Edward Babinski commented:
Hi Randal, According to your own words you were practically “created in heaven”:
“I was born into a Pentecostal home, Evangelical in orientation, so I grew up in the church. I had a day when I said ‘this is the day when I became a Christian’ when I was four years old, but looking back it was just something in the air I breathed, I was just immersed in it. It was very natural for me to go to a Christian university and to study religion, which segued into the other disciples like theology and so on. There’s no big conversion experience, it sort of seemed like it’s in my DNA” [Randal Rauser, Apologetics 315 interview]
I’m not sure what point Ed has here. Could it be a sycophantic desire to highlight my extemporaneous eloquence? Nah, that can’t be it. So what is it then? I’m not really sure, though I think it is intended as some sort of criticism.
Next, I note that Ed misleads the reader for he says that according to my own words, and then he provides a quotation, i.e. “created in heaven”. Surely Ed knows that saying “according to your own words” and then presenting a quotation means that the speaker made that precise utterance verbatim. This isn’t a paraphrase, it’s a quotation.
And yet I didn’t say that I was “practically ‘created in heaven'”. Nor do I even know what that means.
What I am doing in that excerpt is providing a soft critique of the evangelical conversionist tradition, thought I see no evidence that Ed grasped the point.
Finally, consider another excerpt from an interview, this one with a hypothetical atheist:
“I was born into a secular home, atheistic in orientation, so I grew up in the free thought community. I had a day when I said ‘this is the day when I became an atheist when I was four years old, but looking back it was just something in the air I breathed, I was just immersed in it. It was very natural for me to go to a university and to study science, which segued into the other disciples like philosophy and so on. There’s no big conversion experience, it sort of seemed like it’s in my DNA”
Do you think Ed would have bothered to quote this passage with the sarcastic misrepresentation he quoted mine? One suspects not.
