clearly a rounding-error Christian! But he certainly insisted that he was as much a Christian (or, at least, as entitled to claim the term) as any accept-Jesus-as-my-personal-saviour-and-path-to-life-everlasting Christian.
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I think you’ve summed it up.
But I would also add that self-reporting, though important, can’t be the last word. Pseudoscientists, for example, insistently self-report that they really are doing real science. There are people who have significant same-sex relationships and attractions who insist that they aren’t gay or bisexual. Some people with six-figure salaries and seven-figure bank accounts will tell you in no uncertain terms that they’re solidly middle-class and in no way wealthy.
While it’s important to acknowledge what those people self-report, it’s also important to not let them be the sole arbiter of their actual classification.
Cheers,
b&
@Ben:
While I agree with your argument, and am greatly enjoying your expositions, I’m not 100% sure about your statement, “I’d just suggest that those people are so rare that they constitute an insignificant rounding error at most.”
There may be more of them than you think. I never spent any time in the mainstream/liberal protestant churches, but I’m under the impression that the view you describe is not at all rare there. I could easily be wrong, though.
If you’re ever unfortunate enough to read some systematic or historical theology, you’ll even find out (couldn’t bring myself to write “learn” there) that there are seven (of course) “theories” of the atonement (penal substitution gets all the ink, but it’s not the only one). One of those is the moral influence “theory”; the idea that (according to the first sentence of the Wikipedia article), “The moral influence view of the atonement teaches that the purpose and work of Jesus Christ was to bring positive moral change to humanity.”
Failed, of course (for example, Luke 14.26 is the fountainhead of all personality cults), but it was at the very least an historical position held by some not insignificant number of people.
In my experience, mainstream an liberal churches — such as, say, Methodists for the former and the United Church of Christ for the latter — they very much believe in the realism of the Bible. While they’re not into literalism, their pastors read and sermonize Bible passages as if those stories really truly happened. For them, the Bible is an history book
Do those in the pews really believe? At least publicly, yes, as much as anybody believes.
Even amongst the Unitarians…the ones who identify as Christian believe in Jesus as some sort of Newage-style superman who was truly tapped into the deep mysteries of the universe. And the atheists amongst the Unitarians generally don’t self-identify as Christian, even if they’re admirers of Christian philosophy.
A closeted atheist, of course, wouldn’t fit my definition, but that’s a whole nother kettle of horses.
Cheers,
b&
(I have no idea where in the threading this comment is going to appear)
@Ant:
I really like Ben’s definition (which I will expand upon if I can ever find out how to reply to it), as it seems to cover both the “Jesus was God” crowd and the “Jesus was a great teacher” bunch, while eliminating the purely cultural christians. I have a friend at work who doesn’t believe any of the doctrinal crap, but self-identifies as a christian (and would certainly be considered not a christian by my evangelical ex-colleagues), partly for cultural reasons, partly for communitarian reasons, and partly because he conceives of Jesus as one who would support the kind of left-wing politics that he (and I) favor. In other words, per Ben’s anthropological definition, he qualifies, even if by any theological definition you care to name he would not even come close.
So, my question is, why/how does your interlocuteur self-identify as a christian, if there is nothing in his beliefs or actions to indicate that he thinks any differently of Jesus that he (probably) does of Buddha, Thomas Jefferson, or Ant Allan?
@ Mark Joseph
Because he (claims to) follow the teachings of Jesus rather than the Buddhas or Jeffersons or mine (um, Thou shalt not waste! and, er, Be excellent to one another!!).
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“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change…”
@Ben:
Excellent! I was thinking that your anthropological definition pretty much coincided with what I was using–anyone who self-identifies as a christian–but I see that this extra criterion makes for a much more useful distinction. Which, of course, lets the nature of the “no true christian” fallacy shine through brightly. Bravo!
Thanks. Glad it helps.
b&
But here’s the thing… 99.9999999% of the time that this comes up is in the context of this or that christian making some statement to exclude other christians. I see this all the time on Facebook from liberal christians who post inane comments about how right wing-nut christians should just pay attention to Jesus and then all would be well. It is a way for them to avoid ownership of all the hideous consequences of faith. It is much easier and more effective, IMO, to respond to them with “Of course those nasty people are christians… Who gets to define a true christian?”. Trying to insist on a specific definition, even one that I might agree with, isn’t worth it except for that 0.00000001% of the time when something else is being discussed.
@Ant: That would be a Thomas Jefferson style Christian, I think. (You know about The Jefferson Bible, I assume.)
Although I’m not sure if TJ would have self-described as Christian… probably sometimes yes, sometimes, no. He was a deist but believed in JC as a moral guide character.
