Preamble

I probably won’t be around for awhile. I’ve been doing some introspection tonight, trying to get to the root of my fascination with pathological liars. Well, along with doing some more rather heavy inner searching, I’ve decided to write a somewhat formal treatment on the subject. It’ll be a good writing exercise, if nothing else. Hopefully in a few weeks or so, I’ll have something comprehensive, as well as cogent (fingers crossed!).

Psychological investigation has revealed that lying is and has always been a ubiquitous facet of the human condition.  I hope to go into the history, the science, as well as the way the internet has paved broad new thoroughfares for liars to hock their wares upon. Can internet prevarication be considered a new art form? And how does religion play into all this? I mean, these folks seem to be walking a knife’s edge between ethical mandate and some inner drive to revel in their deceitful natures, don’t they? Like I said, it all fascinates me, so I’ll try to follow through on this just as quickly as I can, in between other projects.

If things wind up taking longer than expected, I’ll pop in for an update or two. Thanks for your patience, ye handful of visitors to this blog. Until I return, feel free to browse. 🙂

UPDATE: Wow, a lot of hits the last couple of days. People love a ruckus!

 

UPDATE: Might have to put this stuff on hold for awhile. I have some writing to do that might actually make me a little money, which is always foremost on my list of necessities, unfortunately. But I’ll try to keep checking in when I can, and commenting on cl’s more outrageous stuff as time and interest permit. Oh, and here’s a hint: Keep an eye on what cl ignores, and you’ll learn a lot about him. You know, read between the lines. LOL!

For those who care, anyway. 🙂

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That’s it for today

Well THIS was certainly a fun way to spend an afternoon! Phew! Unfortunately, I have to go to work and leave all the last words to cl (which is pretty much always the case). Anyway, to sum up:

cl uses sockpuppets

cl posts under different IPs to mask his sockpuppet activities

Hmm; actually, I guess that’s about it, at least as far as cl’s concerns go. Concerns, btw, which he manufactures to avoid the vastly larger scope of his duplicitous nature. In the meantime, he just sort of skips over the meat of the issue, because, after all, he’ll never ‘fess up to that stuff until he gets caught red handed again, which’ll happen sooner or later, I suppose. That’s his modus, folks. Deflection of criticism through hyper-literal escape routes. Works every time, eh? LOLOL! At least, for some. For others…yawn. It’s all old news, isn’t it? 

But, like I said, it was a fun way to fritter away the afternoon, but the party’s over, time to call it a day. He writes and writes, and I write and write, and eventually I’ll state something poorly, or incompletely, and cl will jump on it and wring any saving grace he can muster out of it, and at the end of the day he’ll walk away feeling justified; nay, righteous; and the world will go on its merry way until tomorrow. 

Rest well, nutcase. I had a good time. 🙂

A commenter says…

Well, the posse is speaking out over at TWIM, now accusing ME of the stuff I’m accusing cl of via IPs. BIG difference, folks, although I don’t expect cl’s supporters to be very objective in defense of their team mate. Yep, I admittedly used an online proxy here, exactly because I didn’t want cl to catch onto who was parodying him, AND I admitted to it WITHOUT getting caught, after I was done with the parody bit, unlike cl, who ‘fessed up ONLY after the fact of being exposed. Oh, and I continue to use a proxy when I’m on cl’s site, because cl has demonstrated that he’s not above handing out his commenters’ IPs and email addys when the urge hits him, despite the fact that his site explicitly states that such information will NOT be posted to the public.

Rather than post Karl’s and cl’s lovefest in entirety, I thought I’d zone in on something Karl said that I thought was pertinent:

He is dishonest because if he is able to track comments via IP address therefore he should know many people comment using different IP addresses and this in-of-itself doesn’t mean much but he is presenting it as a smoking gun for his case.

No, Karl, this in itself DOESN’T mean much, but of course, my citing it is only icing on the cl-is-a-big-fat-liar 45 layer cake. My god, man, look at it in context, for Christ’s sake! LOLOL! Then again, look who I’m talking to, a guy who concludes that Richard Dawkins is an atheist on the basis of one incident that Dawkins himself brushed off almost immediately after:

And I am pretty sure that had something to do with his stance on religion.

