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Richard Dawkins says, Do not fear the big bad wolf

Excellent. Then we can at least agree on the value of clarity.
 
Although frogs do not usually turn into princes, sometimes it would be advantageous for a prince to turn into a frog. Back in 1981 Miss Piggy offered to turn Kronprinz Karl into a frog, but he wouldn't let her kiss him.

Eldarion Lathria
 
braces_for_impact said:
Well said! Different people respond to different types of argument. Go to any atheist convention and ask those that used to be theist to raise their hand if online debates and conversations had anything to do with them now being atheist and watch how many hands go up. It's absolutely NOT futile. I myself was deconverted in part by a particularly arrogant and harsh chat room participant. He pissed me off so badly I threw myself into serious research so I could see the look on his face when I successfully debunked his arguments. Some of them I did debunk, but many of them I could not, because along with the rather dumb common atheist arguments he proposed he also pointed out GREAT resources on critical thinking. Once you accept those, faith falls like a house of cards. It's incredibly hard to argue with being reasonable. The thing is, most people won't change their minds in PUBLIC. They do so quietly, in private so as to save face.
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I got to where I am today by smelling out the holes in the arguments of theists, atheists, and my self. Apply the same standard to your arguments as you do to opposing arguments and you will learn something of the truth. There is more than a little "double standard" and 2 faced thinking prevalent on both sides of the intellectual divide (atheism and theism)- truth is not arrived at through hypocritical reasoning.
 
Kharakov said:
braces_for_impact said:
Well said! Different people respond to different types of argument. Go to any atheist convention and ask those that used to be theist to raise their hand if online debates and conversations had anything to do with them now being atheist and watch how many hands go up. It's absolutely NOT futile. I myself was deconverted in part by a particularly arrogant and harsh chat room participant. He pissed me off so badly I threw myself into serious research so I could see the look on his face when I successfully debunked his arguments. Some of them I did debunk, but many of them I could not, because along with the rather dumb common atheist arguments he proposed he also pointed out GREAT resources on critical thinking. Once you accept those, faith falls like a house of cards. It's incredibly hard to argue with being reasonable. The thing is, most people won't change their minds in PUBLIC. They do so quietly, in private so as to save face.
Click to expand...
I got to where I am today by smelling out the holes in the arguments of theists, atheists, and my self. Apply the same standard to your arguments as you do to opposing arguments and you will learn something of the truth. There is more than a little "double standard" and 2 faced thinking prevalent on both sides of the intellectual divide (atheism and theism)- truth is not arrived at through hypocritical reasoning.
Click to expand...

Well of course. There's hardly any use in critical thinking if you only apply it to the other side. In fact, one could easily argue that it isn't until you start recognizing your own fallacious arguments and reasoning that your not actually applying critical thinking at all. That's just another form of compartmentalization.
 
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