Bi-Weekly Report: Im Skeptical

Today, I decided to focus on a certain atheist that seems to take issue with the writings of several Christians on the internet. He has been banned from several sites (like Feser’s and Reppert’s, for example) for excessive trolling. You know him as Im Skeptical (also known as Skep, also known as IMS).

First up, I would like to focus on these posts:

The Skeptic Zone: Religionist Frothing at Mouth

Skeppo is responding to an article that Mikey (from Shadow to Light) did recently:

Shadow to Light: More on the Authoritarian Nature of New Atheism

Mikey is talking about a You Tube video that was made by a 17-year old atheist named Cosmic Skeptic, who had this to say:

I think the most important thing a parent can be in terms of religion and the upbringing of a child is secular. I don’t really care what you believe, as long as you let the children come to their own conclusions when they’re old enough.

Mikey brought up another “Gnu” (a term that atheists coined to call themselves, I think) named Travis (a previous commenter on his site) that believes the same thing. Then, he had this to say:

Look, I don’t share these authoritarian tendencies. For the record, I think atheist parents should be able to raise their children however they think best. If they want to teach their children atheism, send them to Camp Quest, and have them read Dawkins and Harris. It’s none of my business to tell them otherwise (even though the children will receive plenty of misinformation). I’m more of a live and let live type.

But this younger generation of Gnus, indoctrinated by Richard Dawkins’ ideology on these matters, have more of an authoritarian nature. They insist that religious people behave and talk as secular parents around their children. They insist that religious parents raise children by acting as if atheism was true.

In response, IMS basically claimed in his article that Secularism is religiously neutral, and that the USSR wasn’t secular (in the comments section of Mike’s entry, people took issue to that).

Next, there is this:

The Skeptic Zone: Children of a Lack of Objectivity

IMS took issue with this article:

Christian CADRE: Children of a Lack of God

Skep: Joe Hinman raises an issue that is worth considering. It is the question of how we can relate to something for which we have no familiarity and no experience. It may not be easy to understand something that you’ve never seen or never experienced. He (Joe Hinman asks this question):

Joe:How could someone born blind understand the difference in blue and green or yellow?

Skep: After calling atheists’ theorizing about religious belief “simplistic and totally wrong headed” and “shallow and senseless”, He sums it up this way:

Joe: Religion doesn’t exist because people tried to explain why it rains. It exists because people sense the numinous. They sense this aspect of something, the sublime, the spiritual, the nether regions but something that is special and beyond our understanding.

Skep: What Hinman wants us to think is that atheists have no understanding of Christians’ belief in God because they haven’t experienced it for themselves. Of course, this is the same old trope that we hear over and over again. And it’s just not true.

 Yesterday, Joe made a response to IMS on his site:

Metacrock's Blog: Children of a Lack of Reading Material

Here is Joe’s response to what Skep said above:

He assumes that there is nothing there to explain so therefore any human feeling is as good as another therefore he knows all about it. That is manifest nonsense. One of the major things that body of research I used in writing my book proves is that religious experience is not had by all humans and there is a huge difference in any old religious feeling and the kind we call “mystical”. That is the point of having an M scale in the first place because all experiences are not the same. Some atheists (small group) do have mystical experiences and the studies show that these atheists react to the experiences the same way that religious people do but they use different terminology, but they are the same experiences. I did write about this in my book. Some atheists do wind up converting to religious belief as did I.

Of course, in the comments section (of a site that he should be banned from), IMS still seems to dismiss it as pseudo-scientific hucksterism, but that’s what he does to anything that goes against his  hardcore materialist-atheist views.