When apologists get together

[_Buffalo]

Do you suppose they wax nostalgic about the good old days, when the big issues came from the evangelicals? You know, like,"Mormons believe Satan and Jesus are brothers" and "Mormons worship a different Jesus"?

They're still largely unequipped to deal with secular criticism. It must be so stressful to be an apologist in 2012.

[_Runtu]

Do you suppose they wax nostalgic about the good old days, when the big issues came from the evangelicals? You know, like,"Mormons believe Satan and Jesus are brothers" and "Mormons worship a different Jesus"?

They're still largely unequipped to deal with secular criticism. It must be so stressful to be an apologist in 2012.

I was thinking about that this morning, as I was typing up my response to BrianH. No offense to our Evangelical friends, but most of the EV anti-Mormon stuff is not very persuasive (see BrianH's insistence that his mythology is more self-evidently true than Mormon mythology is). Secular criticism is harder to deal with because it isn't just a choice between myths; it requires evidence for the falsifiable claims of Mormonism.

Looking back on my days as an apologist, I will say that I took religious critics less seriously than secular critics, because it was easy to lump them in with the poor arguments of their fellows. I think that holds true today, in that most apologists don't take religious critics seriously, which would explain why some people have been so keen to cast folks like Chris Smith as nothing but CARM-style EV anti-Mormons.

[_DrW]

I recall a thread over on the old MADBoard wherein the self-appointed apologists were stating that secularists provided the most difficult arguments with which apologists had to struggle.

Having been freshly banned at the time, I could not respond on this old thread. Had I been able to do so, the response would have made the point that when one is arguing from a position of unfounded belief, one unsupportable assertion carries pretty much the same weight as the next. (Sort of the point that Jersey Girl made to BrainH - who seems to have quite the field by the way.)

However, when one is trying to hold a position unsupported by evidence against an assault based exclusively on facts and evidence, successful defense is difficult to achieve. What usually happens in these cases is that the apologist retreats to what he or she believes is the cover of his or her testimony.

If the engagement is broken off at that point, the apologist can escape with little damage. If however, the apologist continues the engagement, he or she soon finds that what they believed to be cover was really only concealment. At this point, they often simply quit the field, as did DCP late last year.

In fact, in going over several of the threads in which DCP was taking heat when he left the board, it is pretty clear that was trying to prevail in multiple simultaneous engagements using nothing more than the blanks of bald assertions agains the live ammunition of facts and evidence.

(Sorry for going all military here, but these are the most relevant analogies available from my life experience - sort of like the "Crusades" in which Christians often engage.)