I like the post title. If you're going to contort, contort shamelessly ;-)
I basically agree with this post, except that my experience of TGGD is that it doesn't always fall into tiresomeness in the way you describe – sometimes it manages to do it in other ways instead!
Another annoying failure mode is meta-meta-metagaming. You start off with people trading arguments as to why they think God does or (respectively) does not exist, and then they focus down on some point along the lines of "but you're not denying that that part at least might be true" and next thing you know you've gone through "but at least you must concede that it isn't fundamentally unreasonable to believe this or that" and another few rounds of "all I'm really trying to say is" on both sides until they're arguing about some esoteric point of the ground rules of the discourse five layers of abstraction away from the original question and even if one side were to win the argument (which they won't anyway, for all the reasons you give above) neither of them would be able to remember what if any bearing it had on the original question of whether God does or (disrespectfully) does not exist.
On the other hand, there is an LJ on my friends list which I basically friended for the author's strong track record of being quite interesting about TGGD when other people linked to his posts. Possibly it's important that he's an ex-Christian, so although it's clear which side of the debate he believes, it's also clear that he has experience of thinking carefully about both sides and can remember how it felt to believe the other one, and hence doesn't fall into the trap you mention of assuming that the other belief system cannot possibly contain anything of interest.
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Date: 2009-11-05 09:20 am (UTC)I basically agree with this post, except that my experience of TGGD is that it doesn't always fall into tiresomeness in the way you describe – sometimes it manages to do it in other ways instead!
Another annoying failure mode is meta-meta-metagaming. You start off with people trading arguments as to why they think God does or (respectively) does not exist, and then they focus down on some point along the lines of "but you're not denying that that part at least might be true" and next thing you know you've gone through "but at least you must concede that it isn't fundamentally unreasonable to believe this or that" and another few rounds of "all I'm really trying to say is" on both sides until they're arguing about some esoteric point of the ground rules of the discourse five layers of abstraction away from the original question and even if one side were to win the argument (which they won't anyway, for all the reasons you give above) neither of them would be able to remember what if any bearing it had on the original question of whether God does or (disrespectfully) does not exist.
On the other hand, there is an LJ on my friends list which I basically friended for the author's strong track record of being quite interesting about TGGD when other people linked to his posts. Possibly it's important that he's an ex-Christian, so although it's clear which side of the debate he believes, it's also clear that he has experience of thinking carefully about both sides and can remember how it felt to believe the other one, and hence doesn't fall into the trap you mention of assuming that the other belief system cannot possibly contain anything of interest.