Jesse's life of quiet desperation... one which Diarmaid MacCulloch thinks is aberrant

Jesse: "His central claim, that 'Protestant relativism' is the root cause of Western fragmentation, colonial violence, and racial hierarchy, is not supported by serious scholarship."

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There are many common deceiving habits performed by the intellectual dilettante. Among them: 

- making the person who raises the arguments of others own all the argument of someone else - they do this because a dilettante him/her self dare not include a footnote of an argument that  they cannot agree with because they don't have the capacity to actually disprove an opposing argument. So dilettantes only reference snippets that appear to agree with them. (A failure of the standards of higher learning.)

- then speaking or writing as if the arguments that bother them are being produced solely by their interlocutor and solely in the current moment. This has the effect of reducing the horizon of a multitude of opinions and positions and nuance down to just a binary 2... easier for a dilettante to handle.

- moving then to treat the opposing material now as ad hoc and anything that is not convincing as utterly devastating and negating to everything proposed. In a binary mind of yes or no, any no is reason for cancellation. Not engagement; dilettantes cannot engage. Not only has Jesses blocked ALL my comments... he's now made it impossible for me to warn him that I've written to engage with his pseudo attempts at theology.

- and finally acting as if any historically existing argument that makes them uncomfortable never existed. Thus, his "not supported by serious scholarship."

Snark is several levels above these acts of intellectual abandonment.

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Jesse's siloed, quietly whimpering blog production in the deep woods of an antiquarian workshop is the portrait of a dilettante.

It is, as such, just another cry from the desert of hungry minds who refuse to leave and seek at least some wisdom in the city. There have been untold millions of such deprived and underserved zealots. In the city, too, when we actually pay attention to the oppressed and neglected. The IQ of prisons are often higher than the general population. Probably nowhere a greater discrepancy in history as in the US today.

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Jesse performs the moves of isolation and negation from his embargoed den where no opposition is allowed to speak. Or even warn. Put briefly, again, is his opening framing of me:

"His central claim, that “Protestant relativism” is the root cause of Western fragmentation, colonial violence, and racial hierarchy, is not supported by serious scholarship.

Jesse then goes on to argue with this nonexistent "serious scholarship." He even latterly cites two names to back him up. Roland Bainton - the long time mid-century professor at Yale, my alma mater - and Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford professor who is not a professed Christian, but "a friend of Christianity," and, thankfully, gay friendly. I have his book on the Reformation and it is magisterial. Professor MacCulloch has earned the right to his views and is a thoughtful academic. As an un-professed Christian (ordained a deacon but refused priesthood because the CoE did not support gay persons), he embodied the best of the legacy of European protestantism. He thinks American protestantism, though, is an anachronistic aberration and should be more compassionate toward Palestine. (My thoughts exactly!; give me a German Lutheran or Danish Reformed Christian, neither of whom have retreated back beyond the Enlightenment and regard for human rights.)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/29/religion.uk1)

But how can Jesse not see that raising up a couple of names that, together, span a hundred years of writing actually proves MY point?! Which is:

- not that I agree with all of it
- not that I've read all of it either
- not that I've written it all (lol)

BUT! that IT EXISTS!! The IT being the thesis that protestantism generated a massive movement of spiritual relativism that could only find consolation in wealth accrual as a sign of God's favor. And from there, the secularization that exponentially deepened took over and platformed the brutalizing race for capitalist empire based on dispossession. 

And Jesse's side of debaters, meagre though in number, are not fantasists - they are arguing with SOMETHING! Something that does indeed exist.

And what exists is more than a century of expositing the generating effects of the first two centuries of radical protestantism. The intellectual ferment that Max Weber started has matured far beyond Max Weber. It has folded in historians both ecclesial and secular, sociologists both Christian and secular, theologians and economists both Christian and secular (Diarmaid McCulloch being one of them).

Jesse's massive blindness toward what he himself is DOING - debating something that he clams doesn't exist - is the epitome of the pathetic moves of a dilettante who does not go out of the doors of his own mind and into the world of debate. Jesse is so weak, he needs all those reductive and erasing moves I listed above.

Given his willful, duplicitous, ideologically shallow and rigid anachronistic puritanism, Jesse could not be more like Trump in his bottomless self deception or his abysmal violation of public moral character.

If truths oppose them, they act like nothing of the sort exists. And all messengers must be erased from consciousness.

This isn’t Christian. It’s a latent boy’s fantasy of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.