My brother, Pastor Mike, is exercised and incensed that I have been “personally attacking” him on this blog. It seems that the tack I ought to have taken is just to have invoked some generic or innominate believer and refer or show his attacks on atheism and evolution to be “dumb”, without using his name. Never mind the "believer" in question is actually assigning a "Satanic" alliance or pact with those of my group (atheists). (And once again, it matters not that "Satan" is fictional, since it is the undercurrent of degraded thought to which one objects!)
Sorry, doesn’t work like that. Whether a racist, or religious hate monger – hate feeds off itself when the haters- attackers can hide their identities so as not to be exposed to just counter-attacks in turn. In this way, racial hate as well as religious hate are allowed to prosper. So are their hate websites.
Mike claims he doesn’t “hate” me but his whole vicious blog belies him. As one visits it (which I have because he won’t even email me in regular communications) one beholds hate piece after hate piece against atheists....not to mention attacks on Mormons, Jews, Muslims and other Christians (such as Catholics). Indeed, small side insets howl the words “Send Atheism to HELL!”
What am I, an ATHEIST, supposed to think when I read this? The only thing is that: ‘Is this what my brother really thinks of me, that I ought to be sent to Hell?” (Since obviously one can’t send the system of unbelief to Hell, it must always be a person- since Hell is putatively designed that way – or so his bible tells him)
After our father’s death I believed my brothers and I could all come together and at least have some form of connection as brothers ought to – even though our mother and sister still seem a million miles apart, in their own world. We did briefly, but it didn’t last long before Mike (aka Pastor Mike) re-intensified his hate speech against all religious forms that don’t think the way he does, as well as atheism. But when he attacks atheists and atheism he attacks ME!
I have tried my best to ameliorate the situation but whenever I look, there’s a new attack, trying to depict evolutionists or atheists as immoral reprobates out to undermine children and nation, or “Satanic” inspired, or (in his latest blog) that Satan is our pal. Sorry, bro, this don’t wash. Your hate precedes any claims that you don’t exhibit any. When you hate in the generic (against a whole group) you hate in the personal.
I will make you a deal – you remove all the attacks against atheists and atheism and I will remove from my blog all attacks against you and your fundyism.
I am ready to make peace, IF you are. I am also ready to reinstate true brotherly communications (like we had when I went to Florida in July for Dad's funeral and immediately after)
But if you want perpetual war(between our blogs), we can have that too. Your choice. I can't believe that your religion could be be so distorted, perverse and absolutist that it has to feed on hatred....of other religious groups, and atheists...as opposed to tolerance. I can't believe you could put this "religion" above relationships with kith and kin.
But maybe you can, and that false belief system is more important to you than family.
10 comments:
Wow. Best of luck to you in trying to reconnect with your brother. Reading a few of his posts indicates to me that it certainly won't be easy to do.
I think religion is at it's most vile when it drives a wedge between family members.
Again, my very best to you.
Thanks a lot, Brent. I believe that in Mike's case, the *form* of his religion (in following a specific formula to "salvation") - means he is unable to act with tolerance toward any others that don't share his exact views.
In an earlier incarnation, for example, he had a special I-Net "All Souls Church" page, which included a "False Doctrines" link. On it one would regularly find vicious attacks against Catholics despite the fact our mom and sister (as well as late father) all belonged to that faith. at one time, he had them all effectively going to Hell.
To my way of thinking religions can be vetted by the fruits they bear. If they bear hatred and vitriol such as we behold in Mike's case, then they can't be legitimate expressions or authentic embodiments of any "loving God". I just don't have the level of cognitive dissonance to be able to accept that.
Or maybe I lack the absolutist genes of my brother.
I hope he sees the light, before it's too late- for both of us.
"My brother, Pastor Mike, is exercised and incensed that I have been “personally attacking” him on this blog"
That's a stupid argument as well as false, since his blog is a PUBLIC site like yours! So he has no cover! None! Once he operates it as a hate site, and he does no matter how he spins it otherwise, anyone is perfectly correct to call his outrages on him and BY NAME! That certainly includes you, his brother.
Once he makes his hate pulic on a blog called "Pastor Mike's Blog" he has lost all protections for anonymity. So his whining and playing the victim card is just another attempt to deflect blame to you while poor lil' pastor is just an innocent lamb attacked savagely by those nasty wolves or "Satan-controlled" atheists.
I mean look at his last blog with the guy set out in a shield of armor! What is he, nuts? He claims he has the protections of the Lord and cites Ephesians etc. to wage holy war but that's insane. No Lord protects a guy who mongers hatred against one group or many.
He has the nerve to call down this blog for its "personal attacks" on poor little Pastor, but any recent scrutiny of his own blog would show he had no scruples when he personally mocked and attacked you over the meaning of his claimed 'concession' by you when you two last debated openly.
Face it, this guy is a hypocrite and the worst kind. He belabors all kinds of attacks on him for doing the "Lord's purpose" yet he attacks every other religion but his, as well as the other religion's holiest men-deities including: the Pope, Buddha and the Muslims' Mohammed and Allah.
