On arguing

Bruce Gerencser's recent post "Why I Don't Do Debates" struck a real nerve with me.  As a former fundamentalist pastor turned outspoken atheist blogger, Gerencser is sometimes urged to engage in formal debates with Christians.  He also attracts a fair number of Christian trolls who attack him or otherwise try to provoke him into argument, usually without reading any of the material on his site which already addresses what they are saying.  He sometimes posts responses to the latter, while firmly refusing to be drawn into the endless and pointless rounds of bickering they seem to want.  As to formal debates, he gives two reasons for refusing to engage:

First, there are numerous atheist and agnostic debaters producing quality -- dare I say phenomenal -- content..... I see no need to add my weak voice to an already crowded field of expert debaters. I ask myself, do we really need another hamburger joint in town? The answer is no.

Second, I am a conversationalist, a storyteller.  This blog has always been one man with a story to tell.  I suspect that if I changed my focus to the rules of logic, philosophy, and debating, my hard-won audience would likely go elsewhere.  Most people who read this blog do so because they find my story resonates with them in some way.  When doubting, troubled Evangelicals show up for the first time, they find a man who understands their pain, what they have experienced and gives voice to their struggles.  Such people have always been my focus, and I see no need to change my course now.

Different people are good at different things.  The skills of storytelling and explaining overlap somewhat with those of debating, but debating is nevertheless a quite distinct thing.  Gerencser is very good at what he does.  It would make no sense for him to burden himself with further tasks which he judges less suited to his abilities.

A further problem with getting into arguments -- one very evident in Gerencser's occasional posts responding to Christian e-mail pests -- is the sheer repetitiousness of it.  Since none of them bother to read much of his site before attacking, each one starts from zero -- each one makes more or less the same kind of trite and shallow "points" and earns more or less the same responses, never realizing that Gerencser has heard the same from any number of previous trolls.  None address his story and experiences.  They just make assumptions based on their own indoctrination, and proceed on that basis.  I don't know how he has the patience to keep writing responses to such cookie-cutter sameness.

I have no such patience.  The "fight-picker" trolls who try to post comments here, similarly, almost never engage with what I say on its own terms -- they simply regurgitate their own talking points.  In most cases, these are tired clichés which others have addressed far better.

(And yes, there are a fair number of fight-picker comments, not to mention flat-out personal insults.  You just don't see them because of the comment moderation.)

Then there are the trolls who get irate about something in the link round ups and, bizarrely, attack me for posting a link to it rather than engaging with the author I linked to whose words actually angered them.  Even weirder are those who triumphantly proclaim "the person you linked to once did or said [bad thing], thus proving they are a bad person", as if that somehow negates whatever actual point the linked individual had made.  Would there really be any purpose in letting such comments through moderation and then trying to explain why they're irrelevant?  It would be like belaboring 2+2=4, and the troll himself would never get it.

Since the content of this blog is rather varied, not everything on it will appeal to every reader.  I believe I too am pretty good at what I do, and the steady growth in number of readers over time seems to substantiate that.  But as the comments policy says, this is a blog, not a debating forum.  The internet has a vast abundance of places where back-and-forth arguments are welcome.  This just isn't one of them.

Finally, debating is simply not something I want to do, and I consider this a perfectly legitimate reason for not engaging with fight-pickers.  Some people actually enjoy arguing back and forth, back and forth.  To me it would be a wearisome chore.  There are only so many hours in the day, and I already have a full-time job.  I choose not to devote any more of my precious time to the drudgery of bickering.