Three weeks ago, I posted a notice about the online debate I’ve been having with Pastor Bob Enyart of Denver Bible Church. There hasn’t been much direct communication between us since this thing began. One of his minions occassionally checks the boards for messages, and recently relayed a notice from Bob. He says he is about to post his 6th submission -nearly two months after my last one to him. The only reason I mention that is whenever I have taken more than a couple weeks to reply to him, his people start posting comments accusing me of cowardice. Anyway I suspect that his next post will be what all his previous posts have been, irrelevant filibustering.
This debate was supposed to be over how accurate he and I both were while we were arguing on his radio show last November. We were only supposed to see which of the claims we made then were right, wrong, distorted, or deceptive. I don’t know why he accepted my challenge. He can’t defend his position and can’t honestly concede that he was wrong about everything either, so he keeps trying to change the topic, or raise peripheral issues, introducing a mess more urban legends and media-mangled propaganda that I shouldn’t have to deal with. I’ve tried to get him focused on the original topic several times, but he will not acknowledge that, and certainly won’t admit that any of his claims were false or that each of his assertions have been disproved. Thus far, Bob has repeatedly ignored every direct question and every argument of evidence ever presented with regard to the actual comments made on the show. That’s all he was ever supposed to respond to, but he just won’t do it, and I think he’s trying to obfuscate that.
I can’t waste this much time on him anymore, and I don’t intend to post to that debate again. As far as I’m concerned, I won with my first post in December, and have no need to keep winning the same argument. But I am concerned that anyone here who reads his next post (of whatever new pseudoscience he can scrape together) won’t know what this debate is all about, and what points he is still avoiding. So I have a suggestion as to how to hold him accountable. I’ve posted this to the debate already, but he has previously admitted that he doesn’t follow the forum, and won’t check the thread before posting to it. So rather than relay a private message back through his lackey, I don’t think this message should be private; I think it would be better to make a more public statement, one that he’s not as likely to miss -or dismiss, so that everyone else knows what his next entry had better be. Hopefully someone will alert him to my reply to his recent message:
Please feel free to ask AronRa if he’d like to set a limit between posts, say, 48 hours or one week (as I think I proposed),
Now we have a problem. I’m booked up nearly every week over the next few months, with events in Denver, Boston, Austin, Houston, Chicago, Springfield, Tallahassee, Little Rock, and Baton Rouge, to say nothing about a few pod casts, and a couple of charity benefits, on top of my usual commitments. I have so many promotions and presentations to prepare in the interim that I won’t have time to reply to you until some time in December, and I’m supposed to have my book published before then too!
Let me suggest an alternate plan. You make your next post your last. In that post, you will reply to my 4th post to this debate. Therein I repeated a summarized list from the first post to this thread, which was itself a summarized list from the first thread, which you chose to ignore. I can’t make this any easier for you. As we agreed back in November, you must actually answer all of the questions directed to you, (just like I always do) and properly address each of the charges and challenges therein. Your last submission will be the last word, and the last post to this debate, but it will also be your last chance to do the one-and-only thing you agreed to do when we decided to do this. As you have utterly failed to defend any of the many errors you made on your show, and here as well, and since you haven’t been able to rebut any of the points I made then or since, dispite all the months we’ve been at this, then this will be the moment of truth, the truth you’ve been trying to duck or dodge since this discussion started. It’s time to put up or shut up. If your next submission does not adequately address or acknowledge the errors you made while I was on your show -which is the whole and sole reason we’re even having this debate in the first place, I will take that to mean that you won’t, and others will take that to mean that you can’t. This debate will then be over, and we’ll just leave it to public opinion to agree that I won.
Someone see that he gets that.
The description of his dodging and ducking is word for word the same thing I get with an evangelist I’ve been having ongoing debates with.
He completely ignores my refutations, and then focuses on one incredibly minor point and makes his response all about that.
It’s like they’re drunk and unable to focus on the task at hand. Or they’re dishonest. It’s what you do when you’ve got nothing.
Prediction: Enyart will in the future tout this as a victory over an evil YouTube atheist.
Is there a link to a summary thread, where we can find links to all of the back and forth if we’re just tuning in now?
Check the first link to this post referring to the earlier post from three weeks ago. That has all the other links in it.
Anyone who has debated with religious nutters online knows the routine – we carefully go through their points, refuting and pwning – and when we ask any kind of direct question, get nothing but evasion and repetition.
I would personally never even feel tempted to debate somebody who is actually professionally opposed to my own view. They have sound monetary reasons to never be swayed by, or even acknowledge, whatever points you might make or evidence you might present.
I honestly believe that, if doing so tied in with my own business interests, I could argue that night is brighter than day more or less ad nauseum. I could start off with a long (very long) discussion of the poetic uses of the concepts of day and night. Then the unusual light conditions around the poles might be mentioned. Is darkness only literal or can it be metaphoric? Are more crimes committed by day and does that mean that daytime is darker and more evil? What is evil? Etc. Two thousand plus words on each of those topics and your opponent will certainly have given up.