I dont think it was TJ commenting on this website 😉
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…you never know. As fast as he must be spinning in his grave these days, I imagine he must be putting out enough modulated electromagnetic radiation for the nearest WiFi transceiver to pick it up….
b&
WordPress is sending update notices in odd sequences. My reply just above applies to Ben as well as Ant but I hadn’t been told of Ben’s comment yet.
This is my last note in this thread because WordPress is inserting comments in what seems to be random order. Catch y’all in another thread later.
At the risk of dipping my toe into shark-infested waters – I think ‘no true Scotsman’ is a valid concept so long as it isn’t pushed too far by logic-chopping. For it to be a logical fallacy, disprovable by one counter-example, the concept of a ‘true Scotsman’ would have to be precisely defined. And I submit, in real life, a ‘true Scotsman’ is an identifiable collection of characteristics but fuzzy round the edges. Some of the characteristics may be more important than others – in fact the ‘no true xx’ is often used to single out a particular characteristic which that person lacks, although possessing most of the others. “No true pilot would take off without checking his fuel” – obviously ‘our’ pilot had all the other attributes i.e. he could fly the plane, just he was missing that one.
Equally, of course, it can’t be used to bolster an argument in logic.
In fact almost nothing in life is that precisely defined, except maybe mathematics. It’s quite easy to say ‘no true integer is a fraction’ and be absolutely correct. But in real life, it’s hard to do. I suppose one could try ‘No true Scotsman is Japanese’ but if he was born in Edinburgh (of Japanese parents), has taken out Scottish nationality and changed his name to Dougal MacTavish, eats haggis and wears a kilt, who’s to say he isn’t a ‘truer’ Scotsman than his neighbours.
(I await being slaughtered for my caricature by the Scotspersons on this list. Hey, I didn’t invent the phrase. Just as well it wasn’t ‘no true Irishman’ 😉
By the way, wrt Andrew’s example, who’s to say which of the many ‘facts’ about ‘Orson’ is the relevant one that constitutes the ‘truth’? Reality is not that tidy.
…only if, by “correct,” you mean, “incorrect,” of course.
2/1 and 4/2 are both fractional representations of the same integral value. They are integers, in the exact same way that 1.999… is also an integer.
A better statement to use might be, “two is the only even prime,” or some other variation on that theme.
Cheers,
b&
Okay. I would tend to define an integer as including the property of being non-fractional – but I might be wrong about that. But I think my point is, that an integer is precisely defined (even if I got part of it wrong!) so it is possible to make an absolute statement about what is, or is not, an integer. A ‘Scotsman’, on the other hand, is not so well defined.
I doubt that 1.9999…. (recurring for ever) is truly an integer, though, since it is always possible to add another ‘9’ on the end and therefore it has never quite reached true integer two-ness. But again, I could be (unarguably, logically, provably, factually) wrong about that, depending on the precise mathematical definition of ‘integer’.
I think…
Ben’s right about both (sorry). All integers are rational numbers; all rational numbers are fractions. Therefore all integers are fractions. I constantly have to tell my students to write the phantom “1” in the denominator to make it *look* like a fraction when they go to do their arithmetic.
1.999 (imagine a bar over the nines) is indeed equal to two. There are a number of ways to prove this; there’s an entire Wikipedia article devoted to it here.
The first proof is the easiest:
1/9 = .111… (by long division)
Now multiply both sides by 9, and you get:
9/9 = .999…
Mathematics is the perfect profession for pedants!
I’m with Barbie on this one.
I refer (not out loud, of course) to the “developmental” math classes that I teach at the university as “math for people who didn’t pay attention in high school.”
Okay. So I was absolutely, unequivocally, demonstrably wrong, by definition, about that. (I suspected I might be. Bad choice of example).
But it still illustrates my point 😉 That my wrong-ness on that score can be proved beyond question.
By contrast, if I said “Bonnie Prince Charlie was not a true Scotsman”, it would be impossible to prove me wrong, since ‘true Scotsman’ is not precisely defined and no matter what anyone said in his favour, I’m sure I could always find some other characteristic that disqualified him.
I’m right with you; my natural pedantry just overcame my good sense for a minute. See here for an explanation.
The whole point of the No True Scotsman fallacy is exactly what you point out; since the term “True Scotsman” is not precisely defined, it can be manipulated by the unscrupulous to exclude whatever they don’t want to be part of their self-definition. Ditto for No True Christian. In the second half of my response to Andrew, above, I pretty much stated what I wanted to about that. It’s both funny and pathetic when catholics, fundamentalist protestants, mormons, and jehovah’s witnesses all define “True Christian” in mutually exclusive terms!
Another cartoon
Oh yeah, I like that ‘someone is _wrong_ on the Internet’ xkcd. It’s so very true.
