skepticdude

That's exactly right.

But you miss the point.

My point was not to prove that Christians are inept to their task.

My point was to stimulate thinking on how to rescue Christians from their own stupidity.

According to your logic, a mother should not run and whisk her child out from the middle of a street. After all, the child was reminded many times of the danger yet chose to take that risk. If the child gets run over, this is the result of his ineptitude, not the result of the mother's inadequate parenting skills.

Of course, that interpretation of domestic life is ridiculous. Nobody is going to just sit and watch their 4 year old play in a busy street merely because the child made an inept choice to rebel.

Everybody agrees that sometimes we need to rescue people from their own stupidity.

Given the correctness of your view that Christians have nobody else to blame for remaining decieved in a clearly false religious cult, do you have any bright ideas on how to kick them out of the middle of the street...even when they are too stupid to see the danger they are in?

Psychologists deal with women who currently engage in "battered woman" syndrome (i.e., thinking they deserve their lot in life and refusing to correctly identify the true source of the problem, the abusive husband).

Apparently, being self-decieved and unwilling to be honest with themselves, is not the insurmountable barrier to victory that some of these flash-in-the-pan atheists trump it up to be. If not being a bible scholar doesn't prevent you from using your intellectual knowledge to refute Christian apologetics, then not being a psychologist should not mean you should throw your hands up and say a fundamentalist's true problem is too deep-seated for you to handle.

I was a hardcore fundamentalist once in my life, but thanks to the patience of other non-professionals, I began to see the true reason I was putting up this bullshit apologetics smokescreen. I was eventually able to see that I believed in the resurrection of Jesus and the reliability of the bible because these beliefs gave me a direction and purpose in life, at a time when I was struggling to survive and losing the battle. I eventually faced the fact that I became a Christian because I was scared of going to hell (i.e, the motiviation biblical authors always used), and not because of any pretended trust in apologetics arguments. I was scared into salvation, which is therefore an emotional appeal not intellectual.

If these non-professional skeptics had all thought like you, they'd have given up because they weren't professional psychologists and I'd probably still be decieved.

Got any bright ideas on how to rescue people from their own stupidity, after it is acknowledged that they are self-decieved and cannot be trusted to find the answer on their own?

gentleexit

You're likening religious belief to rape or physical injury - is this fair analogy?

This I think gets down to whether we agree with Plato et al. Is ignorance the worst sin? A lack of insight, the only evil, the source of everything termed evil? If you agree, you must enlight. If you don't then ...

Here was my convoluted route. CA's recent debate on gay marriage did make the relative "family values" performance of different states jump out. The worst states are bible belters. CA etc. aren't too good either. The best is gay-marriage-permitting home of the bee-gees. Does permitting alternatives signal less fundamentalism? I don't have any numbers. Nice to have. If we just looked at outcomes, much of these silly values debates would go away. Or would they? Look at the Palins.

bacht

Compared to animals, humans have total freedom of thought and action. We are superbly skilled in lying to ourselves and each other as an emotional survival skill. It's sad to think that after all these millenia we still don't raise our children to be honest healthy people.

kcdad

You are dancing with yourself. If you can not reason with someone, as a skeptic, why would resort to any other way? Do you want to be like Paul who was "all things to all people" just to win converts? Is that why you are having this argument? To win converts?