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Sunday, July 28, 2013

Euler on 'Freethinkers'

Vox Day: quotes Leonhard Euler and adds comments --
As Aristotle did before him, in his Defense of the Divine Revelation against the Objections of the Freethinkers the brilliant mathematician Leonhard Euler observed that there are people who are simply incapable of being reached by reason:
"The freethinkers have yet to produce any objections that have not long been refuted most thoroughly. But since they are not motivated by the love of truth, and since they have an entirely different point of view, we should not be surprised that the best refutations count for nothing and that the weakest and most ridiculous reasoning, which has so often been shown to be baseless, is continuously repeated. If these people maintained the slightest rigor, the slightest taste for the truth, it would be quite easy to steer them away from their errors; but their tendency towards stubbornness makes this completely impossible."
It makes no difference if one calls them rabbits, r-selected, freethinkers, scientists, credentialists, or "people whom one cannot instruct". What they are, in their core, are the lovers of lies, the haters of truth, and they can never be convinced by any knowledge or logical argument because they will literally be damned before they will question, let alone abandon, the dogma instilled in them by their warren.

It is no surprise that the fact that Man's greatest geniuses anticipated them and described them with utter contempt doesn't even give them a moment's pause.
And, by the by, this same applies to most of my "critics" (such as one sees at Victor Reppert's blog (*) ... or a Panda's Thumb, when I still cared enough about "evolution" to criticize evolutionism) -- they are "lovers of lies [and] haters of truth" and they'll be damned if they are ever going to admit that I have reasoned soundly and said the truth.


==============
(*) Consider this, just from today --

Karl Grant:
llion, Have I ever criticized you for rudeness? I don't think so.

Ilíon:
Here ... if you wish, you can wade through the Google results to see whether you have "ever criticized [me] for rudeness" (*). I have more interesting ways to spend my time.

But recall: you spread false tales about me and on the basis of your false assertion about me, call me a hypocrite.

(*) My point has not been that some people have "criticized [me] for rudeness" (**), it is that some people lie about me (and about themselves) and the[n] criticize, in the sense of 'condemn', me on the basis of those lies.

(**) Here is someone merely criticizing me for "rudeness". His criticism is unfounded, it appears to be based on two misrepresentations:
1) that he didn't quite grasp in context what I'd written that he was immediately criticizing;
2) that he had background false knowledge about my "rudeness" based on the lies you people tell about me.

Here is my response to him ... quite opposite what someone who believed your (plural) lies about me would expect, and in fact, quite opposite how you liars would generally respond.

Karl Grant:
Well, somebody has a persecution complex. And no, I did not spread lies about you since you did advocate and defend the of destroying Mecca, a city full of innocent people in a country that is our ally, while at the same time labeling Bob an apologist for mass murder.
I've explained numerous times how it is that 'Bob' -- who calls me demonic *simply* for opposing the leftist slavery he desires to impose on you and me ... and to call that slavery 'Christianity' -- is, in fact, an apologist for mass-murder.

Also, isn't it just like this sort to accuse one of having a "persecution complex" when one objects to the lies they spread about one?

Ilíon:
liars almost always double-down: "Well, somebody has a persecution complex. And no, I did not spread lies about you since you did advocate and defend the of destroying Mecca, a city full of innocent people in a country that is our ally ..."

To quote a great thinker [Ilíon: that is, I'm quoting Karl Grant himself from just a few posts prior], one for the ages, "How stupid can you get?"

I did nothing of the sort, and Karl Grant is a liar.

Even in isolation, no honest person can take the post to which he links as me advocating or defending the nuclear destruction of Mecca.

Moreover, just six posts later in that thread, I said this "Who needs to nuke Mecca to destroy the Kaaba? A barrage of cruise missiles [w]ould do the trick."

And I further said this: "Nevertheless, dest[ro]ying the Kaaba would lead to tens of millions of deaths world-wide, as Moslems begin to slaughter one another."

Any sane, rational, honest person can see that Karl Grant is a liar.

Any sane, rational, honest person can see that while I believe that destroying the Kaaba would be the quickest way to destroy Islam as an existential threat to the West (and indeed to all cultures ... and to all human beings ... in the world), I also recognize and caution that destroying the Kaaba would lead to convulsions in the House of Submission and to the deaths of untold millions of human beings.

======
And, for the record, while Saudi Arabia may have signed treaties with the United States, they are never our allies; their treaties with us are simply taqiyya and hudna in action. And, by their own Moslem "reasoning"
[I should have written 'Islamic', rather than 'Moslem'], no denizen of Mecca is innocent; for in rejecting Christianity (and in persecuting Christians) they actively wage war against God, and therefore Christians have the moral obligation to kill them whenever and however possible.

How fortunate for Moslems that Christianity is not Islam.

Karl Grant:
I rest my case.
In other words, it doesn't *matter* to him in the least that I've shown him not only to have been wrong in what he had asserted about me (a couple of years ago), but actively lying in asserting it yet again. For, after all, he does not love the truth.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Ilíon said...

Possibly. And you surely know that I don't intend to stroke anyone's ego.

At the same time, and notwithstanding my general policy of not justifying myself to any man (*), sometimes it is gratifying to set the record straight, to show that certain of one’s “critics” are liars … especially when it can be done so easily, and with their own words.


(*) For I know from long experience that it's either unnecessary or impossible. For, if a person is open-minded -- just-minded -- he can see for himself that one is, for example, being slandered. On the other hand, if a person is not open-minded -- is not just-minded -- nothing at all that one can say will compel him to see the truth.

Drew said...

You oughta see all the freethinkers I deal with in my line of work.

Ilíon said...

You mean lawyers as lawyers?

Drew said...

Mainly government lawyers, and judges

Ilíon said...

Government lawyers and judges are ... lawyers. ;)

I was on a jury once. I wanted to shoot both the prosecutor (and his witness) and the defence lawyer, but the prosecutor mostly.

And don't get me started on the time the children's "welfare" busybodies hauled up my sister for "child abuse"!!! (my niece had intentionally bruised her own face, as was obvious to anyone *wanting* to see the truth, so as to get her own mother into trouble ... because she wasn't getting her way all the time at home). Fortunately, the people on the jury were sensible. They returned a "not guilty" verdict in just a few minutes. One of them told me that *they* wanted to soundly spank my niece.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ilíon said...

I didn't misunderstand what you meant.

And by "stroke anyone's ego" I didn't mean anything like brown-nosing or boot-licking, but rather trimming on the truth so as to protect someone's fragile self-esteem (*).

Hell! most human beings, at least in the present culture, have way too much self-esteem; it's self-respect they lack ... and frequently don't want, so they use self-esteem as a stand-in.