Love and Loathing on YouTube
Some things just bug me about some people.
Let me tell you all my sad tale. Months back, a fellow named randomslice produced a little ditty. I, and many other people, thought it was clever and well done and funny. Including atheists, which, according to POE’s law, the video was mocking. Apparently people deriving joy from things upsets Christians, so popular YouTube Theologian, Michael Campochiaro, decided to sit down and make an incoherent fallacious idiot rant on many things that had little to do about anything. See: here. So I took him to task for it. See: here.
Then the hate poured in.
First the comments started off semi-valid. I was mostly criticized for being overly pedantic, arrogant, or wasting time by pointing out the obvious, along with several semantic errors. Then people began to attack me for holding ideas in such silly things as logic and evolution. Fine, I could shrug off the crazies. Mike came by and laughed because I mispronounced dichotomy. He wouldn’t try and take on my dissection of his idiot rant, but boy oh boy did he get me on THAT minor detail.
The real problem came later. After mike came and went there was a three way ideological gun battle to which I was not party to. I was mostly ignorant of it. After that though, a young fellow who goes by the moniker DesertFox (Rommel?). Here are a few choice tidbits, presented in chronological order;
“You speak like a person who thinks he’s witty, knows he’s not, but tries anyway.”
“Also, nice mannerisms you QUEEN.”
“I used to be like you, Nyronus. I used to be a raving, angry atheist who hated religion.”
“In fact, I think just as religious fanatics are covering up for something inside them, so are you. Something isn’t right in you, and channeling all that disruption into anti-religious fantacism helps you somehow. If it wasn’t patently obvious through your charged, extremely negative diatribe, I can even see it in your eyes. Religious people are happy and at peace with the universe. You are not. That’s the real problem, isn’t it?”
“Dude, Nyronus, just stop. You sound like an idiot in the video and throughout your comments. Your comments, furthermore, sound more like an attempt to sound smart or well-read than to actually argue a point. I’m no pscyhoanalyst, nor am I psychoanalyzing, but it is very obvious you have some deeply seeded issues and that you are a very angry person. Your hatred of religion is not rooted in suicide bombings or whatnot, but in your hatred of yourself. Stop hating yourself.”
(Bold Mine, otherwise, completely unedited. Go ahead, check for yourself.)
He, along with another person who backhandedly called me a fat faggot, are now trying to convince me that they really love me, deep down. On a visceral level, I am offended by the very fact of their insults. On a intellectual level, I am offended by their use of the word faggot as an insult altogether. On a moral and philosophical level, I want to vomit.
I dragged you all through this boring story to make a point. If this is what love is, I want no part of it brother. Behold the perversion of love. These people came onto my youtube page, trolled it, and then had the gall to call me the psychologically insecure one and claim the moral high ground when I became upset. Upset? I should be fucking furious. If they said half the things they said to me in person, I would have long since begun to consider to hit them. I would feel no moral qualm about striking such a perverse pair of men. One calls me a emotionally warped idiot and a queer who is only projecting his hidden self-hatred on the rest of the world. The other derides me for taking my own ideas seriously. They then take a moral high ground when I grow upset, and what’s worse is their constant claims of love. If love involves dragging those you do it to through the mud, then I’ll keep my self-destructive Freudian hatred, thank you.
Their “love” apparently involves throwing stones at people, and then blaming the people for having stones thrown at them. That actually is fairly indicative of the Christian moral system. To blame people for being punished, and then punish them more. All in the name of love. What DesertFox has shown me is NOT love. Love is to be valued. To be appraised and deemed worthy for what you are. To go to a man and to tell him not only that his ideas are worthless (they shouldn’t be taken seriously), but are derived from a grievous psychological flaw (projected self-hatred) is one of the lowest and meanest things you can tell a man. You tell him is mind is a self-contradictory piece of garbage, that his thoughts are worthless. Then to say you do this out of love! You corrupt love.
Notice that neither DesertFox or krazyeyzekilla (his accomplice in love) can provide a valid critique of why my ideas, even my atheism, are wrong. They instead insist on asserting that my ideas are derived from some sort of psychological fault. Not that they are logically or factually wrong, but that I’m just a crazy little emo-kid not worth listening to. The most concrete critique I have gotten from DesertFox is a purely stylistic one, and that one is wrapped up in barbs about my psychological inadequacies. He compares me to “one of the 100,000 other hypernegative, religion-hating atheists. Except your insults are less witless and creative than I’m used to seeing.” They don’t attack my ideas, they simply undercut them and run. To DesertFox, even my intelligence is nothing but an artifice constructed to hide my irrational uber-self-world-hatred.
There is only one reason I can see to slander a man such (and then blame him for it). It is hatred. Raw, undiluted hatred.
Ah, but Nyronus, aren’t you being just a wee-bit hypocritical? I mean, your obviously angry and full of hate to!
While I am angry (incensed might be the better term at this point), I am not full of hatred. The problem is, I am not indicting hatred. Or anger. I am indicting calling hate love. I am indicting the foul tactic of criticizing a man not for the wrongness of his ideas, but for having them.
Maybe I am taking things too far. Maybe I am reading too much in the self-contradictory drivel of a pair of trolls.
… Except I see it over and over again. Christians, instead of contending with the information brought to bare by a startling diverse pool of evidence against God as they describe him, or critiques of their methods and ideas, deride and mock those who challenge them. Behold the stereotype of the angry atheist, bitter against the world. It is underhanded rhetoric and evasion at its finest, and most of all, “We don’t hate you or your ideas, we really love you.”
If you hate me, say so. If you don’t, then stop acting like it.
~ Nyronus, 2008, 06, 17
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