He has no shame and zero sense of the ironic. He is a bully, as you well put it, and doesn't even see it, preferring to pose as the little harmless victim instead.
Anyone who reads his blog will see he is no victim, but rather makes victims of others, who can't fight back (most of them) because they're unaware of his hate speech. You are and kudos for shedding sunlight on it, which is the best detergent.
Another thing, he claims attacks on him by atheists from this blog and that's why he refuses to publish those comments. This is also rubbish. Caleb and I posted powerful arguments to his on his site and he refused to publish them because he KNEW he couldn't get his brain past them or defeat them. Ok, maybe Caleb called him a "dummy" once or twice, but what else call a person who never learns and keeps using he same dumb arguments over and over?
Sheesh, the best response to this screech monkey phony is just wash your hands of him. Fortunately, his religious hate speech is confined to only a few followers since his blog isn't that well known.
Another thing, if Pastor Mike had any REAL religion, he'd be able to promote it in a POSITIVE way by hailing its positive attributes instead of having to rip and tear down all other religions or belief (or nonbelief) systems.
The fact is that his religion is a hole and a hateful, angry hole. It is an *absence* of empathy, love and tolerance -offering nothing but hatred for the other, whatever the other is.
It operates by piling on and trashing Mormons, Jews, Catholics, atheists and others...and that's the only way it can survive as a hate parasite.
If Pastor Mike had a real religion instead of a fake one (worse because he invokes Jesus to pass it off) he wouldn't have to tear other beliefs to shreds. His would be able to stand on their own positive merits.
The only way a perverted religion like his can endure is by condemning all others -who don't believe in his exact way- to Hell and trashing them as "Satan's soldiers" every chance he gets.
He's a basket case and a lost cause and I hope you see it sooner or later. Just because one has "family" or a "brother" doesn't mean it's possible to relate to any of them, or him.
Connections, if they are to be made, have to be based on love and respect and not just genes. Your brother obviously has NO love or respect for you so long as you're an atheist. That is the one fact you have to accept before you can move on.
Here is a Pastor Mike quote from one of his latest blogs:
"Brothers and Sisters ; Jesus tells us in Luke 14:26-27 ; “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
As we know, this was falsely inserted as a pseudo-translation into Luke while the actual passage, that:
"any man come to me, and **hate his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, cannot be my disciple."
This is from Oxford scholar Geza Vermes' book, 'The Authentic Gospel of Jesus', p. 244.
This also makes more sense than the perversion PM quotes, since Jesus (the real one not fake) was all about love. Because he clearly also said: "The first great Law is that thee love the Lord thy God, and the second is that ye love thy neighbor as thyself"
Now any simpleton would be able to see for this to agree with the Luke quote Mikes cites, that quote would have to be a mistranslation, since 'Hate' was never part of the two great laws of Love. This shows again, your brother is fond of hatred and wants to use hate as an excuse to ignore you.
Once more, he wants no relationship with you unless on HIS terms. You need to leave him to his own devices, until he comes to his sensese, which I doubt he had.
janidebar stated
"Once he makes his hate pulic on a blog called "Pastor Mike's Blog" he has lost all protections for anonymity."
Well,thanks so much for the legal advice counselor . I mean,you ARE an attorney,in good standing with your State's bar , are you not,janidebar?
After all,I trust you would NOT be giving legal advice on a PUBLIC DOMAIN without a disclaimer if you were NOT. And I would HATE to see my beloved bro's blog in jeopardy of - at a MINIMUM - being shut down-IF - someone were to lodge a "good faith" inquiry/complaint.
Thanks again,and God bless
Pastor Mike wrote:
"Well,thanks so much for the legal advice counselor . I mean,you ARE an attorney,in good standing with your State's bar , are you not,janidebar?"
I do not believe she was giving "legal advice", Mike - but she can speak for herself whenever she wants. I believe she was simply using common sense, you heard of that - you know? I think her point was, and again she can correct me is I misspeak, that because you ARE out there in the **public** with your blog (after all you have followers, so people are reading it and it CAN be googled) then you have zero protections of anonymity. I.e. protections of hiding under either a pseudonymn or not being named at all.
Note that this is not the same thing as being a "public figure". It just means if you're out in the public, and certainly if you're attacking other denominations, groups (like atheists) you cannot rightly expect protections from attack speech in return. This has nada to do with any "legal" aspects other than plain old first amendment rights.
--
"After all,I trust you would NOT be giving legal advice on a PUBLIC DOMAIN without a disclaimer if you were NOT. And I would HATE to see my beloved bro's blog in jeopardy of - at a MINIMUM - being shut down-IF - someone were to lodge a "good faith" inquiry/complaint."
Again, compadre, you'd be wasting your time - because IF you instigated such a "complaint"- I would recruit my ACLU colleagues to go after you (as a card carrying member of the ACLU and also one of its "Guardians of Liberty")
As I said above, at the level of common sense and merely from a 1st amendment perspective, all she was saying is that by having a public blog on which you're making attacks, you can't expect anonymity when others make attacks on you.
