Oh come down off the cross.
Indeed, it's been a long time since I've seen so many obvious attempts at emotional manipulation in lieu of actual debate.
We've held your hand and treated you with kid's gloves for years.
Agreed, and in return Jabba has behaved like a spoiled child. Now he's being appropriately treated as one. As Bubba would put it, time for Jabba to go sit in the corner and think about what he's done.
Most egregiously, Jabba has intentionally ignored and avoided his critics. I suspect now he'd like to make us believe it's because they were "insulting" him, but he slipped up and revealed that, at least in some cases, it's because the criticism is too challenging for him. He can't handle it, so he wants to pretend it doesn't exist.
To reinforce that, he has lately urged his critics to write shorter and simpler posts. He's begging his critics to write posts he can more easily refute because he can't deal with the actual refutations. In the Shroud thread he took to rewriting the debate on his own terms in his own venue. He edited the debate so that in his mind he won points he hadn't won in real life. He's trying to do the same thing here, only in a different way. He's trying to get his critics to play along with the "effective debate" on this point that he has scripted out in his mind. Then he uses emotional blackmail to get his critics to play along.
Rather than 'effective debate," Jabba's approach bears a far more cognizable resemblance to ordinary ego reinforcement. He doesn't want to spar with skeptics to see if an effective debate emerges. He wants to spar with skeptics in order to draw the willing subset of those critics into a construct where his prior academic failures are redressed and his ongoing religious and pseudo-intellectual fervor have some apparent toehold in reality. And then prolong that construct as long as possible.
"Got scared, found religion." That's it. That's all you did.
Indeed, no great spiritual or intellectual epiphany here. Religion assuages fear of death by promising eternal life. But it requires faith, which is hard to come by. Skeptics erode faith, so it's vital that skeptics be shown as irrational, shallow, and short-sighted -- or conversely, secretly in agreement with him. Then "holistic thinking" seems outwardly less like the pure speculation and wishiness it actually is.
