Sunday, July 16, 2017

Jeremy Runnells and Anti-Mormon Bravado

Jeremy Runnells wrote the following on my friend, Tarik LaCour's facebook page:


(I am the one who clicked the "laughing" response--"deluded" is the nicest way of summing up his "response")

I am more than happy to link to the relevant pages and let the reader who has intellectual integrity and does not suffer, as Runnells does, from the Dunning-Kruger effect, Runnell's pieces as well as responses thereto and see that Runnells' arguments are often without any merit (exegetical/scholarly/historical) at all:

One can read Runnells' CES Letter and "responses" here.

FairMormon, Response to "Letter to a CES Director" and "Debunking FAIR's Debunking"

Brian Hales, The CES Letter A Closer Look (youtube)

Letter to a CES Director: A Closer Look

Kevin Christensen, Image is Everything: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Michael R. Ash, Bamboozled by the "CES Letter"

I have been making a page on this blog of Tarik LaCour's responses (featuring some guest posts by Stephen Smoot and Brian Hales) here.

Links to other online responses

Finally, one of Runnell's fans asked "If Jeremy Runnells is so unlearned, unsophisticated in his approach and his material old news, then why do so many apologists and alleged scholars of the FAIR variety spend SO much time to going after him and his CES Letter?"

The answer is rather simple: the CES Letter is popular. Using that "logic," because proponents of macro-evolution have responded many times to Kent Hovind and Ken Ham, for instance, there must be something valid to the arguments of Hovind, Ham, and other proponents of young-earth creationism, right? No, it is due to popularity due to the large level of ignorance of their fans who repeat their arguments and show little to no intellectual integrity by researching the issues themselves. Personally, I wish more informed critics of "Mormonism" were more popular (e.g., The New Mormon Challenge and more sophisicated works) while the CES Letter and other low-hanging fruit were not as popular, but c'est la vie.