Peanut Gallery

i'm not convinced. i know i can get him to respond (usually), but it always seems to be as if what i said actually was nonsense. something is not clicking there, and i'm not sure what. i suspect it's not entirely willful, too. i've seen a general lack of reading comprehension throughout the thread -- and tons of faulty assumptions about what something must have actually said -- even about the things that dawn really probably does care about understanding.i'm starting to suspect it's a tl;dr thing.i'm considering finding some really decent apologetics that argue precisely what he's getting at, and posting it in response to him as if it were really a rebuttal, and seeing what happens next. i'm willing to bet i could make him argue with cs lewis, or justin martyr.edit: i don't mean to mock dawn, here. i'm genuinely curious where the confusion comes from, both in his posts, and his ability to process mine (and others).Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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IME, it is not simply TL : DR.
I have previously made a short evangelistic-sounding nonsense post to Dawn.
He first supported what I posted. I then pointed out that he couldn't read English. He then posted a rebuttal to my initial post. And then he posted insults.At any point he could have gone back and read my initial post and torn it to shreds for being utter gibberish.
But instead he could only guess what it was I had written. Firstly, I would like to suggest that the confusion is not from your side.
Your posts are generally (capitalisation notwithstanding ) very clearly expressed.The confusion is all from Dawn's side.
Many people (including moderators) have questioned his poor grasp of English, but Dawn has never acknowledged it.
He is 50+ years old; educated and living in America.
I cannot understand how he can be unaware of his functional illiteracy.{abe} Even if you pointed out that he was arguing against CS Lewis, I doubt it would mean anything to Dawn.
He would just say that Mr. Lewis was wrong.
*shrug*Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

interesting. do you think he got it on the second (or third) pass? i don't think it's guessing. maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part, but sometimes it seems like what he's saying is actually related to what i'm saying... it's just usually the same point i was refuting, repeated. short memory, perhaps? that can't be it either. he clearly remembers some stuff -- he went and quoted me from another thread when he thought he had caught me in a contradiction (because he made a faulty assumption about what i said). i would say it's selective attention (ie: tuning stuff out that disagrees) but you mentioned he seems to have tuned out the stuff that seemingly agreed, too.dyslexia, maybe? no, i know. i've tried to be very clear, to the point of clarifying in simple declarative statements, and then repeating those clarifications over and over.what i mean is, it's not just an output problem. it's not simply that he's dropping words, repeating words, screwing up grammar, or confusing punctuation. hell, i've probably done that a few times in this post already; i need sleep. it happens, and i'm not trying to make fun of him for that.it's clearly something that's getting in the way of both output and input. he's confusing stuff on the way in, and confusing stuff out the way out. this can sometimes happen, oddly, with really smart people; their brains run faster than their fingers or eyeballs, and the brain fills in the nonsense gaps with sense. i frequently have this problem when i proof-read my own work: i know what i meant to write, so that's what i read instead of what i actually wrote.i don't think this is what's going on here, but i can't be sure. if that was the case, he'd probably follow logic a bit better. perhaps the church has simply done a number on him? he does have a higher vocabulary than you might expect. i never thought in a million years he'd use the word "exegesis" (nevermind correctly) in a post. he denies that english is a second language. that could easily do it, and that was, iirc, what everyone suspected. fwiw, i believe him. his posts do not read to me like someone who learned english later in life. (the gibberish i initially posted was, i believe, originally written by someone japanese) probably. but it would amuse me. of course, so does the fact that he's arguing against the bible. but whatever. it would be more about seeing whether it would get past his comprehension blockage.Edited by arachnophilia, : i told you there'd be a mistake somewhere...

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Nope, neither. He never gave any indication that he had understood what I had done. I have friends with dyslexia and they realise that they have trouble comprehending words. They don't carry on regardless.But Dawn definitely understands certain words.
It seems to me that he can understand about 50% of the words - but that leaves more than 50% of the meaning behind. Bear in mind, he's been on this forum for a long time - I've learnt many new words myself.
He also went to an American bible-based college, which could have frequently used that word. Dawn seems to think that it is not him; it is everyone else.
I don't see a way around that kind of blockage, but good luck.

except for just recently, he seems to mostly know the meanings of words. i would say more than 50%. closer to 100%. i don't think it's a vocabulary thing. general rule of thumb, for life. if it seems like everyone else is doing something strange, it's actually you.

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technically, his post was a complete and accurate answer to the question asked in the title.

Complete and accurate answers aren't always appropriate.In grad school I had a take-home exam which included a question of why a particular professor (very emeritus! at a very high-brow university) took a certain approach in his recent book.My professor expected a lot of erudite bs for an answer.Taking a direct approach, I called the very emeritus professor and asked him. He gave me a two sentence answer and I put that in my exam and cited it as "personal communication," giving the date.My professor didn't like that--he expected a lot of erudite bs for an answer--it was a graduate seminar after all! I received no credit for that answer at all! (But he gave me far more on the other questions than I deserved, so I got an A on the exam and in the class. That professor and I became good friends and argued about that answer for a decade or more!)Moral: the short quick answer, though perhaps accurate, may not be what is expected.

oh, i know. evidence might have been nice, too. this wasn't a serious quibble, i just thought it was amusing. college! (or, how to say very little in quite a lot of space)i was in a literature/film class once, and we had to read assigned novels. we'd then watch the film, and discuss the relative merits of artistic decisions and how they change between the different media. the class met once a week, and we'd have a new novel/film each week -- i don't normally enjoy reading novels that quickly, and sometimes i frankly didn't have time what with other classes. (who the hell am i kidding here?)in any case, we had to write an extremely short essay on each novel each week, and we could choose any aspect of the book to write on. anything, you name it. so one week, i emailed the prof, so i wrote on how that week's book was bound. and what the cover looked like.full fucking marks.

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i think we broke dawn. it's been a couple of days, and i'm getting worried.

Hi, arachnophilia. Don't worry: creationists always bounce back. They're made of rubber.Give it a week, and it'll be like nothing ever happened!

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

until they get banned anyways. sometimes, i miss ray martinez. he was fun.

Hardly junior, I needed a break from his and Panda's commedy of errors and inconsistencies.They ask for something (matthews inspiration claims) and i provided it without questionSomething they said i would not be able to provide. When I clearly did that very thing, they resort to what they always do, "but but, now show me this"Always just one more thingBesides this he could not even go by his own rulesand would not tell me whether from his perspective Isa was from God or manHe is afraid to answer that question and more importantly he knows it is crucial to the question at handAll of that adding up to no objectivity on his or Pandas part at allHow about you Bluejay, Isa from God or man?Dawn Bertot

Irony FTW No you didn't. Message 154
You usually fail to answer questions because you can't understand English or cope with your cognitive dissonance.
I think, currently, it is a combination of the two.Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

lol. you didn't read my post. you didn't read the verse you cited. neither says what you think it says. again, you have not shown that you have understood my rules, an are thus consistently misrepresenting them. okay dawn. let's assume that isaiah is 100% inspired by god, literally, and god himself wrote every word of it in his own hand.why should i think the same of matthew? you have never given me a good reason to make the jump from one to the other, even if you do actually agree that one is inspired. "it says so" isn't a good reason. and it doesn't say so.

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I'm baffled. Does RAZD actually believe that his absurd suggestion that some supernatural entities aren't made up by humans actually holds any water? Is it simply a tactic to avoid getting on to any more serious debate, or does is he actually going somewhere useful with this exercise in absurdist theatre?