You quoted his words, and said he was missing the point terribly, then when corrected, walked it back to “well, I’m not addressing the words he just said, which I’ve quoted, but some position I infer he takes from other words he’s said before which I’m not quoting.”
And as a tangent, your characterization of religion is pretty misleading. You’re giving a secular anthropologist’s definition of religion, stripping out all the woo-woo, then complaining that someone wanted to test it (as what, some homogeneous entity?) scientifically.
They usually passed down Received Knowledge, often from the Creator of the Universe, about the beginnings of the universe and of human beings. Questioning this Knowledge was usually not allowed, so I’ll agree that religions don’t try to explain the world “in a rigorous and scientific way.” The folk-lorish tales that came from God’s mouth failed miserably in light of facts, and religions had to de-emphasize those cosmogony and human-beginnings claims or “reinterpret” them in such vague ways as to be useless.
I don’t agree at all that I was mischaracterizing clovis. Since he’s not interested in clarifying what he really thinks there’s no point talking more about it.
Although I’d be happy to talk more about my overall point if you want.
I explained very carefully how you mischaracterized him, and he agreed with my assessment.
You quoted his comments about God/atheism, and conflated them with religion, and when called out on it said you weren’t referring to the very words you quoted.
Meh, if your overall point is that you can concoct a secular-enough definition of religion which doesn’t overlap with scientific inquiry, I’ll grant you that.
Fortunately, multi-quoting is so easy even I can do it.
That’s his post and the one he responded to. Where does he attack religion? And for extra credit, where does he attack the silly saccharine definition of religion you’re using?
Same thing. The top students in CCD got to be altar boys. For whatever reason, I was always at the top but was never an altar boy. Maybe the priests saw something special that they liked about my classmates though.
I’m certainly not shy to attack religion but he Is absolutely right. I wasn’t in that post. I was attacking the silly epistemological claim that god holds some special characteristic which exempts it from all others in terms of how we know things.
It’s implicit in the mindset that God is something that one ought to have to scientifically prove. And of course if he didn’t attack religion in that short post, he has many many times before and posts and posters don’t exist in a vacuum. But whether he was attacking religion or not is obviously tangential to my point: science is not a substitute for religion. OK great the scientific method doesn’t prove god exists. Now how do you go about fulfilling the religious impulse that seems to be innate in folks?
Look man if you want to talk more about this actual subject fine. But I’ve explained what I meant and if you think I ascribed more than what Clovis 8 meant in his post I mean who cares? Clovis 8 isn’t interested in clarifying what he said why do you care so much? It’s odd!
I mean it’s well known he’s a fervent Sam Harris style anti-religion zealot. So when he’s saying that he knows God doesn’t exist because of science it’s obvious what his angle is. That’s why he doesn’t actually want to discuss it, because that is of course what he thinks.