(May 7, 2016 at 7:43 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote: I would posit that they cannot listen, because their programming is too deeply embedded to allow such a "syntax error - does not compute" to register on the hard drive. They "know" what we think, already, because their social circles and preachers told them, and that's all there is to it. The best part are the anti-science crowd, to whom you can provide mountains of actual evidence, to whom you can demonstrate that their ad-hoc explanations of the physical impossibility of many of the Bible's claims hold no water (lately, we've been discussing Noah's Flood), and you will still have them wave it off as if you had said nothing, let alone demonstrated unequivocally that their propositions were not only false but impossible. Because magic!
And as always, there's the never ending confusion on their part about the difference between being an atheist ("I do not believe your religious claims") and a nihilist ("Vee beleef in nossssing, Lebowsky!")... or they think that acceptance of the scientific method of testing ideas means atheism. And so on. It gets exhausting, pretty quickly, trying to debunk so much bullshit on an endless cycle, even with the same people.
There's a TED talk by James Flynn on why our IQ's today are higher than recent generations, and I think it explains a lot about religious people too. They just haven't acquired the conceptual tools they need for things like logically consistent thinking. What sucks is that religion is enabling them to actively resist becoming intellectually mature enough to see how irrational religion is.
So we've got this reason-resistant strain of human culture, composed of ignorant lay people, scholars who ought to know better but succumb to social pressure to identify as religious, and scholars who are just plain nuts.