Hello, D Wiltshire:
: What are the stated premises?
They are the definitions you gave of "scholarly" and "pseudo-scholarly", which you referred to in the premise of your "if - then" statement:
:: So my point is if these definitions are true then the only one that can provide scholarly work on the existance of God ...
In other words, what I said was that your conclusion that "the only one that can provide..." does not follow from the definitions you gave.
: So as you state that Scholar is just a label that one attaches to himself. I may have misunderstood you so please don't take me the wrong way. So is it just a self applied label?
I did not imply or mean to imply anything about who applies these labels. My comments were about definitions, which are almost self-evidently true. Application of such labels is a whole 'nother ball game, since it involves judgments about things that are the subjects of the arguments themselves. It involves deciding just what evidence supports what conclusions and whether a particular conclusion follows from the evidence given. It involves deciding just what "biased" means, but such a decision is often difficult to impossible to make with certainty.
Sometimes it's easy to establish bias in an argument. For example, if a large body of evidence is available, which contains material positive, negative and neutral towards a particular conclusion, and someone writes an essay that claims to be an objective look at the issue but leaves out all negative or neutral evidence, then it's easy to establish that the writer is biased and non-objective. But if some of the negative evidence is hard to come by, it's not so clear that the writer is biased. There are any number of factors that can weigh on whether a writer is biased or not, scholarly or pseudo-scholarly.
So applying a label is a matter of judgment for each person. I usually judge that young-earth creationists are extremely biased, pseudo-scholarly writers because I've seen countless times that they carefully select their evidence and ignore what they can't deal with. On the other hand, a committed YEC will claim that their favored writers are objective and that non-YEC scientists are extremely biased.
Since there is no authoritative, world wide organization that renders unassailable judgments about what is "scholarly" and what isn't, it's up to each individual to accumulate enough information to make his own judgments. So these labels can be applied by others or by oneself.
In the case of your son-in-law claiming to have done "years of scholarly research", he might sincerely believe his claim, or he might just be saying that to get you off his case by pretending to have done more than he really did. You and I know very well what "scholarly research" tends to be for JWs -- reading WTS publications and nothing more. Perhaps, if the JW is unusually well motivated, he may go to a library and look up a few references and confirm that the words between the quotation marks are correct. But most of the time he won't make the effort to understand the original quotation and then judge for himself whether the WTS writer used the quotation correctly. In any case, you and I would judge that this self-proclaimed "scholarly" research is "pseudo-scholarly" because we can point to what we feel are biased "research" methods -- methods that serve only to confirm what a person already wants to believe. JWs can often be shown to engage in pseudo-scholarly research by challenging them to show, in the face of negative evidence, that a particular WTS conclusion is correct. Often they will fail to understand, or claim to fail to understand, simple points of logic or evidence. This is proof to you and me that the JW is biased.
So your son-in-law may have convinced himself that he did "scholarly" research, and if he really believes this he would not be lying when he says he did. But the JW mindset is screwy enough that, as you pointed out, a JW can know intellectually that the WTS tells lies and yet blow it off as if it were nothing. Their minds then convince them that nothing is wrong, that lies are the truth. Is a person lying when he engages in such massive Orwellian doublethink? That's a difficult judgment to make, since we who were once JWs can look back on our own forays into doublethink and know now that we were lying to ourselves, but remember that we were not conscious of telling lies to others when we were still under the spell. In other words, doublethink allows a person to simultaneously lie and tell the truth, while being conscious only of telling the truth, and yet being able on a moment's notice to change "truth" and immediately forget the change.
If this makes sense, great. If not, get hold of George Orwell's books Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. They show what this sort of mind control is all about.
AlanF
