The Serpent Who Would Not “Address” His Lies

by on May 28, 2017 at 3:56 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

anti-christophobia:

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Recently, I’ve been having a series of prolonged debates with a homosexual Tumblr activist who likes to parrot back the same arguments he learned from “Hopermains,” an unsourced website, made by an anonymous author, which is hosted on a free domain. Yes, thats right, I’m dealing with a gay guy who thinks the Bible is wrong because the modern equivalent of a Geocities website told him so.

Now normally, I wouldn’t resort to a “call out” post like this, except for the fact that this joker has resorted to an extreme version of the artful dodger strategy. Whenever he is proven wrong on any of his points, he merely changes the subject by bringing up a totally unrelated topic that was often disproved previously.

For example, if I disprove his claims that the Bible was mistranslated, he would counter by going off on a rant about “witch trials,” “the inquisition” and “abortion clinic bombings” even though those things have nothing to do with the Bible being mistranslated. When I prove that his arguments about the “witch trials,” “Inquisition” and “abortion clinic bombings” are wrong, he changes the subject to make a strawman argument suggesting I called him a false teacher. When I prove that I didn’t call him a false teacher (but also prove that he is one anyway), he changes the subject by citing “mixed fabrics” at me. When I prove that “mixed fabrics” is an absurd reference which he clearly doesn’t understand, he changes the subject by making an ad hominem insult at me. And so on, and on, and on like this we go. The whole time, he is openly lying and claiming that each point on which he was proven wrong is something he “addressed” previously.

Now, part of the problem is that these arguments have been taking place across multiple threads. It first started on a “call out” post he made telling “cishet white christians” that we need to stop making Jesus white and David straight. He got dogpiled by numerous people on that threat and eventually refused to respond any further. Since he wouldn’t respond to that any further, I tagged him on a thread which disproved his “witch trials” and “KKK” nonsense, a thread which disproved his attempts to retranslate the Bible, and a thread which demonstrated the worthlessness of the “Hopermains” site that he is drawing his arguments from. In each of those threads, he was subsequently proven to be wrong on multiple other issues as well, but in each thread he would simply ignore any other places he had been proven wrong and operate as if he had “addressed” any points that he didn’t want to talk about any further.

So it seems to me that the best way to put a stop to this is to begin keeping a running tally of all the places he has been caught in a lie, been proven wrong on a claim, or simply said something stupid. All of it will be kept in one place where he cannot pretend that it didn’t happen or that he “addressed” it previously.

First, a list of all the threads where I’ve debated him…

The first thread, his “cishet white christians” call out post.

The thread disproving his “witch trials” and other “naughty Christian” claims. (This is also where the “false teacher” incident takes place.)

The thread disproving his attempts to retranslate the Bible.

The thread which responds to “Hopermains,” which is where he is drawing his arguments from. (This is also where he cites “mixed fabrics” at me.)

Another thread disproving his “naughty Christian” claims. He has not attempted to provide any response to this one.

Topic #1: “Hopermains”

When I first spotted his absurd call out post against “cishet white christians,” I knew right away that this was another “Hopermains” fanboy.

“Hopermains” is a notorious website made by an anonymous author and hosted on a free domain, with a terrible design to top it all off. It has been repeatedly discredited, yet many homosexuals continue to use it as their source for absurd arguments claiming that there has been a grand 2000+ year long conspiracy to incorrectly translate Bible verses for the purpose of oppressing homosexuals. Naturally, our “Serpent” buddy is in the same boat.

However, when I first challenged him on Hopermains, he first denied it was his source, while aggressively defending it at the same time.

I don’t use Hoperemains as my source for anything but if your only way
to discredit them is to bash their site design and the anonymity of its
author…

That was obviously suspicious, so I continued to press him on it until he eventually admitted…

…Hoperemains … is one of the first
things I ever read that started me on this journey of investigating what
the Bible really had to say about homosexuality…

So he admits that “Hopermains” is what “started” his attempts to lie about the Bible, but he still denies that it is his “source” for the repetitive arguments that he is regurgitating from the site verbatim. He hasn’t offered any other sources that he supposedly gained his information from. I’ve continued to challenge him on the “Hopermains” issue and he no longer provides any response when I do so.

Topic #2: Certain words in the Bible have been translated incorrectly?

Without delving deeply into all the insane arguments he has made about this, I will go over a quick set of bullet points which proves this claim wrong.

