My time at the Houston Baptist University honors college has been immensely frustrating from the start. Many in the program reek of bias, shallowness, inconsistency, fallacies, assumptions, and general stupidity. I have encountered so much sheer idiocy--people straw manning postmodernism as relativism, calling Platonism rational, denying things that can't be false, embracing Christian presuppositionalism, holding to moral relativism while denying they are doing so, dealing with me in utterly hypocritical ways, and all sorts of other shit--and I have even blogged about how asinine many of the HBU honors college beliefs and practices are [1].
I have seen repeatedly that proving the veracity of a conclusion or statement will not guarantee that someone will acknowledge the truth of it or live by it. Of course, a person could easily realize this conclusion from logic alone without any actual conversation with another person, as it does not follow from something being proven that those it was proven to will accept it. Failing to persuade someone of something does not in any way mean that the conclusion was not proven, just as persuading someone of a claim does not in any way mean that the claim was proven.
Proving something to a person and persuading them are two entirely different things. One can persuade without proving and prove without persuading--very often, I have found that people in my life settle for mere persuasion of themselves and others instead of proving to themselves and others that something is true and demonstrable. A person not being persuaded never has anything to do with whether something was or was not proven in full to him or her, and so a rational mind will not mistake one for the other. Persuasion is nothing more than subjectively feeling won over, a totally irrelevant thing to legitimate epistemology, whereas proof is objective confirmation of a thing.
I explained the following in another post:
"The fallacious mind is disconnected from reality; it is intellectually diseased at the most fundamental, basic level. It has exchanged truth for error, actually believing its own demonstrably false delusions. To do so it must try to extinguish or flee from the light offered by consistency and reason. Of course, consistency . . . and reason still have authority even where unacknowledged--nothing can stymie them. Reason is self-evident despite denial" [2].
If people like many HBU honors college students will not embrace the truth when it is clearly and plainly demonstrated to them again and again, they have forfeited any legitimate intellectual justification for someone calling them rational. People who claim intellectual correctness while wallowing in fallacies and rejecting demonstrable truths are enemies of the truth. As such, I will treat them accordingly; I will not praise them as knowledgeable, helpful, or rational, but expose and mock their stupidities. I want truth, and I will shove aside or trample over anyone who actively opposes that quest [3].
Denying truth and reason does not remove either from their necessary existence (it is impossible for either to not exist) or weaken the objective reality of them. If someone will not yield to either despite repeated proofs, then that person is a lost cause until he or she changes. And until that change comes, if it does at all, one only throws pearls before swine if he or she legitimately reasons with such a lost person.
[1]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-critique-of-my-college-education.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-infallibility-of-logic.html
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-fallacious-mind.html
[3]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-sacrifice-in-name-of-truth.html
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