{"id":2811,"date":"2015-12-13T10:44:45","date_gmt":"2015-12-13T15:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2811"},"modified":"2015-12-14T06:02:36","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T11:02:36","slug":"when-nutjobs-fall-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2811","title":{"rendered":"When nutjobs fall out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>J.D. Hall is an unusually stringent Calvinist pastor from Montana with a gift for self-promotion; he constantly lambastes anybody who doesn&#8217;t align with his straitened view of reality.<\/p>\n<p>One of his favorite targets is Karen Swallow Prior at Liberty University, whom he complains is a heretical liberal.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right: Liberty University, a known bastion of liberalism.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, Hall tracks Prior&#8217;s tweets, and had himself a regular conniption fit when Prior presumed to ridicule &#8212; get ready &#8212; <i>him<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><center><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">New post: The Nastiness of the Evangelical Intelligentsia <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/6xbRDhX5cq\">https:\/\/t.co\/6xbRDhX5cq<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Pulpit &amp; Pen (@PulpitAndPen) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PulpitAndPen\/status\/675840686332112896\">December 13, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Yeah, well &#8212; ho-hum.  Here is what interests me about this latest dust-up: Evangelical intelligentsia?  Really?  I emphatically deny that there is any such thing.<\/p>\n<p>When an engineer sits down to make calculations and prepare design recommendations, for instance, every single line of the analysis has a pedigree that can be traced back, literally, millennia; Pythagoras, for example, flourished ~ 550 BC.  The record of observations, the mathematical analyses of those observations, and the discussion and sometimes fierce fights over their interpretation, are all public record.  An engineer&#8217;s analysis of a set of facts is always solidly within the continuum of proved, established, documented knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>But all pastors and theologians and churchgoers are necessarily, though not always explicitly or even knowingly, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Presuppositional_apologetics\" target=\"_blank\">presuppositionalists<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Presuppositionalism is a school of Christian apologetics that believes the Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It <SPAN style=\"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a8f2f5\">presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation<\/span> and attempts to expose flaws in other worldviews. It claims that <SPAN style=\"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a8f2f5\">apart from presuppositions, one could not make sense of any human experience<\/span>, and there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In other words &#8230; The Bible says it, I believe it, and that&#8217;s that.  A lot of intellectually dishonesty is required to be a believer &#8212; and that is the antithesis of intellectualism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>J.D. Hall is an unusually stringent Calvinist pastor from Montana with a gift for self-promotion; he constantly lambastes anybody who doesn&#8217;t align with his straitened view of reality. One of his favorite targets is Karen Swallow Prior at Liberty University, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2811\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2811"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2816,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions\/2816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}