Mitch Versus the Monster

The following is a script I wrote for a response to ProfMTH’s comments on my vid titled, “It’s Time to Go, ProfMTH!” In this, the monster who ate Mitch at the end will explain why Mitch’s excuse for wrongly portraying John 16:5 as occurring at the Last Supper doesn’t wash, and also why his dismissal of the importance of location doesn’t wash.

I may or may not turn it into an actual vid…we’ll see if ProfMTH actually tries to foist these excuses in one of his own first.

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And now it’s time for Fundy Atheist Follow Up. Here to follow up – Nigel Monster.

Hello everyone. Nigel here. It’s rather slow here lately so we’ve decided to follow up on a couple of excuses that Mitch gave us for his erroneous presentation. Tally ho.

Let’s start with the simpler one – where we called Mitch down for falsely presenting the statement of John 16:5 as made at the Last Supper rather than on the way to Gethsemane. He gave the rather petulant excuse that:

There's no error. I was telling the story in a quick way.

Hmm. Telling the story in a quick way. Well, if that’s true then we can perhaps excuse it somewhat if it were not essential to the claim of error – more on that shortly. But does this claim to be telling the story in a quick way bear out?

Mitch didn’t quite say what he meant here and it could mean one of two things.

One thing it could mean is that he intended for his video presentation to be quick so as not to in some way hamper viewers – as though perhaps the change of scene might make the video too long, or too confusing to viewers.

If that is the case, then that doesn’t bear out at all. Indications are that Bible Blunders #1 was released on July 22, 2009. It’s length is 1:38. However, Bible Blunders #2 was released only three days later. It’s length is 3:00 – nearly twice as long. And it includes several changes of scene and much more complex graphics.

So then. It seems hard to swallow that anything changed between the release of these two videos that ought to have made viewers of Mitch’s programs more accepting of longer presentations, or changes of scene. So that can’t be it.

On the other hand, Mitch might say that he was trying to tell the story quickly because he had not enough time personally to make something more detailed.

But, then again, the release of Bible Blunders #2 a mere three days later – of Bible Blunders #3 a mere four days after that – of Bible Blunders #4 a mere week or so after that – well, these all tell us that Mitch wasn’t in any sense under the gun timewise in a way that forced him to have to tell the story quickly. Certainly no one was imposing any deadline on him.

So. This bit about wanting to tell the story in a “quick way” – if you ask me, it’s a lot of (foghorn sound effect).

That’s the simple one. Now let’s look at Mitch’s main argument shall we? He said:

… the location is utterly irrelevant. It's the same group of people on the same night talking about the same thing in a relatively short amount of time.

Mmm, no. Same people, same night, close in time – all irrelevant, you see, because the questions at hand are related to travel and location. In short, not the same place. The old bean tried an analogy as an excuse:

If one evening, while a friend & I were in my apartment, I asked her a question & she answered it, and then a bit later that evening while we were walking down the street my friend complained that I wasn't asking her the same question I'd asked & she'd answered, the location wouldn't make her complaint any less odd.

Not so at all though – not if the question is specific to location: “Where are we going?” And that’s especially so if the question is asked the first time and answered, and then in the second instance, the parties effect some physical movement towards a location that would be incongruent with the prior location.

Put another way: The trip to Gethsemane certainly would not be perceived as congruent with Jesus’ earlier answer to the “where are you going” question – unless God the Father was waiting in Gethsemane for them, eh? And that’s hardly something anyone would have in their mind, especially if the disciples had no hint that they were even heading for Gethsemane.

So – sorry Mitch old boy. Nice try though.

Mitch: MMMmmmm (from inside monster)

Oh do hush up.

Farrell Forgotten

Things are pretty stale over at Farrell Till country these days. The last new articles by the weasel were added in May 2008. Prior to that there were single articles added in February and September 2007. 2006 was the last year there was any serious activity.

Over on the forum, things aren’t much better. The last message was posted in 2009, by one of Farrell’s regular sad sacks, who wrote rather plaintively:

I think it's just a shame that this board is here but is going to waste. Not only do I think it's a good place for members of the list to meet and continue discussion here, but it might draw new members and attention to Farrell's website as a whole.

New members? How droll. Prior to this desperate shovel, the last post had been nearly two years earlier, and there had been only 27 posts since the whole thing started. That’s not counting all the messages that were once there by Viagra spambots. Maybe Farrell should invite them back.

It’s not too hard to see why Farrell used to scream until his head burst demanding that I link to his fundy-atheist foolishness. My reply as always is that such people need to get traffic the Smith Barney way – they need to earn it. Farrell knew he couldn’t do that, and the results are clear now that he’s being ignored.

