From this manifesto:
It’s a pity you won’t be responding to this. You’ve been a very consistent little Hobgoblin about ignoring me completely. But I’m sure your defenders will protect you, and it isn’t like you can’t respond.
So you appointed yourself the resident GOTT (Guardian Of The Truth®), and embarked on a mission to destroy a man and his ideas. Your motivation, according to you, was to give him a “taste of his own medicine”. You stalked him for no other purpose. It was therefore personal everywhere you did it, including Great Debates. I wondered why you ignored me, especially in the early stages of your mission, since I was shredding your argument to pieces and you were just letting my responses go unanswered. I suppose it’s clear now. Like a Borg drone, you were singularly focused on one task, oblivious to the ship blowing up all around you.
It would almost be funny if your stated purpose were not so ignoble. Instead, it’s rather pathetic really. You targeted a man whose kindness and empathy for the feelings and views of others (including yours) are legendary. You wanted to destroy his morale. Prove him wrong. Shut him up. Give him the thrashing you thought he deserved. And now that your hubris has blossomed into full blown self-worship, you believe that you “won”. What you’ve won God only knows, but you seem to fancy yourself the victor.
I don’t know you from Adam and don’t care to, but I do know Poly. A few years ago, my wife and I visited him at his home near Raleigh. He and Skulldigger (his wife) were struggling with expenses, had no reliable transportation, an obsolete computer, and were about to lose their Internet connection. It was Christmastime, and we weren’t in great financial shape ourselves, but we (along with many others) responded. I’ve never made this public, but just to give you an idea of the scope of our response and his plight, we gave him $1,200. Others gave him cash also. Still others gave needed supplies, like food and clothing. One person I know gave a new computer.
His home was as humble as any I’ve seen. As best I recall, there were four rooms, no central heat or air, clutter everywhere from lack of storage, and extremely modest furnishings. But the love. Oh the love. Their smiles and gratitude, their genuine humility, their tears — we were touched in a way that we’ll never experience again. Our only wish was that we could have given more. And we have since been rewarded, incidentally, many fold. We believe God works like that. Though we sought nothing in return, our fulfillment (personal and financial) was complete.
Now, the reason I bring all this up is so people can see that you did not attack the giant that you perceived. You tilted at a windmill that did not exist. We took Poly and his wife out to dinner that evening, and I can’t count the times that he stipulated in the course of our conversations that he might be wrong. We discussed more politics than we did religion, but that same self-effacing humility is as abundant in one thing as another.
You were not attacking the guardian of liberal Christianity. You were mugging a man who would have given you the loot if only you had asked. Despite his meager means, he is generous with everything he has. He has taken in kids that other people called problems, and given them a loving and nurturing home. He measures his success not by material, not by arguments won, not by souls saved — but by the richness of the lives of those he helped.
Yeah, I know you think that your mission was important. And your defenders will doubtless point out how critical it is to fight ignorance. Y’all surely do seem to believe that you are Cecil’s little minions, carrying his torch. But with friends like you, Cecil doesn’t need enemies. A great contemporary philosopher, Daniel Dennett, said, “There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.” And that’s what you are for Cecil — a half-cocked sniper rifle with a faulty scope. You would be the last weapon he would reach for in his arsenal, and then only after he had tried pulling out his teeth and firing them from a slingshot.
That’s because you are so profoundly ignorant about so much. During your Rumsfeldian delusions about defeating the Ogre while adoring crowds tossed you flowers, you lacked certain knowledge that so many other people had. Knowledge like social skills, debating tactics and strategies, human emotion and response, planning an attack, selecting a target, and winning the hearts and minds of bystanders. If you had been half as smart as you imagined yourself to be, you would have attacked an asshole like me. Or a blithering poet like Tris. Or an emotional wreck like Siege.
Instead, being the knuckle head that you are, you attacked a man beloved by nearly all, atheist and theist alike. I suppose you thought that your victory would be sweeter if you could lick the blood of the biggest wildebeest in the herd. But the fact is that you didn’t even make the kill. All the arguments made against you that you ignored in your reckless quest still are there. Unaddressed. Standing against you like Hoover Dam against the river. You failed. On almost every level. Because even if you had destroyed him, you would have destroyed something the world so sorely needs: compassion and goodness the likes of which you cannot even comprehend.
Not only have you not proved Poly wrong, but now that you’ve revealed what an empty, pointless, and quite frankly psychotic goal you pursued, you’ve revealed yourself as nothing more than a polyp in the board’s rectum. I don’t know whether your admission of trolling (surely deliberately targeting a man and stalking him in Great Debates for nothing more than personal amusement is trolling) will get you banned or not. And I don’t know whether you’ll ever take me off your ignore list.
But I do know that Polycarp is the victor in your war with him. You’ve shot yourself in the foot. You now have the status of a misfired sperm. Your cause was never anything more than a personal vendetta, poorly conceived, laughably executed, and a waste of everyone’s time. At this point, there’s nothing to be done about any of that, but in the future, could you kindly confine your intellectual masturbation to the Pit where it belongs? Thanks loads.
