This comes right from my YouTube channel and I am actually shocked at the low-level of stupid comments that I get from people over there consistently. Some of it I can understand, given the beliefs that these people hold, but it ought to shock people who hold those beliefs just how poorly their brethren actually perform.

I wanted to take a second to point out some of the more recent examples and why, they’re just not getting the job done.

First, I wanted to point out a now-banned commenter that I tried really hard to accommodate, but they shot themselves in the foot far too many times. It was someone named Nathaniel Yates and I am convinced there is something wrong with him. His entire content was “I love Jesus” and “Atheism will die” and things like that. It was all highly repetitive, 3-4 word spam and he wouldn’t engage in any discussions with more than that. I figure religion (or something else) scrambled his brain. I and others tried, many times, to correct him and he’d always apologize, but within a week, he’d come back and do the same thing. I even put up a poll in the Community tab whether we should ban him and keeping him around only barely won out, only because people wanted to watch him make a fool of himself.

I was fine with that until he started posting “fuck atheism” and “fuck you”. That was the instant that he lost my good graces and  got banned. He’d been given more than enough rope to hang himself a dozen times over and that was the end of that.

I brought that up first though because that’s largely the kind of content that I see. It’s not 4-word stupidity, but the capacity of the religious to actually answer any questions or understand any criticisms seems painfully limited. I’ve had a number of people like this, but my current example is named Jeremy Crofutt. Now, he’s articulate, which is a plus, but he seems painfully incapable of understanding why nobody takes him seriously. When you argue with him, he doesn’t comprehend the criticisms, he just repeats the same behaviors time and time again.

For instance, he, like most Christians, loves to throw around Bible verses. Who cares? You’re talking to people who don’t respect the Bible. Why in the world would you keep doing that when your opponents aren’t going to take you seriously. I’ve asked him that. I don’t remember him ever coming up with a cogent reply.

He also stumbles into every trap there is with no help from the outside. Recently, he commented on a William Lane Craig video, trying to argue against what I’d said about slavery being “free labor”. Instead of actually accepting that slavery was a bad thing, he wants to quibble over details. Well sure, there are inherent costs in everything. If you keep horses to do work for you, you do have to feed and care for them, otherwise they die and you get no labor, but that’s just a sunk cost. Nothing in life is ever entirely free. That still doesn’t make slavery a good thing, which he seemed to be supporting. You can’t get around the fact that the Bible clearly advocates for chattel slavery and the American slave trade used the Bible as its primary support mechanism to justify it. It’s funny how you don’t see these idiots agreeing that slavery is now and was always a bad thing, even in the Bible. They can’t handle that. Sad, really.

Finally, I wanted to bring up another class of commenter, those being the philosophy nerds. I’ve been very critical of a lot of philosophy, for good reason, and I’ve seen a bunch of  people popping out of the woodwork to bow down and kiss philosophy’s ass uncritically because they really want it to be true. It’s the same reason you get people following morons like Jordan Peterson around. They’re looking for emotional comfort, just like the religious are.

However, in these instances, granted, they do tend to be largely coherent, until I challenge them on their conclusions, then they turn into the biggest theists around. “You just don’t understand!” How many times have we seen the religious making the same claim? Great, explain what I don’t understand and how you actually justify these things in any demonstrable way. It’s amazing just how fast these people disappear, often tossing childish insults behind them.

Why? Because they want it to be true! They have an emotional attachment to the ideas and I’m not remotely impressed by their emotions. It doesn’t matter what you want to be so, only what you can demonstrate actually is. This goes for everything, not just religion and they get the exact same treatment. Put up or shut up. It’s really not that hard. They can’t do the former so they run for the hills.

I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people to put their emotions aside and just think critically, but apparently there are a lot that can’t manage it. Even when I point out exactly what they’re doing, they can’t take a few steps back and realize where they’re going wrong. Why? Because they don’t care. In fact, they don’t like the fact that I point that out. I’ve had lots of theists complain that I’m mis-characterizing them but I’m not. It always comes down to fee-fees if you dig far enough and I think that at least some of them realize just how dumb that is, they’re just bothered that they’ve been exposed and made to look the fool. Maybe they ought to stop being fools in the first place?

Just a helpful hint.