Well, at least Karl said ‘pretty sure’, which puts him in somewhat better stead than cl. Anyway, Karl, I’d politely suggest that you read the transcripts before jumping on cl’s duplicitous bandwagon, and interpret the IP thing in that light. Or not.

cl’s folly

https://thewarfareismentalfanboy.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/for-joseph-with-a-j-43/

Just a reposting of the transcripts cl keeps citing in his own defense, having to do with some hi-jinks of some three years back . Now I ask you, is this evidence of an ‘experiment’ by cl to put those nasty atheists in their places, or has he merely fucked up on his sockpuppeting technique, clicking the wrong alias in his dropdown screen (remember, ‘sfatheist’ also commented on his blog, the day before, I believe, but that ‘sfatheist’ post mysteriously disappeared right after he got caught with his pants down. Unfortunately for cl, I’d already seen it). You might also note that cl has ONLY confessed to the sockpuppetry that he screwed up on, which represents only a fraction of his duplicitous activities. Anyhow, read the transcripts in the link above, and make up your own minds. 🙂

A question

Ah, it was only a matter of time before cl decided to get others to weigh in regarding our little tussle. That’ll be enlightening…not! LOL! Anyway, a question for any of you Christians who happen by. Will liars really be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity? And will cl be one of them, or does he have an ‘out’ card for some reason? Also, is cl a Christian, or a POE? From rationalwiki:

Poe’s Law states:^[1]

“

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

”

Poe’s Law is an axiom suggesting that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between parodies of religious or other fundamentalismand its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane. 

I’ll admit, I’m torn. On the one hand, cl’s over-the-top hypocrisy and other nonsense brands him as a poe in my mind. But, REALLY, for this long, and to this depth? It’s really hard for me to imagine. Also,  I’ve seen other apparent Christians of the same stripe, playing the same games, so my vote is ‘no’. He’s the real deal, which is frightening in itself. No, not frightening, really. Disturbing is a better word. 

Anyway, if I ever find out he IS a poe, I guess that’ll be egg all over MY face, eh? In my heart of hearts, I really wouldn’t mind, since the alternative is infinitudes more ickier.

Here’s a good one

Ah, the ol’ double standard rears its ugly head yet again:

cl says:

You’re psycho-analyzing again (and in fact this is decent evidence suggesting you are Jim Crawford and not somebody impersonating Jim Crawford, because for Jim Crawford it was often about attributing motive and acting as if that assumed motive was established fact).

Contrasted with:

cl says:

I did not know that Richard Dawkins was fondled by a “Latin master” when he was 9, but if this “Latin master” was a religious figure, that explains just about everything about Dawkins’ stance on religion. Does anybody know anything else about this?

Which, of course, can be contrasted with this:

cl says:

 I didn’t smear Dawkins. I merely reported true, public information about the man, and SUGGESTED his negative experience with a religious figure MIGHT explain SOME orPOSSIBLY all of his irrational, militantly anti-religious stance.

cl is what you might call an ‘argumental relativist’; meaning that he says pretty much whatever supports his premise at the time, no matter what diametrically opposed crapola he might say to support his premise somewhere else, even within the body of the same post, at times. In short, he’s a practitioner of throwing shit against the wall until something sticks, or at least leaves a stain. He’s the master of inane justification and rationalization of his own actions, the arbiter of his own deceits, the supreme polywog in his pond of self-delusion, never quite growing into his own froghood. I have to admit, it’s fun to watch him splash around. 🙂

cl’s ‘challenge’

So, cl has challenged me to a chatbox face-off; a challenge I have declined. Why? Well, other than the fact that I’ve already answered his challenges on this blog in excruciating detail, using in many cases HIS OWN WORDS against him, there’s this from RationalWiki:

The Gish Gallop is a skeptics’ jargon term, named after creationist Duane Gish, for the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time.

The Gish Gallop is also cl’s preferred mode of operation in debating his opponents in the threads, so you can imagine what it must be like debating him live. Oh, he can insinuate that I’m afraid, or inferior, or whatever, but really, what would be the point? I’ve engaged people live online hundreds of times over the years, with one of two results. We either wind up having an amiable conversation, or it all ends in lots of heat and negligible light. I gave most of that shit up some time ago out of sheer frustration, and am not of a mind to revisit it with the likes of cl. He likes warfare, but I’ve grown out of it for the most part, preferring to lob shells of truth and wisdom into the enemy’s camp and watch the melee ensue.