Oh, there are reasons his production is down, I’m sure he’d say: He’s gone the way of writing fiction these days (though I would say that’s not actually a change), as I just now uncovered a blog of his in which he offers a single post in January, 2010, pushing his fictional writing (he now has two fiction e-books out). Interestingly, he tells the reader of that blog:

Those who may want to read my religious writings can Google my name and find them listed there, but this blog will focus only on my fiction.

They can Google his name and find them? Isn’t that what I’ve been saying all this time? Can we now call him Farrell “No Links” Till?

The aforementioned blog isn’t much more inspiring, though. It has had just that one entry, and one obeisant comment, not surprisingly by the same sad sack that last posted on Farrell’s forum. I also found another blog with a single entry dated April 2010 in which Farrell complains about grammar and spelling errors in letters sent to him by his e-book editor. This blog entry has only 4 comments, 1 by Farrell himself and one by a spambot selling lottery prizes. Those spambots sure do like him.

But all that’s not any sort of explanation for why he isn’t getting any sort of persisting legacy, as he no doubt hoped he would. It doesn’t look like anyone cares about the fiction books, either, and they’re not helping him any. He once bragged about how a Google search turned up so many more hits for him than it did for me. These days a Google search for “Farrell Till” brings up a mere 3,290 results.

It wasn’t hard to anticipate that someone whose primary weapon was the 10,000-word off-topic bloviation would end up this way. One reason I said I’d not respond to him any more was because it was clear that he was one of several who leeched parasitically off those they responded to in order to draw attention to themselves. As expected, now that no one is responding, no one is paying attention either. Bloviation just doesn’t have a very good shelf life.

Farrell’s right where he should have been all along – with a disappearing legacy that was never bigger than his mouth in the first place.

Laziness, Inc. Part 3

Ministry associate Nick Peters told me about a sign he saw on a van that said, “Life's Too Short To Clean Your Home.” It reflects a sort of laziness that permeates modern Western life these days, much like the copy on the side of a box containing a projection clock my wife and I once received as a gift (which did not work, by the way):

Go ahead

Stay in bed

With [this projection clock] you don’t even have to lift your head.

I think that’s a good way to thematically close out our look at objections from the bums at Laziness, Inc.

You say inerrant copies would implicitly coerce people into conversion. But don’t you also say that the evidence we have now is sufficient for faith? Wouldn’t inerrant copies be “more than sufficient”?

No – coercive elements (whether inerrant texts or not) would not be "sufficient" for anything in the way of faith. This objection makes the standard bungle of equating “faith” with belief; it is not that, but loyalty, and coercion does not produce loyalty – it produces resentful and disloyal people just along for their own self-interest, like those who are too lazy to do the spadework needed for a depth understanding of the Bible.

And of course, let’s not abuse John 20:24-9 on this either. It is precisely because these klutzes don’t have contextualized meanings of words like pistis that they continually abuse this story for their purposes, thinking their “plain reading” is sufficient – and all it takes is a very tiny amount of searching to uncover the meaning of pistis in its patronage contexts. Whining about the Bible not being “clear” on points like this, because of our own willful deficiencies in understanding, is pure laziness and nothing more.

Bottom line is this: The critics at Laziness, Inc. deny that they are asking for much, and cry incessantly about the detailed and allegedly convoluted, subjective, or contradictory answers they get from our side. In other words, those who call themselves freethinkers are whining about God requiring them to think, which is not only ironically delicious, but also says volumes about their relative maturity, and just how useless they would be as putative disciples.

You said your point about the Declaration of Independence’s copies being under tight guard proves your point. But this is just a case of supply and demand in action.

Precisely! And if the copies of the Bible were inerrant, there would inevitably be a choke point on the “supply” restricting the copies to those who could pay the price for them – as happened with relics. Yet the demand for these inerrant Bibles would be extraordinarily high.

But I have an inerrant copy of the Declaration of Independence right here. I bought it for a few bucks at a gift shop.

So what? This has no application to the matter up until the time of rapid and accurate duplication techniques which ensured that making accurate copies didn’t involve a lot of effort – and it also involves a work that is a mere handful of words (the Declaration) versus a work which is a huge volume (the Bible). It wouldn’t take a divine effort to keep copies accurate now, or of just a few words; in contrast to keep a large document inerrantly copied, using only ancient techniques of copying, would require divine intervention.

Well, those early copies of the Declaration weren’t signed or written by the Founders. They’re just from the time of the Revolution, so they don’t have any prestige value as you said.

Wrong. Again, this is nothing more than proof of my point. If they weren’t even touched by the Founders, yet are considered deserving of all that security, how much more so the inevitably rare copies of the inerrantly-copied Bible? Rarity and prestige value are two sides of the same coin: The rarity grants prestige, and the prestige is what enabled the rarity in the first place.

And so, in the end, the couch potatoes have nowhere to hide – though I daresay they’ll end up on Gehenna’s couch in just the way they have asked.