It has been drawn to my attention that Peter Boghossian has posted a quotation from me regarding his book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, on the book’s page at Amazon.com. Unfortunately, the quotation has been taken out of context in a way that could give a misimpression regarding my opinion of the book. Seizing a stray clause from someone’s writings and packaging it as an endorsement when the original comment was most decidedly not an endorsement is a dishonorable tactic, and it is unpleasant to find it being done to my own words. In order to prevent further misunderstanding, I am reproducing here, verbatim, what I originally wrote:
“My initial assessment: he’s not a heavy hitter, and he’s making a number of clear and crucial mistakes – BUT – he’ll rip through the average church-goer like a buzz-saw through balsa.”
On his Amazon page, Boghossian quotes only the last dozen words or so of this statement. When separated from the initial remarks, they appear to express a favorable opinion of his work rather than (what I actually intended, and what should be obvious in the context of the complete sentence) an unfavorable assessment of the level of preparation of the average church-goer when encountering the sort of tactics Boghossian recommends and practices.
Update January 24, 2014: Boghossian has removed the “endorsement” from his Amazon.com page.
It looks like it’s been removed now. If so, I appreciate it.
One thing many atheists have in common is a desire to frame the debate exactly as they see fit, quite aggressively at times. Prior to this Boghossian had been hard at work doing just that, perpetuating equivocated language like “god,” “faith,” and “religion,” and speaking prejudicially of having “interventions.” He is free, of course, to assert his convictions strongly to others. But let’s not pretend that is rational dialogue or debate.
Yes, the question I often have is if they even realize they are doing it. Some clearly are just redefining the words, as a tactic, hoping the audience is fooled. Others, I get the impression, have had the wrong definitions so engrained, that unless you can get them to slow down and think, they really believe the wrong definition is the accurate one. Unfortunately, many Christians do to, making it an easy sell… and then, as they say, they’ve ‘given away the farm.’
From what I have heard, he has done something similar with J. Warner Wallace.
I’ve let some of the Stand to Reason staff know that. It looks like it’s not there anymore.
Jim had been aware of it. I heard him mention it on one of his podcasts.
I went to Amazon’s Peter Boghossian page. The misquote you cited was not there.
It’s on the book page under editorial endorsements:
http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/product-description/1939578094
(and, I have a screen-shot of it just in case it gets Caner-ized… a habit I’ve unfortunately had to undertake lately.)
Okay. I see it now. I missed it the first time. Not surprised by the intellectual dishonesty.
Thanks very much for the pointer to where it was.
I’ve mentioned this in my article (from which they partially took the quote), but based on hearing him in interviews, I think I’d actually like Peter as a person, and agree on many of his non-Christianity-related points. He struck me as a pretty authentic – though confused about Christianity – person, so I’m actually a bit surprised by this. I’m kind of hoping it turns out to be some overly-zealous marketing helpers.
………..aaaaaaaand…….. it’s gone.