Harumph!

On second thought, I figured this diatribe should be posted separately from the book review.

My blog entry "Gay Christians Say the Darnedest Things" was linked by slacktivist in July, which led to a brief and interesting exchange of comments there. Some commenters complained that I don't enable comments here, a matter which I've mentioned but not really explained before. Reading the slacktivist commenters confirmed my decision. For just one thing: at least one person complained that they couldn't understand why I'd written such awful things, and that I never explained in the entry why I did. If that had come up in comments here, I doubt Mr. Know It All (viz., Moi) could have resisted the temptation to point out where in the post I'd given my reasons. That wouldn't have been as effective as what happened in the slacktivist thread, where other readers pointed out my given reasons in my post. This indicated, if it didn't prove, that it wasn't just my imagination that I'd done so -- that a reasonably attentive reader could have spotted it.

Aside from that, the critiques were mostly ad hominems (He thinks he's so smart! Why does he have to say such awful things?), when the commenters didn't simply jump to the conclusion that I must be an anti-gay fundamentalist instead of a militantly gay atheist. I've been online for more than twenty years, often patiently answering such people point-by-point, and in the past few years I realized that I just didn't feel like wasting my time with such stuff anymore.

One commenter griped, "I find it really annoying myself when people otherwise on my side try to defend it by bashing Christianity / religion-in-general or by spouting nonsense about how religion works." Well, as I wrote in the original post, I find it really annoying when people otherwise on my side try to defend it with misinformation and irrationality. (Just what "nonsense" I'd written was, of course, not addressed: no critic even tried to rebut what I actually wrote. But of course, Christianity is good, so anyone who criticizes it must have something wrong with them.) And the low level of discussion among so many liberals who are supposedly on my side, as in that comments thread, just depresses me more. So does their bad faith, their refusal to listen to others.

However -- I'm still not enabling comments here, but as I said in my opening post, you can still e-mail me with your criticisms and comments and I'll try to reply. There's an e-mail link in my profile, and if you can't find that, you can write to me at thisislikesogay at gmail dot com. But as I also wrote in my introductory post: "I also reserve the right to post anything I receive, especially if it's either very helpful or informative, or if it's abusive."