Responding to the covert fundamentalist "Steve Tysinger" about ideological tribalism

A FB debate-group ADMIN wrote:
"Why do you ask for evidence of God when you are not searching for God?"
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In reply, I offered this:
"I can't speak for anyone else. But ...

On the rare occasion I ask for evidence, I'm hoping to help the "*theist" realize they don't have any actually-good evidence.

(*usually either a Christian fundamentalist or an Islamic fundamentalist)"
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In reply, that ADMIN said:
" l like that answer. 

 Now l doubt you can prove your claim they don’t have good evidence"
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5 weeks later, Steve Tysinger said (TO me and ABOUT me): 

James Apperson Us and them mentality.

Instead of trying to get at the truth, you're interested in converting them. 

-- My reply to Steve: Steve Tysinger Nope.

You have fundamentally misread both my purpose and the exchange.

* I was explaining why, in the past, I sometimes bothered to ask religious fundamentalists for evidence.
* I was not expressing an intention to deconvert that particular fundamentalist.
* I was not inviting him into a debate.
* I was not recruiting anyone for an atheist, agnostic, humanist, or any other ideological tribe.

The evidence is immediately above us:

* He issued his challenge five weeks ago.
* I saw it.
* I remembered it.
* I decided to ignore it.

You have collapsed several very different activities into one:

* challenging whether evidence justifies a claim;
* helping someone recognize faulty reasoning;
* trying to change someone’s assessment of particular evidence;
* trying to determine what is true;
* trying to make someone less dogmatic;
* and trying to convert someone into a different ideological tribe.

Those are not equivalent.

Examining whether someone’s evidence supports their claim is not an alternative to “trying to get at the truth.”

* That examination is part of trying to get at the truth.
* Persuasion and truth-seeking are not mutually exclusive.
* Attempting to help someone recognize that their reasoning is unsound does not require any desire to change their religious identity.
* A person can abandon bad arguments without abandoning Christianity.
* A person can become more intellectually honest without becoming an atheist.

On the very rare occasions when I have tried to help religious fundamentalists understand anything, I have tried to help them recognize that:

* faith is not knowledge;
* fallacies are not logic;
* narcissism is not humility;
* hate is not love;
* violence is not peace;
* imagination is not facts;
* ancient religious traditions are literally never verifiable as eyewitness testimony;
* and obedience is not virtue.

None of that requires anyone to migrate into a different ideological tribe.

But consider how religious fundamentalists commonly move through these virtual spaces:

* They enter with declarations.
* They issue sweeping challenges.
* They adopt adversarial “prove me wrong” postures.
* They present no specific evidence for examination.
* They transfer an effectively unlimited burden to their critics.
* They reserve for themselves the authority to dismiss every argument presented.
* They then treat their own refusal to change as evidence that the critic failed.

Throw a softball high into the air.

* A gentle breeze acts upon it throughout its flight.
* While the ball’s upward momentum dominates its visible trajectory, the breeze may produce no discernible change from our experiential vantage point.
* Then the ball reaches its moment of suspension.
* The momentum sufficient to carry it farther upward has been spent.
* At that moment of transition, the lateral influence of even that gentle breeze becomes perceptible.

Human ideological investments often operate similarly.

When someone enters a conversation with “come at me, bro” energy:

* They are usually preparing to defend their identity, not reconsider it.
* Argument and evidence may have no discernibly positive effect while that defensive momentum remains dominant.
* Every challenge gives them another opportunity to rehearse their defenses.
* Every counterargument gives them something against which to reaffirm their allegiance.
* Every attempt to push them away from their position may supply additional energy to the very trajectory we would be trying to counter.
* Instead of interrupting their momentum, we provoke them into doubling down.

Sometimes that defensive momentum must first dissipate before any gentle contrary influence—whether an argument, evidence, or an appeal to someone’s humanity—can produce a discernible change.

I recognized the Admin’s invitation for what it was:

* It was not a moment of epistemic openness.
* It was a request for ideological combat.
* It offered no specific evidence for me to examine.
* It gave me no defined claim against which to direct an argument.
* It placed the entire burden on me while reserving all judgment for him.
* And because he is an Admin, he possesses far more power than I do to censor the exchange whenever it becomes inconvenient.