Topic #3: The Witch Trials/Inquisition/Crusades/KKK/abortion clinic bombings/Westboro/etc, etc, etc…

As with many SJWs, whenever he finds himself on the losing side of the argument, he quickly tries to change the subject and portray Christians as some horrible group of perpetual evildoers… by citing examples from hundreds of years ago!

His favorite go-to argument is the “witch trials” but I’ve also caught him citing the “inquisition” and “bombings of [abortion] clinics“ in some of his rants…

Again, we won’t use this space to delve deeply into all of his absurd comments on these issues, but I will go over a quick bullet point list of the counter-points I’ve used to disprove this stupidity…

Topic #4: The Christian Left and the “Love” Argument

In another typical SJW maneuver, Captain Serpent has claimed that it is “unloving” for Christians to “hate” gay people. 

I already squashed this argument long before this guy came along. I wrote an entire article about it. 

I’ve repeatedly provided him with a link to this article and challenged him to provide a response. So far he won’t go within ten miles of this article. Clearly he hasn’t got any way to respond to it if he is this terrified of what I wrote.

Topic #5: The “Mixed Fabrics” Fiasco

I actually laughed out loud when I saw him trot out this beaten horse of an argument. This is the sort of pathetic reasoning I expect from low-grade atheists trying to attack Christianity for the first time. I even directly asked him if he got this from a “How to Debate Christians” book published by Christopher Hitchens. 

This “Serpent” fellow has been claiming to be a “Bible Scholar” ever since our first debate. So far, he hasn’t provided any credentials to verify this claim, while he has conversely continued to make stupid blunders like this where he has revealed that his knowledge of the Bible is roughly equivalent to that of the average college freshman.

Suffice to say I easily brushed this off by pointing out that the prohibition against “mixed fabrics” doesn’t apply to ANY fabric, but was against wool and linen. I even offered him a chance to go find me a shirt made out of wool and linen and I would gladly condemn it as sinful for him.

As usual, he provided no response. Instead, he tried to change the subject with an ad hominem insult.

Topic #6: David and Johnathan were NOT Gay

This is one of the absurd claims from his original call out post, and it is probably the one that got him pounced on by so many people telling him he was wrong.

I refuted this extremely thoroughly by citing numerous reputable sources;

No serious or expansive effort to describe David and Jonathan as homosexuals was made prior to Kinsey’s impact on our culture. As our culture changed, we simply changed the way we looked at the ancient text, even though the traditional interpretation of the text taught no such truth. Think about that for a minute. From the time that the text was originally written, when its readers were far closer to the action than we are today, the text was seen as a description of a deep heterosexual relationship between two men. Only recently has this been seen in a different way. There are only two possibilities here. One, there was a bias which suppressed the truth for thousands of years, or two, there is a new bias which is reinterpreting the truth.

Most evangelical Christians would drop their jaws in bewilderment if confronted with such an odd theory. Even people with minimal knowledge of the Old Testament know that (1) David was married to Jonathan’s sister, Michal—and he had a few other wives, and (2) David’s biggest blunder was his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba—a woman he saw bathing on a rooftop. God was not happy about David’s lust or with his decision to have Bathsheba’s husband killed so he could hide his sin.

It is illogical to read homosexuality into the story of David and Jonathan because neither Jewish nor early Christian tradition ever endorses sex outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage. If you read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, you will never see a depiction of a gay relationship, ever. Nor will you see homosexuality affirmed. You cannot get around the fact that the Bible says gay sex is flat-out wrong.

This particular relationship garners the occasional popular treatment as an example of a celebrated, biblical homosexual relationship. There are any number of problems with this idea, but I want to offer a critical perspective on the issue in order to demonstrate that such an idea is not one that can be legitimately advanced from the realm of critical scholarship.

To put it bluntly, such arguments view intimate relationships through jaundiced Western eyes. Put your head on the breast of another man today here in America, and the jokes will fly. But in the ancient East, not so; and even today, such affectionate displays are typical on that side of the world, and well-publicized (remember all the news clips of Arab and Middle Eastern leaders kissing each other on the side of the face?), which is probably why we don’t hear these sorts of verses brought up in service of homosexual Bible characters, except by the incredibly underinformed.

The fact that post-modern, Queer theology refuses to shoulder that burden of proof renders it irrelevant to the present investigation. Queer theology side-steps issues of truth and proof; “it simply presupposes that queerness exists, at least in readers, and that this provides a way of illuminating the [biblical] texts” (Jennings, p. 37). That is, when “queering” the story of David, one is not dealing with “a question of what everyone should see, but what may be seen from this [gay] standpoint as one among many standpoints … (S&M, pederastic, prostitutional, promiscuous etc.)” italics mine (Ibid.). However, I am not interested in what may be inferred about David and Jonathan, but rather with what the author of I Samuel intended to report.

