Dialogues with Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 3

This is a little switch from the prior entries in the series, but still fitting in the theme.  My previous two episodes involved religion and religious beliefs as the core topics of discussion.  This one is more on the alt-med end of the spectrum, mainly regarding anti-vaccine and autism-related nuttery.  Nonetheless, I'm still dealing with a hopeless delusional idiot here.  Let that be a reminder that idiocy of this scale is not limited to religion alone, and that this blog is about all kinds of stupidity.  It's things like this that make it bear mentioning that the moniker of "grumpy anti-theist" isn't enough by itself.  I'm "anti-" all kinds of insufferable stupidity.

There are several sub-movements within the set of alternative "medicine" believers, with a relatively minor amount of crossover between them.  It's not necessarily the case that someone who is anti-vaccine is also a believer in Ayurveda, or that someone who buys into homeopathy is also a reiki healing fanatic.  That's not to say, though, that such people don't exist.  In this case, I'm dealing with one such person.  It is pretty clear as things carry on that this person wasn't drawn to alternative "medicine" (read : quackery) because he really found them believable on their own terms, but because he was so staunchly opposed to real medicine that anything that was different was inherently better.

This conversation was taking place on an online forum for a site that is ostensibly about video games (one for which I was formerly a contributing editor for their press outlet back when I was still working in the games industry), but like many forums, they have sections dedicated to "off-topic" or "general" discussion, and topics like politics, current events, "new cool stuff" was always going around.  While I'm no longer super-active with this forum or the site that owns it, I still appear now and then.  This one started with a guy who was posting a lot of anti-medicine nonsense shortly after Steve Jobs died...  I ignored it for a while, and the thread carried on, but after a few posts in, it also started including some anti-vaccine and all the vaccines-cause-autism bullcrap that rested on the outlandish idea that a former Playboy bunny knows more about human biochemistry than all medical doctors in the world combined.

Dialogues with Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 2

So there are times when people are just out and out stupid and put out things in all caps and hurl insults rather than actually trying to argue anything.  We've all seen this, and it's the sort of thing where I could post something completely beyond the pale absurd saying that an actual creationist really said this, and you'd have no idea whether I was making it up or not.  Then there are those who seem otherwise well-adjusted and perhaps even normal on the surface.  It's only when you prod a little deeper that you find that these people are really hopelessly brainwashed.  This particular exchange is one of those latter cases.

This is from a discussion on Facebook about 3 years ago.  Obviously, I'm going to be leaving out real names, but it's not as if it really matters who specifically the person is so much as just being able to identify who said what.  The full discussion is actually quite long and involved multiple exchanges, so it will be difficult to really display it all in one blog post.  In between, of course, we had little moments where we had to stop because one of us would be out of town or something or because of text length limitations, we'd split the responses up, and so we would say things like "I'll have to continue this response in the next post" and so on, which isn't really relevant to the discussion, so I'm also leaving all those bits out.

Where it all actually began was a wall post from a mutual friend in which he linked to the news report about Craig Venter and his team successfully creating their artificial phenotype of bacteria containing an entirely synthetic genome.  It was billed in press as creating "artificial life", which is pseudo-accurate at best, and that's where a lot of debate soon came up, especially from the "Intelligent Design" crowd.  In any case, I put up a response saying that it was a great achievement on their part, and also addressing the fact that the ID supporters will say that it proves that you needed a designer just the way the Venter Institute's staff had to design this genome.  The key thing that gives away their fingerprint of design of course, is the fact that they encoded the URL to their white paper in the pseudo-genes of this bacterium.  If there was anything close to that for a hypothetical "designer" for all life, then you've got some sort of a case for ID...  and that's where the discussion began.

To begin with, I'll start with the part of the discussion that happened in the thread of the original post.  There are extremely long exchanges that happened afterwards when we took the discussion to PMs that I'll probably have to save for some follow-up posts.

Dialogues With Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 1 epilogue

Before I continue with the primary content of this little series, I wanted to include some particularly hilarious responses I got from the first one.  Since the Google+ feed of comments/responses is directly visible at the original posting, I'm more or less not including anything from there.  Instead, I'm including some of the direct messages I get here and there (such as on Facebook, where anybody can message anybody).  Some of them are truly amazing, and I feel it is only right to include them so that everybody gets a good laugh.  Note that I'm only including the responses from delusional idiots in order to keep up with the theme of the series. I will say that I got a lot more positive responses than ones from crazed religious morons, but there is clearly a great deal more entertainment value in reveling in the inane stupidity borne of faith the world over.

So without further ado, I submit to you some truly magnificent morons.

Dialogues with Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 1

Yeah, I get email.  I also get PMs over various networks and forums, and so on, and there's a general rule about the internet -- No, I don't mean rule 34...  I mean the rule that only stupid exists on the internet.  In this case, it was a PM on a forum some years back where I was the as-yet-unassigned-as-a-name-but-essentially-filling-the-role-of "grumpy anti-theist" in a crowd full of people.  But although the blog may be relatively new (it's only been around a few years), being a grumpy anti-theist is not at all new for me.  Perhaps 10-12 years ago, when I was a naive undergraduate, I might have been more of an apatheist, and identified at least culturally as a Hindu, but I really couldn't help but call religious nutbars on their bullshit nonetheless.

So this particular message I got was a PM I got in response to some activity on a forum thread...  in fact, it was on a forum for which I was an admin.  The thread was mainly about religious indoctrination and the forceful instigation of religion on people.  And of course, one delightfully delusional idiot comes along and pretends that it's not true...  at least not of his religion.  Well, the fellow happened to be Muslim, but what I had to say as far as the issue of forcing beliefs on people really isn't exclusive to Islam.  Just so happened that the conversation was on that topic.  I feel that this particular exchange is a pretty good example to illustrate the degree to which religious nutbars can have an inordinately distorted view of reality.

Below the jump are his claim and my response inline.  Names are hidden, but not really significant in any case.  All the original grammatical and spelling errors are preserved (including my own).  In yellow are his words, and mine in white.