As I will point out in my new blog piece directed at you, this also has a generic basis - since people have to be made to take ownership for the claims, and statements that are made. Just saying "fundies said...so and so" doesn't cut it, since many fundies do accept that the Earth is more than 5,000 years old for example.
Thus it is incumbent to point out *specific fundies* by identity.
In any case IF she was "giving legal advice" on a public domain I am sure she would have indicated that.
But, any reasonable person would not be so daft as to read THAT into the remark. As I earlier noted.
One last thing you might want to take away, people in glass blogs shouldn't be casting stones - even if their bibles usually prescribe that "punishment" most often.
If you could climb off your high horse for once, you'd gain more perspective and sense - and thus see more of it in the remarks, comments of others. As opposed to always seeing the "nuclear option" and then acting on that, so to speak.
copernicus wrote:
"I do not believe she was giving "legal advice", Mike - but she can speak for herself whenever she wants. I believe she was simply using common sense, you heard of that - you know?"
THANKS!!
Any fool could tell I was going from common sense, NOT law or offering legal advice! I mean, WTF?! Only a guy like your brother could manage to grab one end of the stick, and have it full of termites, which he then blames on the stick.
I mean this isn't special relativity. The guy's blog is *public* - not personal. If it's public he has no anonymity and can't hide behind it. That was the simple point I made and any First Amendment group would back me.
I'd have thought this stuff was basic for anyone operating on the net, but evidently not. Your bro seems to have legalitis on his brain, or maybe he was threatened before by someone, like he's threatening you?
I also understand, btw, that the Americans United (for Separation of Church & State) take up claims made against atheist blogs where free speech rights are at stake. So, you might want to contact Barry Lynn there, if he is daft enough to try this. (I suspect he has a higher IQ than that)
Personally, though, I wouldn't waste any more time on the guy. There are many more interesting things to fill a blog than to have to call attention to Pastor Mikes' demented ideas day after day. Let him bark and howl all he wants. No one will probably hear him but his followers.
Time to go to some new stuff, copernicus!
janidebar wrote:
"Personally, though, I wouldn't waste any more time on the guy. There are many more interesting things to fill a blog than to have to call attention to Pastor Mikes' demented ideas day after day. Let him bark and howl all he wants. No one will probably hear him but his followers"
I suspect you're correct there, since all he appears to do is recycle the same miscues, errors, canards, and illogical arguments he's always used. At least three times already I informed him how he was confusing noogenesis with the theory of evolution - yet in his latest piece on "Stupid Evolutionists" he does it again, telling people to do an "experiment" letting things sit in their garage then checking to see if they "evolve". This is nonsense, and I'd have thought Mike would have improved his thinking and example by now, yet he doesn't.
A few blog entries back I also informed him that one doesn't ask 'where does space come from' - but SPACE-TIME! Yet he makes the same error again, as he repeatedly does by misusing the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
He seems to think at some level, just being a HS graduate - that he knows vastly more than professional research scientists that make this stuff their life's work. It would really be funny if not so pathetic.
So anyway, I'm following your advice and from tomorrow doing new blogs on other issues- anything but Mike's mental distortions and argumentative contortions to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
If readers of the blog ask for other response articles to Mike I may relent and come back to it - but right now, it's just a colossal waste of time. I have many more things to do than to keep replying to Mike's re-circulated horse merde.
To prove your point that he never learns check out his latest blog and look at his recitation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics again:
"The Second Law states that all systems, if left to themselves, move from a state of order to disorder. "
Of course, he OMITS the critical parts! For example, the 2nd law actually says that for any "CLOSED SYSTEM" (not all systems)- there is a TENDENCY for the entropy or state of disorder, to increase.
So he leaves two aspects out, closed systems, and tendency - which deals with probabilities not certainties. So, even in CLOSED systems there is the probability of higher disorder, but not certainty.
The fact he doesn't even distinguish the closed systems from open systems (which are given in all general college physics books) shows he doesn't understand physics at all, and doesn't know how to apply its principles. (Or else he's deliberately changing them to suit his specious arguments)
He then can write the following nonsense, because he never got the 2nd law correct in the first place:
"Thus, the best conclusion is that the universe must have started with a lot of energy and is now running down."
Which is the worst conclusion since the universe itself is )from the latest data) an open system. If it were closed it'd re-collapse on itself and form a new Big Bang but the latest measures show thatthe cosmic density is too low to allow this.
In addition, we know the universe - as you pointed out in an earlier piece- is 70% dark energy. This dark energy is accelerating the universe in its expansion and if it's accelerating it can't be "winding down"
As I said, your brother is ignorant and doesn't know what he is talking about. (I believe he's actually proud of being ignorant!)The only people he can appeal to are those as ignorant as he is. Who don't know what the 2nd law (or other laws) state, so simply accept what he says they say.
Given he will never change, since his whole site depends on using ignorance to try to prove his nonsense and advance his dumb belief system, it's a waste debating him or even wasting blog space on him.
So on that note, I am glad to hear you have decided to move on. Let Pastor live in his own little ignorant blog world and think that what he says has meaning or power. Only fools like him will believe him.
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