Also known as SIWOTI syndrome.
As usual, Vi Hart has the ultim7.999… answer.
Cheers,
b&
She’s awesome!
Yes. Yes, she is.
b&
Oh, by the way – I don’t regard 2/1 or 4/2 as being fractional, since they both cancel precisely to give an integer. As you say, they’re representations of an integer in fractional form. Just as 2.000 is a decimal representation of same – but it’s still an integer.
It depends on how pedantic one wants to get. In some formal developments of arithmetic, 2.0 (recurring) is a real number which happens to be equivalent in the right sort of way to a previously defined integer. But in most contexts this is irrelevant and one can sloppily equate the two.
What about the “no true bug” argument? 😉
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Not sure of the reference, but the first google hit brings up http://www.myrmecos.net/2011/05/11/whats-a-bug/
which relates to a post by Gregory Kusnick on this very no-true-‘blog’ (TM). The conclusion (as I interpret it) is that among entomologists ‘bug’ is precisely defined, whereas among the general public it’s a loose term – and this is entirely acceptable.
That’s okay with me, too.
Was that the argument or did I get the wrong one?
Yep. I was alluding to one or a couple of recent articles that made that point.
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infiniteimprobabilit, I’m totally with you on your first paragraph.
WRT Orson, yes, it is just a simple thought experiment and, like I said a comment or two back, the truth of a matter might be a group of facts. Your asking “who’s to say?” seems to confuse the epistemological with the ontological. Getting at the truth about a real aspirant astronaut named Orson might indeed involve some insurmountable epistemological obstacles but it also might not. Our thought experiment conveniently provides among all the other facts about the fictitious Orson, a fact which clearly emerges as the truth and there is no reason why the same ready availability might not apply to the facts about a real Aspirant astronaut (dammit! Why do I always have to delete a gh from that word?!)
Okay, thanks.
Re Orson, I’m still sceptical that the truth is ever simple enough to summarise with one fact (in fact I’m suspicious of the word ‘truth’, it gets misused so much), but I don’t wish to argue the point, I think we could go round in circles. I might concede that if we carefully define ‘truth’ as being ‘the relevant fact(s) in these specific circumstances’ the thought experiment could be valid.
By the way, an astronaught is an unsuccessful aspirant astronaut, obviously. 😉
Absolutely. The truth is not always neatly ensconced in one fact. My replies to Mark and GB which I referred to were blocked – probably because they were on the long side and I’ve already had a lot to say for myself on the matter (sorry, Jerry!) so I’ll just try to extract the relevant bit here:
… but groups of facts which are the truth of a matter are often given a single name and grouped as if they were a single fact – probably precisely because they are bound together by being the truth of a matter. Some examples of groups of facts would be that of a bull or bear market, a revolution, a democracy, a divorce, a diagnosis.
I like your definition. In fact I’d pare it down to “the relevant fact(s)” because relevance is implied by “specific circumstances”. I hadn’t, in my first comment, set out to offer a definition, merely to observe and describe truth, to say how it works and how it is different from fact. I think once we get the distinction between fact and truth clear, we will misuse “truth” less and find ourselves more comfortable with using it.
The distinction between definition and description can also provide some clarity.
I didn’t realize that once you accepted Jesus as your savior, there was no way you could renounce that.
Well, Dr. Coyne, I guess the problem is that you aren’t reading enough theology! ROFLMAO.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled website of science, anti-religion, cats, boots, and noms.
Frankie is clearly not a student of the Bible she reveres nor is she a student of the language she speaks. First the language confusion: “snatch them out of my Father’s hand” is quite different from “deconverting”. “Snatch” denotes another person acting violently on the believer to take away belief, while “deconversion” denotes the believer refusing to believe anymore.
Second, Frankie either never read or misunderstands Hebrews 6:4-6 which says, “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance…”. The author of Hebrews is making a statement exactly comparable to Mark Joseph’s when he writes, “I am resolutely and irrevocably non-religious, and will remain an atheist…”. The Hebrews text clearly demonstrates that Frankie invented a completely false interpretation of John 10:26-29. In point of fact, Frankie made up a lie and attributed that lie to the Bible! She should fall down on her good Christian knees and repent for lying on God and his Bible.
As any atheist student of the Bible knows one can “use” the Bible to “prove” almost any Christian point of view that one has been brainwashed to believe.
I’m not so sure about what these passages mean and there are those who call me a backslider but I’m damn sure I could never go back to Cross and Blackwell mayonnaise after my wife started making the real thing. Similarly, I could never start eating at a McDonald’s after being enlightened about what goes into their “food”.
I wasn’t surprised to find out Frankie is English and not Scottish as no true Scotsman would make such a claim.
lol