First, the Hebrew word for “love” used here is not the typical word used for sexual activity. This word for “love” has clear political and diplomatic connotations (see 1 Samuel 16:21 and 1 Kings 5:1). Second, David’s comparison of his relationship with Jonathan with that of women is probably a reference to his experience with King Saul’s daughter. He was promised one of Saul’s daughters for killing Goliath. But Saul continued to add conditions upon this marriage with the underlying desire to have David killed in battle (1 Samuel 18:17, 25). The love David had received from Jonathan was greater than anything he could have received from Saul’s daughter. Third, the Bible clearly and consistently denounces homosexuality (Genesis 1:26-27; Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Romans 1:18-25). Extolling a homosexual love between David and Jonathan would be contradicting the prohibitions of it found throughout the Bible.

The only response he provided to this was to whine that these sources were “homophobic” in the typical SJW manner. He didn’t provide any meaningful response beyond that, and he hasn’t made any further attempt to defend this claim since then.

Topic #7: The “False Teacher” Debacle

This “Serpent” guy absolutely LOVES his strawman fallacies. Most of his responses are to totally misrepresent my argument to make it easier for him to provide some random off-topic excuse to change the subject. The “false teacher” claim is probably the best example of this.

After giving up on one of our debates, he suddenly came back several days later and posted a response in which he accuses me of calling him a “false teacher.”

I never actually called him a “false teacher” prior to that point, which is what makes this particular lie a strawman fallacy. Rather than risk attempting to provide a rebuttal to what I actually said, he is attempting to change what I said to fit some convenient response that he finally thought of several days later. It was kind of like George Costanza’s “Jerk Store” moment where he realized later what he “should” have said, but had to engineer an elaborate plot in order to create another opportunity to actually say it.

Regardless, I decided to humor him and explain why he actually IS a false teacher. Take note here, I cited Biblical scripture extensively in my explanation, including Matthew 7:15, Matthew 12:33, Luke 6:43 and James 3:12. I also took this opportunity to drop the fact that my second bachelors degree is from a Christian University and I’ve taken actual theological classes, which gives me more credentials as a “Bible scholar” than some random gay guy on the internet.

His response? He claimed I didn’t cite the Bible. What???

Topic #8: He accidentally admits that one of the words he claims is translated incorrectly means “Sodomy”

In the thread which disproves his claims about certain words from the Bible being incorrectly translated, he still stubbornly refused to admit defeat and continued to harp on one particular word which he claimed “no one has yet addressed…”

He could have dropped the issue, changed the topic, refused to reply or tried some of his other annoying but halfway effective strategies. Instead he just couldn’t help himself and kept talking about this one word… Which caused him to eventually admit this;

Do you really think arsenokoitai has always been translated exactly the same?

For much of history, it was translated as some variation on the word “sodomite”

for the same amount of history, “sodomy” was defined as any sexual act involving the mouth or anus.

To which I replied;

So tell me, what exactly are homosexuals doing in the bedroom? Sipping tea and discussing the Bible? I think not.

We
all know that homosexuals are engaging in what you just admitted is an
act of sodomy. You also just admitted that this word you have been
ranting about is translated as sodomy. Hence, the word refers to a sexual act practiced by homosexuals. Thus, homosexual sexual acts are forbidden in the Bible.

You just unraveled your own argument! Good job! Maybe you are a “Bible scholar” after all?

He then followed this up by making the this insightful claim;

Paul is condemning premarital sex here

To which I offered the following simple response;

Homosexual intercourse IS “premarital sex” (also known as
adultery). Since marriage is between one man and one woman, any sex that
takes place between two men would be adultery and thus would be a sin.
Hence, you once again admitted that homosexual sex is banned in the
Bible. Good job.

So far he has done an excellent job of finding arguments to undermine his own point, and not such a great job of finding anything which supports his point.

I will continue to update this as additional dumbassery unfolds. If this post starts to get reblogged, make sure to always check back to the original post to see updates.

Although not explicitly an example of Christophobia, this encounter with a homosexual activist does have some elements commonly encountered when dealing with atheists and SJWs who try to trash Christianity.

Examples include:

  • Citing the KKK/Westboro/Crusades/Inquisition/etc.
  • Claiming that Christians “hate” certain people.
  • Lying about the Bible.
  • Using examples of scripture from the Bible without actually knowing the context (I.E. “Mixed Fabrics”).

Be on the lookout for many of these same arguments when debating atheists!