RayAgostini wrote:Corrected:
Cicero wrote:
And you Darth are the best anti-Mormon on this board. You seriously almost had me ROFL with this gem from earlier today:
He may have
you fooled, but he has more dogma lodged in his brain than I ever saw in any Mormon Sunday School. It's "exmos" like Darth (he may still be on the Church rolls, mind you), and Steve Benson, and all the bigots who just changed their Mormon zealotry to atheist zealotry who I'm most wary of.
Note how Darth will say, in thread after thread, how foolish, stupid and dumb Mormonism is, and when you call him an anti-Mormon - he'll strenuously object.
Cog. Diss?
For those who are new to the board, allow me to put some of Ray's lunacy in context.
Ray does not appear to know what the word "dogma" means. He has no idea what I believe. Yet he is stating that non-belief in the LDS Church is itself a substantive belief. This is much like asserting that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Ray also does not appear to know what the word "bigot" means. I do not arbitrarily hate the LDS Church. I explain why that organization is disingenuous, why it consistently fails to hold itself to its own touted standards, and why its truth claims cannot be sustained. I hate Mormons in the same sense that people who recognize Charles Ponzi as a con artist hate Italians.
Nor does Ray seems to understand what cognitive dissonance is. Disputing the deliberately ambiguous term "anti-Mormon" (such that disputing the truth claims of the LDS Chruch is equivalent to something like anti-Semitism) is not holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time.
Additionally, Ray has an unfortunate habit of inventing facts to assert against those with whom he disagrees (which apparently is everyone on this board). I am not an atheist, and I have repeatedly said so in threads in which Ray has participated. Yet he is wary of my supposed atheist zealotry.
When I told my exit story, I made it clear that I am not an atheist. Ray participated in the thread in which I did so:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=13596&hilit=winnerIn that thread, Ray, who is currently on this rampage about anti-Mormon bigotry or whatever, said this (fourth post from the top):
Ray A wrote: I find most of Scott's reasoning bizzare, to say the least. It's like they live in this Gilligan's Island cocoon, sheltered from the rest of the real world in a sort of "Jack and the Beanstalk" fantasy. 1 million light years away from reality. If Darth is in fact active, then his "anti-Mormon" criticisms hold more credibility for me than a whole choir of apologists singing "Let us all press on."
Mormon apologist are just so stoopid, with an absolute minimal appeal to intelligence, that I rank them with a lower IQ than Mickey Mouse. (Okay, I may be exaggerating).
That certainly seems different than the raving street preacher gibberish he is spouting now. So what happened? Well, in February 2011, Ray evidently decided that not all Mormon apologetics are "just so stoopid, with an absolute minimal intelligence." What precipitated that change in attitude, I do not know, but Ray seems to be ambivalent (not to say bipolar) in his feelings toward Mormonism. Anyway, Ray started a thread in which he issued his own version of Hugh Nibley's Book of Mormon challenge:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16995Like Nibley, Ray's challenge included conditions that the Book of Mormon does not have (no inconsistencies in the narrative, for example). Ray defied anyone to write a 3,000-word story comparable to the first three chapters of the Book of Mormon in six months. I wrote such a story in approximately two hours (check the time stamps on the posts). Ray then went ballistic, because nobody was actually supposed to take him up on his challenge.
Eventually, the thread metastasized into discussing Ray's cherished beliefs about space aliens. Ray at one point in his life saw something in the sky and does not know what it was. Ray believes that this something was an alien space craft. As I explained in that thread, Ray is arriving at that conclusion based on information that he could not possibly have known from what he says he observed.
Confronted with the bigotry and dogmatic skepticism of basic trigonometry (Ray could not possibly have known his distance from the thing, nor its altitude) and the limitations of human perception (forgetting that Ray does not know if what he thinks he saw was even a solid object, he could not possibly have observed anything, since his wildly speculative estimate of its velocity would mean it was moving at about 3,667 feet per second) , Ray started another thread about the wonderful truth about the space aliens that are visiting our planet:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=17043&hilit=jihad In Ray's UFO thread, I made the bigoted, dogmatic, atheist, [insert snarl word here] faux pas of thinking critically about his proffered evidence of space aliens among us, instead of accepting said evidence with pious gullibility. I also observed that UFO apologetics are effectively indistinguishable from Mormon apologetics. It was at or near this time that Ray went to DEFCON 1. He left the board, but came back a few months later (that's why he now posts as RayAgostini instead of Ray A---he deleted his previous membership). And now he is on a perpetual jihad about nothing and demanding "balance" in viewpoints about Mormonism, such that his own ambivalence about Mormonism should be imposed on everyone, and an air of intellectual uncertainty should prevail in order to allow room for cherished beliefs based on specious evidence. This is the same kind of balance that intelligent design proponents want when they claim schools should "teach the controversy," or that would result if universities offered degrees in both chemistry and alchemy.
So perhaps with this background, Ray's lunacy---I won't go so far as to say "makes sense"---has some context.