Ingeniously, there’s alwas the explanation that “the devil made them do it.”
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Do you know any atheists who don’t lack belief in any deity, think carefully now? There are none are there, thus the definition of atheism as a lack or absence of belief applies to all atheists, whereas the definition it involves a belief no deity exists does not. So what would you call someone who does not believe in any deity or deities, but who does not hold a belief no deity exists? Me for example?
So no amount of data can make any assumption known or proven to be true? I must say as a laymen who is not “scientifically trained” this is most edifying. I haven’t been this surprised since you asserted that what we know or is proved to be true (facts) can never change. Yes indeed most edifying…
What’s so funny about Sherlock’s posts is that they are so full of shit, we can keep going back, rereading, and finding more and more bullshit to comment on. He flooded the site with so much shit that it was not possible to address it all. Here he is, gone for days, and there is still bullshit to respond to. I also went back and re-read a few posts. Thus far, I have resisted the urge to continue bringing up his BS. Admittedly I did mention shit once or twice even after I was aware of his ban. I’m sure he was just trolling.
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Yes, that is quite remarkable. I see that on other sites as well, where flat earthers, creationists, conspiracy theorists, etc. spam threads with similar long-winded collections of fallacies and with stubborn rigidness, often also combined with verbose wordiness and logorrhea. How do they get time for it all? Don’t they have day jobs? Or even a life?
On another forum I frequent, this was referred to as the “Energiser Bunny” method of trying to win - by seeking to exhaust the patience of the honest contributors. The Gish Gallop is a direct product of this.
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I’ve generally referenced it as the shotgun approach to argumentation. You just point in the general direction of the debate, shoot, and see what sticks. It’s also important to note that he never addressed the issue debated. Rather, he would pick one small example from the issue and demonstrate contention with that. As if, one small disagreement appears to have completely discredited the entire matter. Before you realized it, the entire focus had shifted from the initial claim to a trivial matter that had no connection whatsoever to the core issue. This went on over and over and over and was annoying to watch.
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I’m quite familiar with the Gish Gallop tactics, with lots of claims about lots of tangential stuff being thrown around, giving the opposing part no chance at all to answer it all (and in addition, it’s easy and takes absolutely no time to just asserting something, but takes a lot of time, pain, and effort to debunk each of those assertions). You could sort of call it an asymmetric debate form with a firehose of claims and assertions that are individually time consuming to answer or debunk. I’ve been exposed to it on a number of occasions at other discussion forums. But I don’t think the Gish Gallop really fits with Sherlock’s tactics, as it’s a mishmash of repeating the same assertions ad nauseam, making liberal use of fallacious reasoning and self-contradiction, all in the hope it will not be noticed. And if it is noticed, ignore it. In the end, it all boils down to having more stamina and more time at your disposal than your opponents. So I think the “Energiser Bunny method” is the most descriptive one.
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Yeah, I’ve heard this described as the “scatter gun approach” as well, and it’s not just the the number of posts or new threads that are often entitled more to provoke a response than debate, it’s the endless repetition of the same points often without addressing the responses to those points, in an endless dishonest loop.
Ah, beat me to it…
…and again, kudos.
Again I absolutely agree, he was adept at spinning the thread away from claims he made that had been demonstrably debunked, without acknowledging it, and if all else failed just wait until someone inevitably pointed out how dishonest he was being, then the faux outrage was his trump card and fallback position.
I mean “facts can’t ever change”, “no amount of data can turn an assumption into a fact”, these are just laughable nonsense, or the notion that all claims, beliefs and ideas are subjective", as if this means they are equally subjective, but then moving away once someone points this out.
Another tactic is the “cherry picking” sherlock used, he’d make an expansive post filled with claims, you’d take the time to address the whole post, and he would cherry pick one part, and spin the debate away in that direction, when called he’d dedicate more time to denying this than it would have taken to honestly address the whole post.
If any kept at it, he’d just ignore them completely.
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This is why I pinned him down to answer two questions.
Has god ever interacted with the natural universe?
And, Did got have any direct influence upon scripture?
Because if he has in either or the two above, then it becomes testable.
If not, then there is no god reason to belive the claim and any arguments from ‘scripture’ are total bollocks.
His answers confirmed what I always find in theists, they believe because they want to believe.
Maybe a fear of death? Maybe a yearning for belonging? Maybe tradition?
Theres a plethora of reasons, but its all unsubstantiated and in essence is simply wishful thinking.
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So you didn’t buy into his claim that it was the beauty in a mathematical equations that led him away from atheism then? 
