So basically, he’s continuing to peddle the mendacious nonsense, that our taking account of observational data as the basis for our inferences purportedly makes us “biased”, but his treating a merely asserted cartoon magic man as real, for reasons he claims to possess but never actually reveals (probably because they’ll end up boiling down to the usual farce that is “my mythology says so”) is purportedly “reasonable”. This time laced with a heavy leavening of duplicitous ex recto apologetic fabrications aimed at trying to discredit science and the peer review process, because neither will roll over and accept mythological bollocks.
This display of banal dishonesty on his part isn’t even point and laugh material any more, it’s just fucking sad.
We have vast mountains of evidence, informing those who treat the relevant matters honestly, that virtually every part of the world we see around us is the product of testable natural processes, that are themselves the subject of precise, quantitative scientific theories enjoying an unprecedented level of hard experimental backing. Yet he, and a lot of others like him, want to shoe horn into the picture, an imaginary cartoon magic man that has only ever been asserted to exist, and within the pages of a Bronze Age mythology littered with absurdities at that, with absolutely zero genuine justification.
Of course, we know the real reasons for this desire to shove a cartoon magic man down our throats. Some are just too stupid to understand basic science, and regard anything more advanced than the wheel as magic. Others want the world to be run by a cartoon magic man, but only if that cartoon magic man shares their prejudices, and their dark desires to see people they don’t like suffer hideous fates. Others are simply reprobates who want to jump on the political control bandwagon involved for personal gain, and don’t actually care about the ideology being pressed into service for this end.
Finally, you have the hard core of “true believers”, who have made the ideology in question their entire identity, because they’ve been swayed by the music of the spheres of the relevant verbal diarrhoea, emanating either from the televisions inside their own heads, or the smoothly emotive yet ultimately vacuous oratory of some charismatic leader figure.
This final group are the truly dangerous ones - the ones who think any action is “justified” if they think their god wants said action to be performed, no matter how brutal, how malign, or even, from the perspective of their own ideology, how evil that action is. “Magic Man says so” has been an easy justification for nameless horrors, and the bigots and reprobates will happily encourage the true believers down the requisite paths because it serves their ends - until, of course, the tide turns and they ae on the receiving end, but then it’s too late.
Trouble is, aspects of the bigot and reprobate demongraphics end up corrupting the “true believers” as well, though in an insidious manner that they don’t notice at first, the phenomenon that can best be described as “blinded by piety”. That allowing oneself to be wedded in such a manner to an ideology, no matter how “benevolent” said ideology is presented to be, invariably results in selling one’s humanity for short change, is an observational fact with plenty of examples to choose for reference - indeed, pretty much every ideologue who became a dictator provides the relevant object lessons.
And once again, the corroding and corrupting factor, can be summarised as the business of treating unsupported assertions uncritically as fact. Which, once begun, leads inxorably to all manner of duplicity, in a desperate attempt to recoup the investment squandered in the relevant discoursive pyramid scheme.
I, of course, await the usual specious accusations of “bias” for taking account of the relevant observational data …