Sufficient pause

I like Stephen Law; he's a bright guy and speaks directly and plainly. But I think he gives too much credit to theistard William Hawthorne, treating Hawthorne's pathetic excuse for argument with something less than outright derision and contempt. Hawthorne argues that

if many extremely brilliant people have thought about p carefully, subjected p to rigorous logical analysis, and have come to believe that p, this should give us reason to refrain from lazily dismissing p as childish or delusional. A more thorough investigation would be called for.

Well duh. This argument is positively retarded in its triviality. We shouldn't even lazily dismiss the Flying Spaghetti Monster without some sort of investigation.

Implicit in Hawthorne's ridiculous excuse for an argument is that this sort of lazy, superficial dismissal is prevalent enough to notice and actually argue in philosophical terminology. This assumption is so false-to-fact that one must suspect Hawthorne of either traumatic brain injury our outright dishonesty.

It's always meta-this and meta-that with these retards "brilliant people". "We can't be certain!" (No, but we can be extremely confident.) "Theism isn't logically impossible!" (Just ridiculously inconsistent with the actual facts.) "There are other ways of knowing!" (Perhaps, but making shit up and calling it true does not rise to the level of an epistemology.) But when they get down to making an actual case, these supposed "rigorous logical analys[es]*" turn out to be at best a sham and at worst a lie, nothing but more or less clever attempts to clothe egregious bullshit and wildly implausible assumptions in the most obfuscatory philosophical terminology.

*And notice how they always talk about other people's "rigorous logical analys[es]" but never actually present an analysis? Somehow these analyses are always another hand-wave away.

It irritates me no end to give retards like Hawthorne even the standing to appear in the arena of reasoned debate. Without exception, they lack the competence and/or the intellectual good faith to actually engage in reasoned analysis. Thousands of years of engaging with the lies, bullshit, stupidity and outright evil of theism is sufficient pause to justify treating this form of stupidity and mendacity with nothing but mockery and moral condemnation.