Why I think Thomas Riskas Is A Joke

[_Gadianton]

God is punishing you for being so hard on Krauss. You couldn't find any good in a fellow atheist who wrote a book without the requisite philosophy background and then went off to respond vocally to his critics without giving an inch. So God thought, OK, the next time I'll send him a fellow atheist who wrote a book without the requisite philosophy background and is ready to lock himself in the panic room if anyone dares criticize him, and request increased security so that future critics will be proactively silenced.

[_Josh Seconal]

What part/parts of Thomas Riskas's book is/are untrue?

Ah ye olde argument from ignorance.

Where's Darth J when you need him? I guess it is kind of fun committing the fallacy fallacy.

Tell me Dr. Shares, what is untrue about Dune?

[_Gadianton]

What part/parts of Thomas Riskas's book is/are untrue?

Shades,

I don't think Stak is making a claim about the truth or untruth of Riska's book.

From what I can tell, Stak objects to Riskas staking out a foundational epistemology based on an uncritically cited source. It is clear that Riskas doesn't want to discuss criticisms of his underlying, fundamental assumptions.

That's true, and what Stak is doing is completely valid, however, I don't think he's going to make much headway with people who aren't interested in epistemology or semantics without a practical demonstration. I think Stak needs to find an example of Riskas rendering something "meaningless" and explain why his assumptions matter, and why they are problematic. Perhaps he could show that based on the same kind of reasoning, an import atheist concept is rendered meaningles, or that under a different, better accepted theory of semantics, the something isn't meaningless at all.

[_Fence Sitter]

*Takes a deep breath & jumps in to the deep end without his floaties.*

I like the book.

Here's why.

I think of his book as a action movie. Now critics always hate action movie, because the movie treats the viewer as if he is stupid, they always have the same plot and the good guy always wins. This is very boring to someone who has seen a million movies and has discerning tastes, can recognize plot flaws and see how a director is manipulating his audience. But to the average guy (the stupid one), who can be wowed with special effects, big muscles and naked women, the movie is awesome!!!!

In short, someone like me, who is not as able to see those flaws or doesn't even care about them, may find something of interest and value in this book. While I think Riskas is painful to read at times (Okay almost all the time), he also asks questions that I have always asked. "What does eternal mean, how is God infinite, what the hell does families are forever mean, does Satan make sense as a real person, how does the Plan of Salvation depend on these other concepts, and so on and so on. Frankly I don't care how flawed he is, and I don't care much about the deep psychological motivations he thinks drives religions. Nor do I care about his conclusions about religion in general. What he does that I really like, is lay out arguments about statement that Mormons make all the time, and then he asks what the hell does this really mean? That part hits home with me because most of my life I have been puzzled when Mormons talk God talk to me. It just never made sense. (I was sitting in tithing settlement with my family when I was about 14ish. The bishop was telling me how lucky I was to have been chosen to be sent to such a wonderful family. I replied "I believe I argued and lost".)

I am not a deep thinker. I have not had the intellectual training many here have and I realize all this, but this guy makes me think and consider things at a depth I have not done before. So for that , if nothing else, I am really enjoying the book.

I appreciate what Stak and others have said about him and it has helped me be more critical of what I am reading, but

I still like the book.

FS

Oh and what Gad said above.

[_Tarski]

Tell me Dr. Shares, what is untrue about Dune?

The sandworms

[Anonymous]

I don't know how much I want to say about this book. I'll throw a few things out.

I found it an astonishingly and even bafflingly self serious work which approached it's topics with an unnecessarily top-heavy level of abstraction. Partly I think this was due to not really having a sense of who its reader was: if it were a scholarly work, then the repetitious conceptual background would be unnecessary, or unfamiliar concepts could be elucidated in a few short footnotes. If it were pitched at laymen, everyday members with religious doubts, then summaries with a good bibliography would help open up the discussion. Instead he is writing with the hubris of a bad graduate student: the book is sort of a deformed dissertation. And it constantly talks down to its reader who he imagines can never have encountered, well, pretty much ANY idea before. Nearly every citation to an author is prefaced with the adjective "noted," "notable," "renowned," and so forth. I think it seeks to exactly replicate what the author himself sees as his own journey through these ideas--this is just one level of what strikes me as a profoundly narcissistic text.

I'm a functioning intellectual, I've been working with these or similar ideas my entire life as a scholar and professor. I don't need to be told over and over again that unless I carefully follow the amazingly difficult ideas with exceptional scrutiny, then I can not be trusted to move on to later chapters. (I'm not averse to dense text. Critical theory, continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory both Freud and beyond are not only what I've read, but also what I've managed to teach to undergraduates for the last 30 years.) It was bad enough to encounter this kind of thing throughout Deconstructing Mormonism, but when I saw Riskas issue this proviso on RfM, that he would only consider further discussion:

...after I am satisfied that (1) you have carefully read the entire book, inclusive of footnotes...

One needs to prove that they've read all the footnotes? One needs to prove themselves 'worthy' by some test? Why did that sound familiar? Oh yeah! John Gee's infamous attempt to forestall discussion of the Book Abraham by demanding that everyone first prove to him their competency in Egyptology. And sadly, this was not the only place were I found myself reading what looked like a strange mirror-image of Mormon apologetics.

