Confirming my suspicions
I kind of expected that Barefoot would crow loudly about my banning him. Just so you all know, in case you weren’t sure, it is clearly the case that I handle having my “views contradicted and [my] intellectual failings mocked.” Because, you know, Barefoot had me on the ropes and all (pfft – right).
Notice how quickly I’ve morphed from the most articulate, intelligent theist Barefoot has ever met into just one more quibbling, God-bothering supplicant crushed by his almighty intellect and overpowering reason.
That kind of snap turnaround has got to cause some neck strain.
As I said, this was pretty much expected: he’s not an individual too particularly familiar with humility, and it was only to be expected that the temptation to make one final attempt at mockery would be too great for him to resist. And while I don’t usually like to see my negative opinions of people confirmed, in this case I take a certain point of pride in seeing one final confirmation that the person whom I viewed, for a couple of weeks at least, as a worthy intellectual equal is really nothing more than a petulant man-child who thinks he has full license to say any insulting thing that catches his fancy and then act as though he is the victim when someone else is offended by a statement that is meant to offend.
In other words, a classic bully. I do hope that his wife meekly agrees with everything he says, because I cannot imagine that even mild domestic disputes in that household would resolve themselves peacefully or amicably.
Seriously, though, let’s quickly review one or two tiny little points of fact about this man who so clearly handed me my ass (or, wait, no, it’s still where it ought to be – heh) in our recent debates.
Did he contradict my views? Yes, quite clearly. He’s an atheist, I’m not, and he began from the very outset by taking a contradictory tone. That’s to be expected.
Did he mock my intellectual failings? This is a trickier question. He did in fact mock me, but is what he was mocking an intellectual failing? A better question might be who had the actual failure of intellect.
Let’s review for a moment. I produced two immense essays for Barefoot’s consideration, including one which cited heavily from Fides et ratio. Barefoot’s rebuttal to that essay, which evidently was too intricate and complex for him in its totality, was to focus on a single issue that arose from within it — the function of epistemology. Well and good, and this amusing discussion promoted a second essay that was a collection of thoughts on analytical methodologies of a non-scientific nature.
I waited about a week for Barefoot’s response to that.
He assured me, repeatedly, that he was working on it but that it was taking a fair bit of time and that he was a busy man.
I expected something profound, to say the least. His first essay, on epistemology, was good. His second was decent as well, even though it had a major flaw at its core which quickly allowed me to deconstruct it. So clearly, if this latest response was taking a while, it was bound to be a good one, right?
A week later, his response finally arrived.
And when I read it? Insults and snide comments, and one single irrelevant “counter”-example involving the First Council of Nicaea.
Now, I don’t know about the reader, but as a general rule it is not the place of a man who takes a week to think up a response that any seventh-grade bully could compose off the top of his head (except the bit about Nicaea, perhaps, but a quick Google-search only takes a minute more — five minutes if we allow for the fact that the computer may have to boot up) to claim the intellectual high ground in the debate.
And ultimately, it wasn’t really any kind of debate. I threw out immense volumes of information, and Barefoot could barely respond to 10% of it. He said nothing at all about any of that the former pope articulated so beautifully in Fides et ratio, which I excerpted very heavily. Nor did he really issue any meaningful rebuttals to what I said about non-scientific analytical methods, except for the aforementioned off-base remark about Nicaea (and that ain’t much). And there’s still the small matter of how I cornered him on his own logic in our discussion about rape and social coercion.
But hey, if he needs to think that he won this round, let him. No skin off my nose — some people are just needy like that.
So it’s with a huge smile on my face, O Reader, that I refer one last time to my once-esteemed opponent, now revealed to be a petulant, arrogant, bully who is probably taking in these words with pride as he reads them.
My readers, join with me in prayer for this man. I honestly can think of no other request I can make of you regarding him, and I can honestly think of nothing else I would wish upon him, save that people spare him a passing thought in their prayers, as we ought to do for anyone so lost and mired down in his crypto-positivism and self-importance.
Who, then, really suffers the failure of intellect?
Additionally: I think my banning him was premature and hasty; I’ve removed that restriction. My mistake. Barefoot is welcome to post his comments here again. Hey, even I need a laugh once in a while.
It’s a strange thing — initially, I didn’t want to get mired down in a festival of name calling with someone who had diminished himself from respected debate partner to combox troll, but the more I think about it the more all I can think to do is to feel a great swell of pity for people like that. What kind of need for attention, need to be right, need to pronounce others wrong at all costs and at the expense at the abandonment of reason, must a person have in order to engage in that sort of behaviour?
Barefoot’s not a threat — he’s just one more lost soul. I don’t need to ban him, and I shouldn’t have in the first place. My mistake — I acted out of anger and high blood pressure, and also out of disappointment. So he’s been reinstated on the site, although I for one doubt he’ll have much else to say.
He’s been sending a lot of readers my way, though, at least judging from the number of commentators on his post crowing about the now-reversed ban. That comments thread, actually, is interesting in a number of ways — I’ve had other atheistic commentators assure me up and down the wall that atheists do not come together to discuss their disbelief and their non-religion in the same way that religious communities do. And yet, when I note the commentators and the blogrolls that Barefoot has and participates in, that’s exactly what I see — an assembly of like-minded individuals sharing a common belief (because atheism is just that: a belief) who participate in a community assembly specifically convened around the context of their shared atheism. And who seem to do so on a semi-regular basis. In fact, I see an “Atheists Blogroll” that, if you think about it, really only exists for that purpose.
Sounds almost like a religion, doesn’t it?
P.S. For more concise analysis of Barefoot, his arrogance, and his typical modus operandi, see the comments for this article (thank you, Peter and Stephen). Apparently I’m not the first person Barefoot has tried to use as a soapbox, nor am I the first person to hand him his ass in a debate. I really pity people who count a sound defeat as a stunning victory. Do you have to take classes to get to be that delusional?
