Thursday, March 30, 2017

... on Jen Fulwiler's conversion : believable


Her story:

Atheist to Christian Testimony - Powerful!
A New Light Dawning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA3n2zZlLdw


0:33 Carl Sagan's Cosmos?!

Kind of Corny. A bit like Mork and Mindy. I was already Christian when watching it, and YEC, so I didn't believe all he was saying, but I enjoyed his presentation.

A criticism of her story (other longer version of it?):

Calling Bullshit on Atheists: Jennifer Fulwiler
Prototype Atheist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60DYKNiGVNg


1:28 "inventing gods to explain things"

There may have been some other reasons as well, but that's a very crucial and true statement, you say?

F i n e ... she gave her research as encompassing a reading of Greek philosophers which somehow invalidates that history of ideas (not sure how that would apply to pre-philosophy gods, if any, but it applies to Christian God having been invented for such a purpose after the Greek philosophers were available).

Now, where is your research for your statement? Perhaps I'll be hearing it next minute? Going on with video ..

1:49 No, I didn't hear the explanation of former.

I am not sure how you would consider Marco Rubio or Santorum who are my favourites as espousing social darwinism.

I also don't see how your support of abortion is not espousing social darwinism.

And as to Jen Fulwiler, I just checked she is less conservative than I (no surprise) and her favourite political blogger is "right of center". Not sure how you would stamp that as social darwinism either.

Nor Chesterton, whom I suppose to be common ground between me and her.

1:58 I think the examples you gave, you would have a supporter in Fulwiler and on some a supporter in me.

Catholics are not Protestants, you know.

4:58 There is a difference between:

  • the first or last religion you investigate
  • the first or last religion you actually go to and try to practise.


I don't agree with you she contradicted herself, rather, Christianity was at once:

  • the last religion she looked at intellectually, investigating and deconstructing claims of (or trying to)
    AND
  • the first religion she actually tried to practise and in that sense went to.


I don't see anything more remarcable in her own biographical claims you find so interesting than in Dawkins - except that with her, God was leading the way. Which of course is less remarcable to a Christian than to an Atheist.

Is her biographical claim, as given, so "God laden" to you that you feel a need to feel sceptic about it?

Or is it, perhaps, that she claimed Catholics have and Protestants haven't the fulness of truth (a very commonplace Catholic claim in its weakest form ....)? If so, is your Atheism a bit parochial in a Protestant way?

Or that she gave some insight into Atheist prejudice you find embarrassing the way she was putting it (putting all the Bibles in the section for fiction, considering Christianity last)?

6:43 "five of the six were - surprise! - Catholics"

No surprise to me. Ex Protestant convert to Catholicism.

Atheists at my school were asking me how the Bible could get through as true word of God by being passed over an unreliable and partly un-Christian and un-Biblical Catholic Church, as I saw things when I came to the school (not that I wasn't pro-Catholic anyway, Catholics were just a little less Biblical and even more so earlier in history).

Well, solution is, it is the Catholic Church which is Biblical, and therefore no surprise it can produce a correct transmission of the Bible.

And since then I learned some about Catholic intellectuals which makes the claim very much not surprising.

So much of what Atheism is arguing against is the Protestantism they came from, not Catholicism. So much of what Protestants of a certain type are arguing against is Catholicism, or even internal conservatism, not Atheism. Catholics have had intellectuals all way through dealing with both types of anti-Catholic claims.

"as if people belonging to the world's largest religion" (perhaps bypassed by Islam by now?) "were somehow miraculous"

I don't think the six people were all Christians she found at the atheist blog.

I think they were those arguing best - and five of six being Catholics in that category is overrepresentation, compared to 1 of 2 being Catholics in statistics.

[Later I hear the atheist blogger is now also a Catholic. Instead of deconstructing his claim to have been atheist in another video and link to it, he is not even disclosing the blogger's name. Perhaps Jennifer did?]

7:32 for about half a minute you have been going some half indignation over her concluding conservatism in doctrine is correct.

Well, if Catholic doctrine has even a chance to come from Jesus two thousand years ago, while Anglican / Episcopalian is known to come from Lambeth conference of 1930 which contradicted Lambeth conference of 1920, where WOULD a Christian reasonably find one more correct than other?

Unless of course by "reasonably" you mean exclusively non-adherence to Christian "irrational" dogma, which begs a lot of questions, but clearly shows you don't really care what Christians stand for, you just like to argue against them no matter what it is, anywhere they disagree with you.

7:53 She does in fact consider atheism more reasonably than Evangelical fundies.

She has not come to the point in her Catholic studies where she actually realises Catholc traditional doctrine really is as YEC as Kent Hovind and as Geocentric as Bowden (Malcolm?).

Which is where I disagree with her.

[About Pedophile Scandal and her stance on it, the following:]

8:18 About ten years ago, I checked stats about US pedophile scandal.

Catholic priests were not worse than gym teachers or boy scout leaders, as I recall, but the outcry was directed to only one of these. Priests got sued more often when nothing could be proven, and for smaller things.

A Father Svea FSSP was given one or two years in prison, for touching a butt, which if a gym teacher had done it, he would probably have kept his job.

The issue is, Catholic priests do and gym teachers do not set a higher standard of conduct by condemning contraceptives.

However, stats from a more recent scandal in Australia are a bit different.

Also, when hearing of those, I heard 800 and some priests had been defrocked. That means their superiors are doing something right - whatever one might think of wishy washy doctrine of Robert Barron and some.

8:30 Care to get into detail about what you think you know better about Church history than she?

[If he does, I'll see if debate gets large enough for a separate post or comes into update here. He had claimed that if Jennifer Fulwiler really became convinced because of history, she can't have known it.]

9:33 Again, you seem to be so upset someone used a life to conclude differently from you, you can't believe an autobiagraphic claim as given.

There is no miracle involved. If she had claimed to have seen someone rise from the dead ten minutes after death certificate and that one given in hospital and wounds rapidly healing, I could understand you would, as Atheist and therefore miracle negationist feel sceptical about that.

But it seems your atheism has some kind of over suspicious prejudice about how people's minds work about religion and how they don't work about religion. If you claim to have that solely from not believing in God, from a negative answer to one single question, I don't think your claim is believeable.

9:50 No, her claim does not fall flat, insofar as Scripture is a very complex kind of writing. You read fifteen pages of a modern author, you know what he is talking about. You read fifteen pages of Old Testament, outside historic narrative, or even in it if you are not prepared to believe the history in a way she would have considered too fundie, you usually have less secure grasp of what Biblical authors were about.

So, she read tons of books easy to understand and admits skipping the book she finds hard.

How is that unbelievable?

10:14 You have just admitted that your view of her conversion story is not just Catholicism as seen from the standpoint of an Atheism actually sympathetically asking what it contains and how it could attract an Atheist - if he or she ceased to be Atheist.

Your view of the Eucharist is a Puritan and Calvinist Protestant rejection of the Eucharist as what some called "blasphemous fable", it is not simply an Atheist rejection of "miracle, so not true".

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