cl, if you ever have any viable refutation of my charges that won’t make people squirt milk out their noses in disbelief, bring it on. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and move on. Or, better yet, come clean. That would take guts, and I’d actually gain some respect for you. Otherwise, I’ll go on considering you the joke that you are in the eyes of hundreds. Have a nice day! 🙂

Internet Christianity

You know, when I was a Christian, I tried very hard to lead a ‘morally good’ life, according to how I thought that phrase applied in the context of my Christian walk. I’m not saying I always succeeded, but I really did my best to let love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance (wow, I’m surprised I remembered all that. Galatians?) hold sway in my life. I contrast that attitude held by myself and most of my Christian friends back then with what I sometimes see on the net; and I am, frankly, bewildered and even ashamed. cl and his disingenuous argumentation laced with blatant lies throughout. Not to mention the sock puppetry! Vox Dei with his psychopathic arrogance and thoroughly dislikeable manner. Others who are just as bad in their own ways. It all just gives me a lot more respect for those who know very little about what they profess to believe, but KNOW that they don’t know, and yet have managed to integrate the best aspects of their religious experience. In short, they walk the walk, and part of me really respects that.

A popular saying amongst Christians these days is ‘What Would Jesus Do?” I’ll admit it makes me giggle when I think of Jesus inventing imaginary friends, then pretending to argue with them in front of the congregation of the faithful. Or obviously contradicting himself, then getting all pissy like a 5 year old when he’s called on it. Or making references to ‘bukkake’, the pornographic term for a circle of men ejaculating on a woman’s face, in the context of refuting some interlocutor’s position, something Vox is fond of doing. Or is that what Jesus meant when he said ‘Come unto me, ye who are laden’? Doubtful.

Anyway, it strikes me that these insult comics for Christ really aren’t Christians at all. They would like to be, since it seems what motivates them above all else is their fear of going to hell, but they just don’t have what it takes to turn it around. And so they pretend, and all their blogging does is fulfill the twofold purpose of carrying on the pretense in the hopes that Jesus will have pity on them at the end, as well as to unleash their deceit and vitriol on an unsuspecting public. I think that’s called ‘exercising one’s demons’, and by their demeanor I suspect these particulars sons of Lucifer are using steroids or their hellish equivalent.

I don’t know, maybe it’s time for these guys to grow some balls and repent of their wickedness, or sumpin’. You know, get down on their knees and grovel a bit in the hope that Big Daddy hasn’t cut them out of the will yet. In his recent post, cl has hinted at Christian deconverts being turned over to a reprobate, unsalvageable state as the reason why they can’t respond to God anymore. Perhaps this reflects cl’s own fears about his own salvageable status, hm? How about it, cl? You and Jehovah, mano a Godo? I’d pay to see that!

LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

UPDATE: These verses just came to mind-

Romans 6

King James Version (KJV)

6 What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?

² God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?

³ Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

⁴ Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

I’m thinking that maybe some of these guys stopped at the first verse, and interpreted it in the affirmative. Read on, lil chilluns, read on!

Converts, deconverts, and reconverts

cl says:

 Does anybody know of any prominent, vocal or outgoing believers who became prominent, vocal or outgoing atheists, then reconverted? I’m asking because I have this hypothesis that once a deconvert has blasphemed and insulted enough, potential cognitive dissonance outweighs commitment to reason

So we’ve got this fellow. Once he wasn’t a Christian, then he was (convert), then he wasn’t again (deconvert). cl’s ‘hypothesis’ is that his hypothetical deconvert’s ‘commitment to reason’ isn’t adequate to bring him back around to cl’s truth, due to what I think can fairly be called ‘unreasonable biases’. Of course, cl is speaking in general terms here, and seemingly from his ‘gut’- a euphemism for opinions gleaned from personal experience as opposed to, say, testable or measurable indicators, or what some folks might call ‘solid evidence’. Or any evidence, really, other than cl’s own biases, which themselves might easily be subject to the same kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ cl is trying to label others with here. Fair enough. This is usually the kind of thing cl ostensibly echews when aimed in his direction; nevertheless, I’m game. Let’s participate in this little thought experiment, and see where it takes us.

I suppose the first thing to ask is, are original religious conversion experiences generally the result of reasoned contemplation? Here are a few points to consider when asking this question:

1. Most people belong to the religion they were raised to believe in, with some variance depending on the ecumenical tenor of the surrounding culture.

