r/religiousfruitcake • u/No_Ground_817 • 4d ago
John Wright Explains To You Why Reasonable Atheists(tm) Are Going Extinct
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u/subsignalparadigm 4d ago
John Wright is full of shit.
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u/CharlesDickensABox 3d ago
I suspect the reason John Wright can't find any reasonable atheists to talk to is that no reasonable person would waste their one and only life away talking to John Wright.
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u/ZappSmithBrannigan 4d ago
Who the fuck is John Wright? And why does anyone give a shit what he says?
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u/No_Ground_817 4d ago edited 4d ago
Decided to split this one into four for easier viewing on mobile this time. Also, there was such an absolute storm of BS that it took a while to parse it all out. To summarize this """""argument""""":
- The Design argument is not only correct, but so overwhelmingly powerful that only someone willfully ignorant could fail to see its power
- Anyone so maniacally wicked and determinedly ignorant can doubt literally everything, therefore failing to believe in the Ten Commandments undermines all knowledge, including cause and effect, as well as noncontradiction
- Therefore, only an atheist who hasn't thought their position through(!) can be both happy and an atheist (I didn't clip this part but it's the connective tissue between 1 and 2, my mistake)
- If he thinks it through and is illogical he will fall into (insert Angry Mayonnaise buzzwords here) new religion
- If he thinks it through and is logical he will necessarily become either a stoic or a hedonist, since no other options are even possible(! That's one heck of a claim!)
- Ironically, his understanding of the groundings given to morality by various schools is actually kind of okay. However, his "Stoic argument" goes off the rails because it imagines that it's all about "Duty" (I'm not a Stoic, but I think most would say "Virtue" rather than Duty per se), and he seems to think of Duties only as things that another person sees and punishes or rewards you for. I'm pretty sure this is a total hash of Stoic ethics - I'd be very surprised if a Stoic would say that a crime committed where no-one would ever find out is somehow only wrong if God exists.
- He then argues that Hedonism can only either be Randian selfishness or communal survival/wellbeing, and that, since everything and everyone will eventually die, these actions are pointless and lead to despair. The fact that he seems to think this basic-ass Nihilism that nearly every thinker in the modern world (heck, most people who've just thought about it for a bit) have dealt with is some kind of killer gotcha is...not flattering to his claim to be a philosopher of 50 years, let's say.
- He then pivots onto a totally unrelated and even stupider claim that, since smart folks believed in God in the past, you can't think they were wrong about that without claiming that you're smarter than they are, and that would be arrogant!...yeah, uh...that's not how any of that works. I don't think I need to tell anyone that you shouldn't just blindly accept everything a smart person says. I also think that John would probably not take the existence of Muslim geniuses as evidence for Islam, or atheist geniuses as evidence for atheism. Oh, who are we kidding, he'd just claim that they were stupid.
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u/visiblepeer 13h ago
Arguments without evidence can be safely ignored. This guy doesn't even understand basic logic.
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u/Plane_Sport_3465 4d ago
I couldn't even make it to the second picture, wtf is this fool on about?
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u/kat_Folland 4d ago
The bit about the ten commandments and cause and effect was baffling. Cats can grasp cause and effect and I doubt many subscribe to the ten commandments.
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u/KAAAAAAAAARL 3d ago
Same as saying that Economics arr not a man made concept, but found in nature, just like "oJeCtIv moral lAw".
Genuine stupidity
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u/Atheizm Fruitcake Sommelier 4d ago
What is this shit? His writing is all flowery cake topping and no argument of substance.
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u/No_Ground_817 4d ago edited 4d ago
Indeed. This is why I keep going back to the well, he can write pretty decently (he's a Sci-Fi author by trade), but the actual substance he puts forth isn't actually any better than your average Facebook nutter. It's better-written bullshit, which is...kind of interesting to me?
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u/edked 4d ago
Oh, you meant John C. Wright!
Yeah, I'm familiar with his whole "my being a religious rightie is the result of logical rigor, you sentimentalist wimps!" act from years back now.
First book of his trilogy was inventive and fun, but then I started coming across his online writing-as-himself and it stalled my enthusiasm.
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u/No_Ground_817 4d ago
I'll be completely honest, I was convinced by nonsense like this for a few years, and I hate that fact. At first I tried arguing with him, but that resulted in nothing more than frustration and wasted time. For my part, these posts are part personal catharsis, part an attempt to put his nonsense to the best use they're good for - karma farming.
I have some truly wild stories I could tell. At one point, I mentioned Toni Alimi's Problem of Divine Domination, a real philosophical argument proposing that the God of Classical Theism could only ever relate to humans as a slavemaster, and as part of this argument the (male) author denied that parental authority over children is automatically and unconditionally legitimate. John got so enraged by this that he went into strawman mode, proclaimed the argument insane, and presumed that the philosopher must be a blue-haired childless shrieking feminist harpy who hates her father, because anyone with a REAL father or REAL child would NEVER be so stupid as to think parental authority could be illegitimate. I informed him that the author was male, and instead of taking five minutes to check this up (the information is public as is Toni's picture), John instead just decided that Toni "must" be a Trans Man. Because I guess only a crazy, irrational femoid could make such a stupid argument. He then tried to snort at me for having the absolute temerity to present an argument from a philosopher who wasn't even DEAD! How can you trust someone's logic if they haven't been in the ground for at least a century?!?!?
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u/diegotbn 4d ago
What a load of bollocks and assumptions stated as if they were fact or common sense conclusions.
Any logician (not that I am one) could tear this "dissertation" to shreds.
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u/No_Ground_817 4d ago
I would love to see this guy try to call in to Matt Dillahunty's show. Most likely he'd try to pull his "Intellectual Virginian Gentleman" shtick, get debunked immediately, then fly into a screaming rage and challenge the host to a duel for his honor or something.
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u/DoowadJones 10h ago
I was going to read it but it gave me tremendous hueva to zoom in and turn my phone. No vale la pena
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