Recently, I've been having a debate with a young-Earth Creationist and fundamentalist christian with whom I am acquainted. We've had a number of discussions over the brief time we've been aware of one another, primarily concerning my status as an atheist and his status as a christian, and what we believe and why. I admit, I am fairly ruthless in these conversations, mainly because it's important to me to discuss passionate topics with passion, but also because he is so, so damned frustrating.
The debate we've been having most recently is one concerning the morality of his god. This came about after his accusation that my husband and I are only atheists to "indulge [our] hedonism", which, of course, in laymens terms, merely means that we are only atheists because we like to sin a lot. To quote Matt Dillahunty, president of the Atheist Community of Austin, "Yeah, you're right. I decided, this whole sinning thing? It's for me. So, pshaw." That argument didn't quite fly with my fundie friend.
I retorted, much less eloquently, that he couldn't accuse me of sinning, because, not only do I reject the idea of sin basically, but the god he chooses to worship has demonstrated nothing specifically moral worth following; in fact, I would (and do) go so far as to say this god is specifically immoral.
I just rattled off a few verses from the bible demonstrating yahweh's total lack of morality, specifically focussing on genocide, rape and torture as described in both the old and new testaments. My friend totally refused to answer me on most of my points, instead promising a "detailed dismantling" of what he called my "propaganda". I fail to see how quoting his own holy book counts as propaganda, but hey, far be it from me to try to extract logic or reason from a fundamentalist.
He flamed me up a wall for quoting these verses, accusing me of ripping off someone elses work (I did not), accusing me of taking everything out of context (I did not), and accusing me of taking only ten seconds to put together a pack of what was essentially lies (another wrong, it took me quite some time, actually.) To quote him directly,
"But this shows, 10 seconds to write propaganda. In this case, probably 2 hours of my time to dismantle and refute in detail."
Well, it was more like three weeks, but, to his credit, he did actually write a very long answer to my accusations (he proudly noted it's 5,300 word length) and directed me, and all those he imagined were following this exchange, to his website. I will post the link here.
http://resplect.com/mainsite/?q=node/20
Yes, children, this was the atrocity with which I was greeted after weeks of waiting. This clusterfuck of wrong. And now, as he so bemoaned before, I will have to spend much of my time correcting it, like a teacher with her angry red pen.
I will be going through this garbage one bit at a time, and I will separate it into different blog posts so that it will be easier to navigate, the same way he did on his website. It will take me quite a bit of time to do this, but thankfully, despite the fact that I, like my friend here, have limited spare time, I can squeeze in a bit here and there to deal with things that are important to me.
And doing my part to rid the world of more disinformation, twisting of facts and bending over backwards to smear "good" all over something which is demonstrably bad, is one of those things that is actually important to me.
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