Wide is that path and easy the way that leads down into dissing the divine beauty of mathematical equations… 
He quoted all sorts of shit that led him down that path. The problem was, every time he quoted someone you, Old Man, Cali, or someone on the site would go look it up. He most certainly was not used to that! I don’t know where he argues his inane branch of apologetics but around here members look up shit and generally know the origins, strength, and applicability of an argument for any given proposition. They do that even when those propositions have nothing, whatsoever, to do with the existence of a god. The depth of discussion around this place can get insane at times. And so, I see the theists being held accountable for their choice of poor science, misquotes, quote mining data, and other absurdities. I imagine our friend Sherlock was able to bamboozle a lot of people with his energized, shotgun, gish-gallop, garbage. Around here it seemed he was just another brightly colored play thing for the lepidopterist’s kill jar, and all he did was get himself pinned to the wall. Now, like a museum piece, we just look back and think… 'Look, how interesting." LOL
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fucked him good and proper…meeting SMEs seemed to be a complete shock to his system.
I agree with your analysis and would add that he (through lack of meaningful socialisation) had become quite lonely and was looking for new fuel for his self aggrandisement.
Sad that he was disabused of his intellectual superiority. But how often do these chew toys come the same cropper in these forums? You are the Psych Cog…what makes them do it?
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If all your friends are in a group, it becomes difficult to leave. We may assume he belonged to some form of group and was perhaps highly thought of in that group. Who he is as a person is a product of his social identity and that is directly attached to the dogma he believes in. In a statement, “I am a Christian” and "I am a person who happens to think there was a guy named Jesus who was …) I remind myself of this when people ask, “Are you an Atheist?” Well, I fit the definition because I don’t believe in magic. (My standard reply.)
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A victim of an indoctrination process. Through repetitive teachings, lectures, group sessions, and forms of intense indoctrination, religious leaders instill ideologies and dogmas as absolute truth. Critical thinking and independent judgment are discouraged, while acceptance and obedience to doctrine are emphasized.
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Identity fixation (Object Relations): An internalized identity of the self and a dogmatic view of others. Typical among 'In Group" / “Out Group” beliefs. You are one of us or you are not. You are with me or against me. There is no middle ground. (We saw this in his unyielding definition of Atheist), Black and white thinking. A complete inability to see shades of gray. Any movement away from a dogmatic view of the world is evil, manipulative, sinful, and obviously wrong.
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Internal experiences confirmed as a result of external fixations. In short, “Believing is seeing.” Tell yourself something long enough and you are likely to start believing it. Self-created delusions based on selective perceptions, cherry-picking, and confirmation bias.
All challenges to his view are a personal assault on his identity. Hence, his complete overreaction to being called a liar, even when directly provided with quoted material demonstrating the obvious truth of the claim.
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In my case, I have the best part of 6,000 scientific papers stored on my hard drive (sorted by topic into subfolders galore), and as a corollary, can latch onto bullshit in a flash.
I recently had a lying sack of shit creationist try to pull a parallel stunt over on Faecesbook. He claimed that some ex recto fabrication he was trying to fob me off with was a “direct quote” from a landmark scientific paper.
Took me 3 seconds to find the paper, download the PDF version and another 3 seconds to search for his “quote”. Which, quelle surprise, turned out to be a total fabrication (no doubt lifted from a lying sack of shit creationist website).
Better still, that paper also provided me with no less than three pages of material directly destroying his infantile and mendacious assertions.
The individual in question tried to assert that gene regulatory networks made evolution “impossible” (a variation on the “irreducible complexity” shite these twonks routinely wheel out on castors and pretend is still alive).
Except that the authors of the paper themselves explicitly stated a mechanism for the emergence of evolutionary novelty within gene regulatory networks and presented examples of how said mechanism might work.
Indeed,the fact that the paper in question was almost single handedly responsible for launching the entire discipline of evo-devo was apparently completely unknown to the tosser in question.
Like so many of his creationist ilk, he was also completely unaware that I’d spent 14 years watching his ilk lie through their teeth and peddle repeatedly destroyed bullshit. It’s reached the point where I can smell the imminent arrival of creationist bullshit in my sleep.
Some of these twonks are so inept, that swatting them is like hunting dairy cows with an AH-64 Apache helicopter gunship. Many of them can’t even lie competently.
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Exactly Calli, Sherlock tried to pull the external historical evidence card. Subject matter I have been actively researching for some 38 years now.
Evidently he had never bothered to actually read any of the quotes or datelines but had merely copied from some fool website, or worse in some theist chat.
When I quoted the original language, timelines and impossibility of those being contemreary evidence for his claims…nothing. He limply said " its what I beleive". Fair enough but do not pretend on this forum. It will not turn out well for you.
Btw love your stuff Calli I have a whole file dedicated to your carefully filched erudition, as I have for Cog (when making sense) and even Tin Man…but that is for evidence…
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The hilarity of his focusing exclusively on a straw man semantic claim he assigned to you said it all. It was like watching a drowning desperate man thrash about for something to save him, but all the while trying to pretend he was fine.
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Yes yes, but if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?
Because the humans got it backwards. We are just waiting for you idiots to kill each other off, and then we are going to turn your cities into banana groves.
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11 minutes into the video below, the Hitch gives as good a rebuttal to the claims for an afterlife as I have seen.
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