2. Most people ‘convert’ as children or young adults (I’m not sure how valid the term ‘convert’ is here, since for many folks belief is more a case of inheritance than conversion, but since the terminology is part and parcel to cl’s question, we’ll work with, keeping in mind that in many cases  it really doesn’t accurately represent the fact of the matter).

3. Most people convert with little to no understanding  of the history behind the stories and doctrines of the religion they’ve chosen; or, strangely enough, of the very doctrines they’ve chosen to believe in and adhere to.

4. Most people go through their whole lives worshipping at the altar of their choice without #3 ever having changed very much.

5. Most people convert for emotional reasons, or for reasons that, at best, have very little to do with protracted logical examination and/or discourse.

Indoctrination. Lack of life experience. Ignorance. All of these are general indicators of the conversion experience of most people, most of the time. Naturally there are exceptions, but since we’re talking along with cl about generalities, exceptions can be rightly ignored per this conversation. Moving on…

So, now that we’ve painted a picture of the average religious convert- albeit in somewhat broad strokes, but surely recognizable- I think we’re ready to more closely examine the religious ‘deconverts’ in question. Let’s take a hypothetical Christian named Chris Jebus, and see what makes him a potential deconvert. Let’s see, he believes in a God who promises him everlasting life and happiness if only he continues to believe, while at the same time threatening him with eternal damnation for unbelief. He’s surrounded by family, friends, and indeed by a whole culture who basically believes the same things he does, to varying degrees. He’s accepted into the flock through almost no effort on his own regarding the historical, philosophical or logical veracity of his own faith. And yet, and yet…for some reason, Chris Jebus is having doubts. But what on Earth could he be having doubts about?

At this point, I’m forced to turn to my own deconversion experience, as well as to the anecdotal evidence of those ‘prominent, vocal and outgoing’ atheists cl mentioned. And what do I find? Well, for the most part I find testimonies concerning questions about logical coherence, moral consistency, textual validity, historical accuracy, as well as an overall sense of intellectual discovery where, in the end, Christianity comes up wanting. In short, whereas reason was  usually a minor player in the conversion experience, it came to play THE crucial role in the DEconversion experience for the type of people under question. The deconversion almost never seems to come at once, but rather at the end of a ‘crumbling away’ of Christianity’s tenets in the mind of the deconvert. This is the way it was with me, and it’s also the way for most of the folks I’ve read about.

Christians have a saying. When something comes up that seems to go against the grain of their faith, and they just can’t find a way to mentally reconcile things, they’ll tell you “I’ve put that problem on the shelf for now.” Well, when Christians ask me what the crucial factor was in my ‘falling away’, and I’m pressed for time, I simply tell them “You know that shelf’ you guys talk about? Mine fell off the wall.’ It just wouldn’t hold the weight of close inspection, is all.

So, we’re finally to the question of potential reconverts, and cl’s ‘hypothesis’; which really isn’t a hypothesis at all, but only convenient wishful thinking. Are we truly talking about a case of cognitive dissonance outweighing commitment to reason, as cl puts it? Or is it more likely that reason itself supports the original decision to ‘deconvert’ in the first place? Put it this way. It’s easy to make a mistake. It’s usually a little harder to rectify that mistake; in fact, it can be VERY hard if you’ve invested your ego in that mistake, perhaps even spending a long, long time justifying to yourself and others that it really wasn’t a mistake at all. But once you’ve finally climbed over all the obstacles that prevented you from seeing that mistake, or from admitting that it was a mistake after all, why on EARTH would you want to crawl back down into the belly of that mistake again? Is that cognitive dissonance, or just plain good sense?

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” That’s about the size of things, cl. Deal with it.

Case study #237

Is that what you heard? If not, what did you hear?

You called it “crap” that “gets no love here”. What was I supposed to think that meant, if not something of no value (crap) to be dismissed (no love) from philosophy (what we’re doing)?

Do you see where I’m coming from and why I made the interpretation I did?

—PETER HURFORD, 7-5-2012, 10:24 PM | PERMALINK

Do you see where I’m coming from and why I made the interpretation I did?

C’mon man, I can’t answer your questions until you answer mine. I asked you if that was what you heard, where “that” denotes the position, “possible world thought experiments have no value in philosophy, whatsoever.” Is that what you heard? Yes? Or no? If no, what, exactly, did you hear?

—CL, 7-6-2012, 7:30 AM | PERMALINK

TWIM, where authentic discourse comes to die.