The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

I have to admit that on some levels, I like trolls. I appreciate the effort it takes to engage in one losing effort after the next, hoping to chip away at an armor you know you can’t penetrate. It takes endurance and dedication to push your way into a room full of people aligned against you and then antagonize them ceaselessly, knowing the whole time that you’re ultimately going to lose the fight and probably get banned or blocked or whatever. I also like the way they maintain bridges and come up with clever riddles.

But what I don’t like is when they try to paint a veneer of intellectualism over their self-congratulatory, masturbatory hobby obsession. At least have the courage to admit that what you’re engaged in is impotent antagonism. Hell, my entire show is dedicated to the proposition of impotent antagonism and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But you’ll never hear me pretending that my show is an ‘intellectual’ endeavor. It’s a string of frustrated, powerless, antagonistic ramblings that may or may not make you laugh depending on the depravity of your sense of humor. There’s nothing intellectual about that.

Unfortunately, too few trolls are willing to be that honest with themselves. They like to pretend that their mom’s basement is a fortress; a lone citadel in fallen empire and that they are the final guardian of truth that shall persevere against the hordes of minds too broken to agree with what they themselves simply know to be true. Take as an example some sub-dermal infection that showed up here yesterday to point out what a bunch of homophobes atheists are.

In response to my post yesterday about whether or not atheists are “angry at god”, he left a seemingly innocuous comment asking what, precisely, atheists were so angry about.

I thought I’d made it clear in the post, but I’d also made it clear how bad theists are at understanding what “I don’t believe in your fairy tale” actually means, so I distilled the essence of the argument to a single sentence for him/her:

The implications of a group asserting social jurisdiction on the perceived authority of an imaginary being.

And while I already suspected something rotten under the bridge, it was not until then that the inquisitor revealed their troll-like nature. The response was to link to a blogpost so stupid it forces spontaneous neuronal suicide. I won’t be linking to it here (that jackass already has one undeserved link on my blog), but I can distill the point that this fucktard was trying to make in a quick syllogism:

• When I argue with atheists, sometimes they get upset and call me names.
• Sometimes these names include anti-gay slurs and implications that I love the cock.
• Ergo, all atheists are homophobes.

It may seem like a strange assertion to say that atheists, a group that is all but universally in favor of gay rights against an opposition that is all but universally religious in origin are somehow “anti-gay”. But don’t worry, this human-shaped pile of nut-butter wouldn’t make such an allegation without rock-solid evidence. Why, he/she presented several cherry-picked, out-of-context, unverifiable comments from a blog. Talk about incontrovertible! As we all know, if a person says something in the comments section of a website, clearly their statement is indicative of the larger feelings of whatever group you have chosen to associate them with.

So I politely pointed out that trolling is a dangerous game and that when you engage in it, you should know that at any point, you might get accused of taking it up the ass. And then this monkey-spunk-gargling scrotum wart offers a defense so stupid I had to blog about it:

I wasn’t trolling, I was debating evolution.

Oh, well in that case…

Look, if you want my intellectual sympathy, don’t start off by admitting that you were engaged in something that is almost criminally stupid. If you start the story with something like, “So I’m debating the theory of gravity…”, “So I’m trying to convince this guy that the moon really is made of green cheese…”, “So I’m arguing with this idiot who thinks water is somehow wet…” or, “I was debating evolution…” you’ve already revealed yourself to be a horribly misguided, intentionally ignorant promoter of wanton stupidity. And you think somehow that will shield you from the accusation of being a troll?

You can pretend that you’re “debating” evolution if you want to, but you’re lying and nobody believes the lie but you. The science is in, the data is conclusive, the proof is in the pudding: evolution is true.  There is nothing to ‘debate’. Sure, there’s still plenty to learn and there is a healthy scholarly debate about the mechanisms and specifics of evolution, but if you’re trying to pretend that there’s an intellectually defensible way to debate the very fact that evolution happened, is happening and is responsible for the biodiversity we see on earth, you are not engaged in “debating”, it’s “denying”.

Oh… and trolling.