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madmatt112  ·  2213 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Evangelicals—Still!—Support Trump

It's great that you have this image of me as a stereotypical Church-Warrior who's going to report back to my herd about my battles with the heathens, but it's inaccurate. Let's try and give other people some credit that they're deeper than what we can see. Religion as I've experienced it is people challenging each other on what they believe so that we can all discover what the truth is, rather than the herd-mentality echo-chamber that you seem to envision.

"You're not engaging us. You're not...you're playing "debate a heathen MadLibs" and we all know it. We can all smell it." This isn't an argument, it's a mixture of an ad hominem and strawman attacks. The strength of any of my claims has nothing to do with why I would be driven to make them, if we're having a rational discussion.

I also don't think of you as a heathen, I barely know anything about you and your experiences in life - I'm not out here trying to win Jehovah's Witness Points To Avoid The Rapture And Make It To Heaven. I'm trying to discover the truth.

"If you don't think you're better than anyone, why wrap yourself in concepts such as "moral supremacy?"" Because I think that the objective morals I live by are better than any other - that is significantly different than saying I am better than other people. You aren't able to see a difference between the two because your arguments rest on the presupposition that subjective interpretation is the firmament of reality for any person.

You've betrayed your worldview with the words "There are no truths. There are no maxims". If you do actually believe that about existence, then we can go no further in this discussion. You are now trying to pull me into your framework of subjective relativism, when a basic education/reading in logic and philosophical reasoning would show you the internal incoherence of the claim "there are no truths", and all the rationales that follow it. Your paragraph stating that the individual's interpretation is the ultimate definition of a text also reinforces your buy-in to this philosophy.

I lay claim to an objective reality and objective truths that exist outside a person's subjective experience of them. If we are unable to reconcile these two viewpoints, then we won't find common ground about this topic.