In practice, “Prove that we don’t have good evidence” commonly means:

* “Convince me.”
* “I have already decided that I will not be convinced.”
* “I will reserve the right to dismiss everything you present.”
* “Once I remain unconvinced, I will treat my own refusal to change as proof that you failed.”
* “No matter what evidence or arguments are presented, I will retain my posture as the ultimate arbiter of reality.”

He gave me nothing specific to engage with and no reason to believe that we possessed compatible interests for such a debate.

So:

* I did not forget his challenge.
* I was not intimidated by it.
* I did not lack an answer.
* I decided that locking horns with him would be a waste of my finite personal resources.
* I decided to ignore it.

I know how that game plays out.

I also know that I would be wasting and desecrating my own time and energy by repeatedly wrestling in the muck of that kind of narcissistic skullfuckery.

But you are a different person, making a different claim, in a different exchange.

I did not care enough to enter ideological combat with that Admin.

Today, however, I do feel like spending some of my personal resources exposing what you are doing.

You have made a specific public claim about me:

> “Instead of trying to get at the truth, you’re interested in converting them.”

That claim is:

* specific;
* unsupported;
* uncharitable;
* directed at me personally;
* and presented before an audience with a long history of observing your own rhetorical posture.

So today, you are the lucky winner of “Who Gets Exposed for This Behavior?”

Although you pride yourself on opposing religious fundamentalism, you repeatedly end up guarding fundamentalists against their critics.

That is what you are doing here.

Instead of examining the Admin’s rhetorical maneuver:

* you redirected scrutiny toward me;
* assigned me a psychology and motive for which you had no evidence;
* characterized epistemic criticism as ideological conversion;
* framed truth-seeking and persuasion as mutually exclusive;
* and attached a cartoon about tribalism as though it established your interpretation.

In effect, you tried to delegitimize a challenge to fundamentalism by uncharitably psychoanalyzing the person who made it.

This is not an assessment I derived from one isolated comment.

* I remember you from years of participation in this group and others like it.
* You have cultivated a reputation for positioning yourself as the intellectual, moral, and supremely enlightened observer standing above everyone else.
* Other longtime group members have repeatedly noticed and challenged that posture.
* Most of the people reading this exchange possess enough history with you to recognize the pattern being described.

Somehow, you continue failing to notice how badly this works against the social optics—and the marketing—of your own supposedly nontribal, intellectually enlightened paradigm.

You present yourself as standing above ideological team sports.

But then you reproduce one of their characteristic maneuvers:

* leave the original claim largely unexamined;
* redirect scrutiny toward the critic;
* invent a discrediting motive;
* and use that attributed motive to protect the original speaker from criticism.

Attaching a cartoon about tribalism does not provide evidence that I was acting tribally.

It merely illustrates the interpretive framework you brought with you.

To make the distinctions unmistakable:

* I do not care about changing that Admin’s ideological tribe.
* I do not care whether he remains a Christian fundamentalist.
* I did not consider debating him worth my resources.
* I do care about correcting your public misrepresentation of me.
* I do care about exposing the irony of your own behavior.
* I presently feel that doing so is worth some of my time.

Those positions do not contradict one another.

Different people, claims, risks, and conversations warrant different allocations of my finite resources.

For the record:

* I am not an atheist.
* I am not on “Team Atheist.”
* I am not on “Team Humanist.”
* I have no interest in recruiting anyone for either of those—or any other—ideological tribes.

I’m an igtheist.

That means:

* Before claims about “God” can meaningfully be accepted, rejected, debated, or supported with evidence, the person making those claims must first provide a sufficiently coherent definition of what “God” is.
* If the proposed concept remains incoherent or undefined, then neither “God exists” nor “God does not exist” expresses a sufficiently meaningful proposition for me to affirm or deny.

Separately:

* No humans have access to the data and understanding needed to establish what the ultimate foundation of reality is.
* That unknowable ultimate foundation is what I call **the Great Mystery**.

What I call **the River** is related but distinct:

* It is the transformative power and beauty through which human beings encounter, interpret, and participate in that Mystery.
* No religion owns the River.
* No religion possesses exclusive access to it.
* Different people may enter it through spiritual, philosophical, artistic, relational, contemplative, or other experiential paths.
* None of their ideological labels can contain the Mystery from which the River flows.

If I ever help someone become:

* less dogmatic;
* more intellectually honest;
* less hateful;
* less violent;
* more humble;
* more compassionate;
* or more fully human—

then wonderful.

But I do not care which ideological label they wear afterward.