So now I’m revisiting all of the answers in Leah’s Ideological Turing Test in order to see which ones I straight-up liked. Keep in mind that I strongly disliked both of my own answers! So far the only one I’ve really liked and whose author I wanted to know better is this fake atheist.
Well, actually, there were many other entries (both real and fake, and both atheist and Christian) which had points I found intriguing but which didn’t develop those points. In a real conversation I would have asked about some of that stuff, and we would have been able to engage more fully, I hope. Anyway this exercise–and reading the comments!–can give a sense of just how difficult it is to gauge someone’s personality or intuit the larger shape of their belief system based on a small slice of their online persona….
Oh, wait, right, I remember that the first time I read it I wanted to flag this line from a real atheist, since I agreed with it and thought it was a useful analogy: “[Trusting someone’s prudential judgment on moral questions] is more like trusting someone’s judgement of history than trusting their judgement of physics, in that there are a lot of unreliable sources and often little hard data.” (Huh, I see that I guessed that both of this guy’s answers were genuine!–his fake Christian one is here.)