Sunday, March 10, 2013

#460: Moshe Averick


Although his name suggests a poe (“M. Averick”? … come on) evidence suggests that major nutcase orthodox rabbi Moshe Averick is the real deal. Maverick has a background as a a floor trader at the Mercantile Exchange, and has written a rock album. He has also written the anti-atheist book “Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist”, and is famous for defending the technique of quote-mining – as long as it is done in defense of religion – insofar as his intuitions tell Averick that “had the author really seen the extent of the matter, this (i.e. Averick’s own view) is what the author would have said” (as in this).

Now, Averick has absolutely no intention of staying within the bounds of reason, truth or decency, and you can see him attempt to argue that atheism leads to pedophilia here (basically the same tired nonsense: no God entails no standards; skepticism and anti-authoritarianism leads to rejecting time-honored values, etc., and some scattered (but persistent) violations of Godwin’s law.

Averick is (unsurprisingly) an intelligent design creationist, and notable for pushing irreducible complexity arguments (see also this, this, and this), and, indeed, Dembski’s debunked “specified complexity” claims. The simple point, of course, is that Averick simply does not understand complexity, as he brilliantly demonstrates here.

Diagnosis: Massively deluded know-nothing who will still gleefully pontificate to those who do know something. He seems to have achieved a certain amount of popularity, and seems in essence to be exactly the kind of well-spoken PRATT-reviving ignoramus the ID crowd is looking for.

1 comment:

  1. This guy has been busy recently, spewing some serious stupidity about the George Zimmerman verdict.

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