Richard Carrier: Merry Christmas, God Is Still a Delusion

[Peter Kirby]

I was thinking about the attack on Richard Carrier's integrity today: that he was "once a reasonably sensible man" and that he is now a "drooling idiot spitting slanders." I don't take this particularly seriously, either as a demonstration of Carrier's inability to reason or as a general condemnation of anyone studying the subject without a Christian faith commitment. But, still, I was thinking about it.

It reminded me of Lovecraft. On the one side, you have those who are already deluded by the nature of what they believe (for the sake of the Lovecraftian analogy anyway) but who, by that fact, avoid the supposedly maddening influence of skepticism. On the other side, those who attempt to keep their wits about them find them constantly eroded by the malice that develops in refuting the fallacies of the deluded. In the end, everyone is made a fool. The only way to avoid becoming mad or deluded is to avoid the subject entirely, but then there is no way to obtain the truth of the matter. And the only ones who hold the truth are a few mad men who get laughs from everyone, those who believe (obviously) and those who have not studied (and for whom their views are unfamiliar). Yet they've gone so mad that they can no longer explain how they got to the truth without stumbling with all their defective habits of mind acquired in study, and they are not even entirely convincing to each other. I'm pretty sure Lovecraft would have liked the irony of a situation where everyone is either deluded, mad, or ignorant and where study destroys everyone who draws near to the truth.

[Blood]

Knowledge really is a dangerous thing, and not just in an ironic sense. We read in a vain attempt to overcome our ignorance, but the more we read, the more ignorant we feel. There is just too much information out there now. And the futility of everything becomes overpowering.

[stephan happy huller]

True but as strong as the pull toward truth is it is more than offset by the gravity of egoism, vanity and self-importance. Most people don't even get pulled up to stand on their feet by ideas let alone off the ground.

[Blood]

We have, at best, 25 years of full, mature consciousness in this life. What can anyone really accomplish in that minuscule length of time? We barely get to scratch the surface of knowledge and then our life is over.

[Peter Kirby]

The trick is to get more thinking done on Sunday than some people do all week.

[stephan happy huller]

Twenty five? I think I must have reached my limit already

[Roger Pearse]

[Deleted]

[A_Nony_Mouse]

I don't know why it is so difficult for people on both sides to say "maybe."

Just how hard is it for a believer to say maybe I am full of it? How hard for believers to seriously consider their beliefs are all wrong in every respect?

That is how hard it is.

[Adam]

We have, at best, 25 years of full, mature consciousness in this life. What can anyone really accomplish in that minuscule length of time? We barely get to scratch the surface of knowledge and then our life is over.

At 71 I may be reaching that limit, but I'm still getting out some zingers over on my main current thread:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=222&start=40#p4834
It's not just that I discovered a major flaw in German scholarship and exposed a paradox that no one else noticed. I turned around a day or so later and solved the paradox, based on some research I had done just days earlier. But contradicting the assumption of Blood here, I have shown that all the 20-somethings' supposed superiority has neither observed the paradox nor avoided adding to the misunderstandings. And we're talking about analysis here, not some creative genius. I'm not particularly good at analysis, mine kicked in at about 25 and diminished before 65, but even so I can analyze better than the professionals that Eichhorn & Marsh taught what led to Holtzman & Weisse and that their Two-document Hypothesis as expounded later by B. Weiss & Bacon was recovering a bigger proto-Gospel than Eichhorn taught? (By the way, Bacon was showing his age 70 when he finished up with Studies in Matthew in 1930, or did his reasoning always suck?) I expect my creativity to be considered wild and unsubstantiated, but I expect to be taught by analysts, not exposing their misrepresentations of what earlier scholars taught.

Once again I am realizing that I have to discover everything for myself, there seems to be no one out there to help me. I'm not talking about just FRDB and here, this goes back 50 years.
Edited to add:
Here's my hypothesis on why all German scholarship sucks (just German?):
Yes, it's true that you've got to be in your 20's (well-recognized for engineers and scientists, these days even more clearly for computer nerds) to have maximum creativity (mine started at 18), productivity (19 for me), analysis (25), and detail-intoxication (27 for me), but during all this period the future professors are still stuck as subordinates to masters whom they must please. By the time they can exercise independent thought, they no longer have that creativity to want to use it. They are already locked into their course (and if not, they'll never get tenure).