ChristianGovernance Report – October 18, 2010
Atheist guerilla warfare exposed
By Tim Bloedow

It has been very interesting engaging with atheists over the past couple of weeks. They came looking for us, finding our website, it seems, due to exposure by a PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Mr. Myers is brash about his own atheism, declaring that his website is about “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” If these people are his “disciples,” he, as a professor, should be thoroughly embarrassed.

One of the most evident characteristics of these atheists was their demand that you produce evidence for your views and your charges against them. There is nothing essentially wrong with this expectation, but these manipulative and dishonest people made this demand in a particular context. If you engaged them at all, you would start to learn that when you gave them evidence for your views, they would simply dismiss it, often not engaging with it at all, and because they didn’t acknowledge your defense, they would then accuse you of being irrational and pathetic for not producing any evidence for your views.

These atheists would also demand that you lay out the material backing up your position. If you told them to go and look for it themselves because you know how easy it is to find on the internet, or if you even just tell them, that if their interest is genuine, they should just keep reading your own website, you again got accused of not having a defense, of not having rational reasons to back up your claims.

On numerous occasions, I accused these atheists of engaging in guerrilla warfare, trying to wear down their enemies by sucking them into a long, drawn-out battle, demoralizing them at the same time with fraudulent accusations and sarcastic, mocking criticism. I am sure that if I bothered to look, I’d find a book somewhere called “Atheist Battle Strategies Against Christians.” The tactics used by some of them were so repetitive and robotic, as though they were brainwashed disciples of some cult leader.

Last week, I attended a local talk by a guest speaker from Creation Ministries International. In his presentation, he provided at least one quote from an influential evolutionist which revealed the evolutionist strategy in the government schools against creation as being a strategy of mocking, not hostility. They want to make belief in creation seem “silly.” Most of us will probably acknowledge that being humiliated, and made to look like a fool, is worse to our self image than facing direct hostility. The evolutionists know this, so that is a key tactic for them. It certainly came out in the hostility of these atheists commenting on our ChristianGovernance site.

We can have a good discussion about what the right way is for Christians to deal with such attacks. We know that Elijah mockingly humiliated the priests of Baal. But we also see many exhortations to speak with gentleness. At any rate, due to the evident lack of sincerity and constant mocking of these atheists, those of you reading through some of the back-and-forth will see that at times I was quite derisive and condescending in my replies. This wasn’t for the purpose of revenge, but to expose the absurdity of their logic, and the incoherence of their arguments. Even if this didn’t help them, it would hopefully help thoughtful readers see, not simply how wrong atheism is, but how truly pathetic the worldview is.

I finally got fed up with one person who was consistently manipulative when, in the midst of what I thought could finally be a reasonable conversation, he changed the terms of the discussion on me in order to protect his position and marginalize mine, not with reason, but with sleight of hand. So we deleted all his comments from our website, instead of allowing him to use ChristianGovernance as a forum for his bigoted and childish comments.

So what did this fellow, “Etch,” do?

In response to a brief comment of mine – “It’s excellent the # of Ph.D. holding scientists are on board with that 6-day creation org.” – he wrote: “I’m glad that you agree that Ph.D.s are a sign of educated authority, however the University where it was obtained is relevant (because of the existence of Diploma Mills), and the subject it was obtained in is relevant. Just because someone has a doctorate doesn’t mean they know everything, and it’s been shown that a disproportionate number of ID and creationist supporters with Ph.D.’s are Engineers, who aren’t particularly qualified for the topic, unlike Biologists, Geologists and Physicists who are. I can try to find the statistics if you like.”

So, he makes this allegation about the qualifications of creation scientists. I drop over to Creation Ministries International and look over their list of speakers and find people with credentials in a diversity of fields. So note the context: He dismisses credentialed scientists who are creationists by saying a “disproportionate number” are not qualified in the appropriate areas of study. He doesn’t use specific numbers. He doesn’t say what percentage. He insinuates that although not all these scientists have the necessary qualifications, not enough have the right qualifications to make creation science credible.

In this more general context, my intent was not to capitulate to his guerrilla warfare and do the exhaustive research myself to determine such numbers. I did, however, produce a few different areas of expertise among the CMI speakers, and I listed the biographies for two of them.

