Coulter on Jews

I watched the interview with her and was able to stay out of the ER. Those beta-blockers work!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/ann-coulter-thinks-that-j_b_67969.html

Ah, yes, Twiggy with tourettes with the mind of Rush Limbaugh in the body of Lisa Kudrow.

http://mymallandnews.bizland.com/index016.html

Here is the real scoop, counter-intuitive though it may seem.

Ann Coulter is one of us as by her existence she creates what she pretends to despise-- liberals . Ann isn't about politics or propaganda. Rather, she is about $$$s from her books and speeches, none of which could exist unless oxiginated by manufactured outrage amplified by the media. As the (pretend) face of modern conservatism, Ann Coulter is doing the Democratic Party a great service.

I woudn't get worked up about anything she says as everything she does is a fraud to conservatives as she is toiling in the service of leftists everywhere.

Why do others have such a negative opinion of atheists?

Speaking for myself, which is a theist, allow me to make a few points. First, I think you're begging the question. Most people don't work and have fun in the context of only believers in their particular world view or brand of politics. I suspect for most people it's a surprise when they find out that the chap in the cubicle next to them is a Methodist or a Democrat or a Liberterian or an Atheist and the response generally is most likely a shrug of the shoulders and perhaps something along these lines: "Now how about those Cubs?"

As far as being insulting, I've never seen this at all in real life. In forum life, it's happened, but perhaps no more so than on any other forum where folks have strong points of view, and it certainly provides me ironic delight whenever I see people assert their rationality and then demonstrate their irrationality by the low quality of their discourse. Of course, it's no big deal to put the worst offenders on ignore.

It also kills the dialog and any hope of convincing others that our position is the most reasonable.

Sure it can kill the dialogue, but that may be their goal, a kind of Gresham's Law where bad talk drives out good talk. And that may be because those people could be precisely the opposite of what their arguments claim. Just as I think that Coulter, for example, has done much to expand the ranks of liberals by her emotive conservatism, so too do the most rabid atheists reinforce the the preconceptions of those who have never encountered that minority in any meaningful way thus fostering theism.

Having said that, I don't believe the goal of any dialogue should be persuasion, a kind of verbal tennis match where one side wins and the other side loses. And, frankly, it would surprise me if argument either on a forum or in person has changed any minds one way or another. Perhaps a more desirable goal is to engage in dialogue in such a way so that my thoughts sharpen in the termpering fire of rational argument. Proverbs 2:17 is the ideal: "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A mind stretched to a new idea never regains its original dimension" and this has been a mind-stretching greenhouse for new ideas.