[MD] The Level of Intellectual Quality

[david buchanan]

John said:
But seriously, I honestly feel that every time I get in a debate with you, you come to a certain point and then close down.  There's no resolution to scores of arguments I've proposed and there's no continuation to completion any dialogue we've had. It's discouraging to me, and even you must admit there must be something wrong.


dmb says:

I close down? Unless I missed it, you still haven't said a word about the case I repeated. After repeated it and I walked you through the argument, which you accussed me of never making in the first place, you got discouraged and stopped talking. I mean, isn't it just a fact that you closed down? 

Same thing happened with Steve and I. After repeatedly challenging his concept of truth, he just dropped it without answering the one and only question I'd been asking. Then he started a new thread in which I did not participate (because I figured he was sick of me) and yet the thread was all about what a dick I am. This is a patten that repeats over and over. When the debate gets too tough, the topic somehow always gets switched to what a bad person I am. While this reaction is understandable, it is not intellectually respectable. It's pretty childish, actually.  


John said:
I understand you are under time pressures and other pressures and it's sorta facile for me to judge, laying back in my broken down shack with all the time in the world to be annoying.  I admit, it's hardly fair.  But I don't spend hours thinking up stuff to say, or figuring out the correctness of my position, I just state my case as logically as I can in the moment, and invite you to do the same.  No need to overthink,...

dmb says:
Well, thanks for that. There is some homework due at 5:30 that I'm not doing right now, so I'll have to be brief here. For whatever it's worth, I just state my case too. It just so happens that school work has me saturated with this stuff so there are usually relevant quotes at my elbow.

John said to dmb:
The idea of religious play within a context of a Quality metaphysics, seems so offensive to you that you can't be objective.  It seems you take your own religious views of atheism so fundamentally, that you don't allow any other game. That's projection on my part.  How accurate, you'd have to tell me.  But the primary essense of my assertion, that the MoQ is a unification of science AND religion, and that both are EQUALLY patterns of value, then why can't a theist also be an MoQist? Explain this rationally to me please.



dmb says:

The MOQ does claim to unify art, science and religion by making DQ the basis of them all, but there is also the problem of comparing social level traditions (like institutional theism) with intellectual level patterns like science. That deserves a fuller explanation but that will have to wait. You could also revisit the case I walked you through, because that does explain something about this issue.

But let me say that your impression is not at all accurate. The idea that I won't allow any other game but atheism is defied by the way I spent MOST of my time. The Master's thesis I'm working on is all about the pragmatic mysticism of Pirsig and James and this is the kind of research project that makes it completely impossible to avoid the arguments of theists. Right now I'm working on the bibliography and so there are about 50 sources at my side that discuss nothing but pragmatism as it relates to religious studies. As I see it, theism and atheism are both wrong. This area has interested me for a long time and I've spent a lot of time and energy thinking about it. I don't mention this stuff to make a case that being back in school makes me special or smarter than anybody else, but just to point out that my actual, non-virtual life bears no resemblance to the accusations of knee-jerkism or rigidity or closed-mindedness. It's just not possible to be that way and live the life that I'm living. They would kick me out or flunk me out, and rightly so. 


  		 	   		  
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