In response to that, “Etch” displays his deceit and aggressive dishonesty. He writes: “Yep. Two scientists totally disprove that clearly a disproportionate number of creationist supporters are engineers. Are you intentionally bad at reading what people write?”

Perhaps “Etch” is one of the worst fools among modern atheists. Otherwise how can one see his response as anything other than a malicious and cunning deception, and another guerrilla warfare attempt at demoralization. I didn’t bring two examples to him. I listed four different fields of expertise among the CMI speakers – horticulturalist, chemist, medicine, zoology – and provided the bios for two of them. Everything in the context of my comments, and “Etch’s” comments to which I was responding, indicated that the info I was providing was representative, not the sum total of what was available. But “Etch,” desperate to shore up his defense of Atheism, had to use deceit, mocking me for supposedly having only two examples. Even he acknowledged that he didn’t have the information at hand to back up his initial claim. He wrote, “I can try to find the statistics if you like.” But, he holds me to a higher standard that he doesn’t hold himself to, by, in effect, expecting me to have all the information at hand that I needed for a defense, and therefore he pretends to assume that I presented all my information, and mocks me for having only two names to produce.

The deceit, the dishonesty, the lies, the ignorance, the manipulation is astounding. And it’s on display for everyone to see. Yet, one of his atheist colleagues – “joe” – who’s also been active on our site comes to his defense when I post a notice saying I am taking down all of “Etch’s” comments. Instead of showing any real interest in the essence of the offence and analysing the discussion between myself and “Etch” to see what was offensive, he also pulls a guerrilla warfare stunt with his knee-jerk accusation against Christians of being embarrassed at their lack of defense. I’m not posting these pathetic comments by “joe” either. But he wrote: “It was only a matter of time before Timothy got so embarrassed that he started banning the only people making logical comments… So predictable. And these clowns wonder why nobody respects them, or takes them at all seriously. … For the record: instead of banning people you could just point out all of the places they’re wrong… oh yeah – they’re right and you’re wrong, and so you have no other option than to delete and ban. How embarrassing for you…”

And “Etch,” maintaining his arrogant, self-righteous posture, also takes the same line instead of acknowledging his manipulative, deceitful, ignorant tactics. In a post that I left up for a few hours, he wrote, “If you look at my first comment on this blog, I didn’t expect it to actually survive moderation, because censorship is the response of those who have no arguments.”

Meanwhile, we left that post up for days as well as many other posts and had some dialogue with him on some of them. But he and his atheist colleagues still fall back on their visceral hatred of Christians or Christianity and their presumptive bigotry that we are ignorant and censor competing views. You won’t receive respect or deference for acting contrary to their bigoted presumptions. They’re out to get you. You can write the atheist script after a day of discussion with them because it’s so predictable and robotic. They use aggression instead of argumentation and mockery instead of ideas. I commented to another atheist during the week that I was more scared of an atheist with a knife or a gun than an Islamic radical because some of them seem to hate Christians just as much, and there’s no evidence that they possess any intellectual or moral restraint.

“Etch” had a few other things to say, but he’ll have to move on to more interesting territory now. I told him to stick around for a few more days because I was preparing an analysis for our ChristianGovernance supporters on this matter that he might want to read before his final departure.

An important point to be made from this kind of interaction and conflict is that there is no meeting ground between God’s truth and hostile worldviews. Adherents of both talk past each other because their presuppositions and fundamental convictions of what is true and real are different. In other words, you can’t argue someone into the Kingdom of God. The best way to communicate truth to them is simply to declare it. Declare the Word of God to them. Affirm it in its truth and relevance. They don’t like it unless God is working conversion in their hearts, but it has the power of God behind it, working with it to accomplish God’s purposes. That is His promise regarding His word. Our philosophy and argumentation does not receive the same guarantee. And when we choose to use it instead of the Bible, atheists and others don’t respect the compromise either. Sometimes they see it as hypocrisy because they know better than we do what we should believe and declare. There were some provocative quotes along those lines from evolutionists in the CMI presentation I saw last week.

Don’t abandon the Word of God – and don’t let mockers and scoffers intimidate you. The Word of God is a sword. It slices and dices and penetrates – far more effectively than any knife or gun in the possession of a hostile atheist.