I was also astonished at the way the ideas of other writers were used. Instead of summaries and quotations followed by the author's own conclusions (perhaps pushing things further), enormous swaths of text are quoted with Riskas's own remarks inserted into other people's works as bracketed interpolations. I've never seen this before, its like some kind of balls-out post -postmodern quasi plaigiarism. (And weirdly enough, this is actually the most deconstructive--in its original sense--move in the text, thought I don't think Riskas would think of it that way.) Sometimes the interpolations are of the level of importance of just inserting [Mormon] after someone else's critique of some aspect of Christianity---as though the reader couldn't make that leap herself---and sometimes it's to insert material that I have no idea how or why it would be necessary---and sometimes it changes the original quotation quite extensively. An example from page xxxvii, footnote 12:

"As"--combining Welles words and mine--"a disparaging term for members of [either] an outgroup [or those who are known and assumed to 'know better' than what they believe or claim to be true] the word 'Stupidity' [, like 'idiocy,' 'stupid,' or 'idiot'] often indicates little more than a biased [and/or exasperated] evaluation of [beliefs and] behavior [, and is often used either as a put-down for personally or politically expedient purposes, or as a tacit or intentional ad hominem strategy used to express annoyance, disapproval and frustration to shake others to self critical self-evaluation].

First, let's look at Welles's statement minus the Riskas interporations:

"As a disparaging term for members of an outgroup the word 'Stupidity' often indicates little more than a biased evaluation of behavior.

I don't know why Welles's use of the term 'stupidity' needs to be augmented with 'idiocy,' 'stupid,' or 'idiot'---what more does this add to the point that such a personalized term usually denotes a bias against the outgroup its behavior? That strikes me as a pretty empty emendation. But check out the other additions: with Riskas brackets such phrases do not just denote bias but "exasperation," something perhaps more understandable and legitimate than mere bias? And in fact, why it turns out that maybe "stupid" and "idiot" are are perfectly legitimate terms if they are part of attempt to "enlighten" others---who are no longer just the "outgroup" of Welles's original statement, but now are people who should know better and need to be shaken into "critical self-evaluation" by the one who apparently REALLY knows better.

To be fair, a few pages later Riskas says that:

Additionally, in relations to the published words of others, the reader will encounter the not infrequent use of bracketed interpolations where required to extend the relevance of quoted material to the Mormon faith.

Well, competent use of quotations usually make these inferences obvious. Moreover, much more is going on here in these insertions that just that. Check out how seamlessly Riskas joins the roster of notables here:

"This minimalist, disquotational, or deflationary conception of truth is needed, according to Nielsen, to “escape being clouded by metaphysics,” which I, as Nielson and others including “Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Burton Dreben, the logical positivists, Richard Rorty and, in effect, W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson [regard and] reject as nonsense or as Austin said, ‘cackle.’”

There is more to say about the relation between form and content throughout the book. But it is toward the end, in the turn to the "pycho-social" that things get more disturbing. The idea that religious belief is not rational becomes the grounds for regarding it as a species of mental illness where "treatment is always indicated." From Wittgenstein we descend to works like Jack Worthy's, The Mormon Cult: A Former Missionary Reveals the Secrets of Mormon Mind Control. And finally, material like this:

My two sons served a two-year mission for the Church and seem to follow the program, more or less. Only my youngest daughter, Tessa remains uninterested and turned-off by the whole affair, but I fear even she remains vulnerable to return to the fold if she does not do the hard work necessary to metaphorically inoculate herself from the virulent outbreak of the Mormon virus in her brain.

Although Riskas begins his book with critcism of Robert Millet's a priori assumptions of sin and laziness motivating the doubting apostate, soon Riskas is working with his own formulas where believers are weak, lazy and fearful and "free thinkers" are strong, ego-integrated and mature. That is one binary that never quite gets deconstructed in this book.

[_suniluni2]

At some point you should just publish something, do a blog post or something like that, and then maybe link to it. An OP of that length on a discussion board is just ridiculous.

[_Nightlion]

I could not even get on a waiting list at Barns and Nobles. Are there any real nuggets that pan out or just the black sand of doubt baiting? Satan simply said....believe it not....and the whole world loved him more than God. Nothing but doubt for doubt's sake? That's critical thinking huh?

[_MrStakhanovite]

I think Stak needs to find an example of Riskas rendering something "meaningless" and explain why his assumptions matter, and why they are problematic. Perhaps he could show that based on the same kind of reasoning, an import atheist concept is rendered meaningles, or that under a different, better accepted theory of semantics, the something isn't meaningless at all.

Professor Shirts was asking for this very thing Dean, and after thinking about it for a bit, the only way I can do this is to take people through a quick history of modern philosophy. I’ve begun the arduous task of going from Frege to Rorty, so people can judge for themselves if Riskas carbon copied ideas are worth it.

[_MrStakhanovite]

I've never seen this before, its like some kind of balls-out post -postmodern quasi plaigiarism.

I loved this description.