dwise1 writes:
They couldn't care less about convincing any of us. All they really care about is keeping themselves convinced of their false nonsense, of their own stupid lies.
That's what I have found as well. Christian apologetics was never about convincing the nonbelievers. It's about making the believers feel better about their own beliefs.
From the beginning (mid-1980's) of discussing creationism, I have used the approach of taking their claims at face value and discussing their own claims with them. That never worked since their response immediately turned to angry invective (which escalated as I persisted with my direct questions about their claim). You see, I made the mistake that they took their own claims seriously and that they understood them; over time I came to realize that they were trying to cover up for the fact that they didn't understand their own claims -- had no clue -- and used anger to cover that up and to drive me away (I survived 28 years of an abusive marriage, so it takes a helluva a lot of stupid crap to scare me away).
Two decades ago on another forum, a creationist accidentally revealed their secret. After demolishing his stupid sea-salt claim, I asked him why creationists use such unconvincing claims, to which he said:
"You only find them unconvincing because you are not yet convinced." With that light coming on in my head, I immediately used it to compare how that difference in motivation makes such an enormous difference between scientists (seeking to discover new facts, so honesty and testing is of utmost importance) and creationists (just want something that sounds convincing regardless of how false it is, so no place for honesty or testing), which I started to convert to a web page,
Fundamental Differences Between Scientists and Creationists (still under construction, so my mentions of it here are the only links to it ... though it has found its way into Google's database if you search on that title).
This is also why all creationist and fundie arguments are so stupid and, of course, unconvincing. If you ever doubt that, not only need you do little more than look at what so many of them have posted here and in other forums, but watch some atheist call-in videos or critique videos of creationist videos. Or watch some creationist or fundie videos -- we ain't making up none of their stupid shit.
And the really tragic part is that they think that their arguments are so phenomenally good and "convincing", but only because
they are themselves already convinced and they won't even consider examining and evaluating their own arguments. They are too convinced to realize how utterly stupid they sound. And then they have the unmitigated gall to get mad at
us for not becoming convinced, blaming it on our own "hatred of God" (et alia nonsensical accusations) instead of realizing that we cannot be convinced by unconvincing nonsense that is also flagrantly false.
This is what we see with ChemEngineer as well.
We've already speculated that "he" is nothing more than an AI, but an AI that is too stupid to do anything more than lift quotes and dump them in our laps like steaming plops of fresh manure. I mean, it cannot even preserve any degree of formatting, that's how stupid it is.
But such incompetent AIs are just plain sad when they are hosted in meatsacks. ChemEngineer just might have been a person previously, before his brains were scooped out and replaced with that buggy AI.
There's an expression in German for asking someone if they're stupid: "Hast du einen Vogel?" (Do you have a bird?). The common interpretation is the idea that there must be a bird living inside your head and its constant squawking keeps you from being able to think. Another interpretation is that your cranium is hollow, providing a cage for a bird, often accompanied by a poetic description of how happy that bird is flying around in that vast emptiness inside your head.
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