Sigh. Creationists – it doesn’t matter if it’s a random Bible-thumper in a comment thread or someone who purports to have a real and honest interest in science, they all seem to read from the same basic playbook: raise irrelevancies/tangents, concentrate on or magnify minor quibbles, quote Scripture, quote “authorities” and/or “experts”, mis-quote actual authorities and/or experts, misrepresent/mangle data from scientific papers, present non-data from un-scientific papers, intentionally misunderstand pertinent information, malign atheism (it’s a religion/belief system/just as fundamentalist as creationism; it can’t account for logic/morals/reason etc), ignore points/paragraphs/papers wholesale, claim victory, rinse, repeat. As a bonus, claim the moral high ground when your opponent gets infuriated by your incessant goddamned dishonesty and evasion.
This is of course only my direct personal experience and my observations of others’ debates, but I have never, ever seen or had a debate with a creationist that didn’t run like this one with Bob. There’s always been variation in the depth, duration and civility of the debate, but the creationists involved have always and without exception conducted themselves shamefully with regard to truth, facts & evidence and dishonourably with regard to providing direct answers to challenges or questions.
The thing that makes it so goddamned pointless is that it’s (obviously) all a dog n’ pony show for the rubes listening in, just to show ’em their boy has their God’s back and won’t give in to no heretic science-tist and his fancy-ass “facts” and candy-ass book-learnin’. It’s about reassuring the folks at home that their God’s in safe hands and no white-coated egghead’s gonna put Him outa business with his five-dollar words and his DNA and his Australoplatypus ape-men.
As a wise man once said, debating creationists about science is like playing chess with pigeons: they ignore the rules, knock the pieces over, shit all over the board then fly home to coo over their victory.
It’s never about winning the debate, it always about influencing those watching the debate. Making your rebuttals easy to understand, forcing the listeners to question their personal views on the debate, that is the goal of these things.
And the more we have them, the more we get our point across, just like the religious have been doing to eons in their churches. So those who say that it is worthless, back away and let those who can and want to do this, do it. And another thing, those who do not think it is worthwhile, do you really think that you know everything and have nothing left to learn, even from the deluded religious?
Indeed. To combine it with the simile from from mandrellian @6, the pigeon leaves happy, but passers-by notice that the formerly shiny chessboard is now covered in shit – knows who did it.
* should read, “covered in shit – and knows who did it.”
Credit where it’s due: Amazonian Scott D. Weitzenhoffer used it in a review of Eugenie Scott’s “Evolution v Creationism” to describe the pro-creation reviewers of the book. A piece of brilliance which will, I think, outlive us all.
To clarify, I think “pigeon chess” is definitely worth doing, but only if it’s done for the right reasons. Creationism needs to be both opposed as a harmful political action and exposed as the non-scientific falsehood it is. I think we all know you won’t change many minds in the dedicated fundie camp, no matter how well you do in a debate, so the target (I think most people already agree on this) should be the plain old undecided, the interested laypeople, the creationists with honest doubts about their faith and honest questions about science (a rare bird, but worth pursuing).
Bob Enyart is a convicted child abuser – NOT a Christian. He’s a dangerous criminal psychopath who has no conscience and speaks lies in hypocrisy. There is currently a criminal investigation against him & phony “pro-life” organization PersonhoodUSA for conspiracy to make false reports of child abuse against my innocent family & other shady demonic activity.
Like you said back in Sept about Bob & Will Duffy (a DBC ELDER & former producer) “why do you have to lie, mislead & conceal on the little trival things…now I see I’m dealing with shameless liars for Jesus.”
You have no idea how right you are. For the TRUTH X-Posed about Bob Enyart & his *Kult of Konspiracy* go to http://www.GenerationXpose.com
You seem to be nearly as wacky as Enyart. And your website does you no favors. How about posting the evidence of what he allegedly did to you up front? That certainly is terrible, and he should be exposed if this is true, but you don’t expose anyone by burying the facts behind walls of crank web design.
Holy ad hominem, Batman!
Holy I need to read what I’m responding to more closely, Batman!
Time Cube web design detected.
Someone needs to write a web-app that scores websites based on how timecubey they are. Kind of like an alexa for weird. I bet it’d work, too!
You can watch for this CPS Conspiracy scandal involving Enyart in the news shortly. He is evading this debate because of the criminal investigation he trying to cover “Bob Enyart Arrest Record” – he’s quite the decorated criminal for a pastor.
Google it. “Bob Enyart Arrest Record” And there’s more than one conviction of “CRUELTY TOWARDS a CHILD”
I googled, and read the first link (google docs).
Multiple arrests and convictions for “cruelty toward a child”, felony and misdemeanors. What a creep.
Is there something new, or recent, regarding Pastor Bob that I missed?
*Google “Bob Enyart JonBenet Ransom Note” to learn about the “pro-life” convicted child abuser & cult leader in Denver GUILTY of brutally murdering Jonbenet Ramsey & framing her parents for the crime. His ShadowGov is the “Small Foreign Faction” with a violent “Group of Individuals” who run an organized & sophisticated underground network of Satanic Ritual Abuse against children.
*Google “Robert Adolph Enyart Arrest Record” for more PROOF of his guilt!
*Google “Bob Enyart JonBenet Ransom Note” to learn about the “pro-life” convicted child abuser & cult leader in Denver GUILTY of brutally murdering Jonbenet Ramsey & framing her parents for the crime. His ShadowGov is the “Small Foreign Faction” with a violent “Group of Individuals” who run an organized & sophisticated underground network of Satanic Ritual Abuse against children. *Google “Robert Adolph Enyart Arrest Record” for more PROOF of his guilt!
*X-Pose the TRUTH-www.GenerationXpose.com