I was at a game convention somewhere and a young lady was talking to me about Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea. Specifically, she was telling me about characters she loved and how her GM put those characters in their game so she could interact with them. She not only got to do that, but she got to save one of her favorite characters from danger. “That was amazing!” she told me.

“That was the point,” I said. “Make players fall in love with the setting, then put it in jeopardy.”

“But how do you make characters you know the players will fall in love with?” she asked.

I smiled and told her, “Because I fall in love with them.”

It’s a lesson I learned a very long time ago. Way back in the ’70’s when I was still in single digits, my father started watching the Wonder Woman TV show. And that’s when I fell in love for the first time. I didn’t fall in love with Lynda Carter—I have no idea who she is. I’ve never met her. But I did fall in love with Wonder Woman. Like I said, it was 1975 and I was only seven years old, so it wasn’t the fact that she was in that costume or that they put her in slow motion when she ran. I fell in love with Wonder Woman because she cared about people and put herself in danger to protect others. She was fair and just and, most importantly I think, merciful. Just one hour of watching Diana accomplished what my parents had failed to do with Jesus.

What Would Diana Do?

She got me into comic books, and from there, I discovered Spider-Man and Batman and Superman and the X-Men and…man, that’s a lot of men. And over the years, I’ve remained a Wonder Woman fan. I’ve always collected her comics, even when they stink. Fortunately, these days, they don’t stink. Since the movie busted box office records, they’ve put some money behind Diana with talented writers and artists telling her story. And to this day, I’m still a fan. I’m still in love.

But you didn’t come here for her. You want to know what that title is all about. All right, but from here on out, THERE BE SPOILERS. I mean it. I’m going to talk about the movie as if both of us have seen it, so if you haven’t, you’d better beat it. Scram. Get lost. Because I’m talking about the movie in 3…

2…

 

 

 

 

 

 

… and before we get there, let me say this: just because I didn’t like something doesn’t mean you’re wrong for liking it. It doesn’t make me a better person than you, it doesn’t make you a worse person than me. I don’t like asparagus. I know they’re good for me and I know people love them, but I don’t. Doesn’t make me anything other than a person who has different tastes than you. So before you go off on me for not liking something you did, just remember, there’s probably something I adore (Big Trouble in Little China is the Greatest Movie Ever Made) that you think is cheap rubbish. And that’s okay. That’s why there’s 31 flavors of ice cream. This essay is about my feelings, not yours. I’m not telling you whether or not the movie was good or bad or whether you should like it or hate it. That’s up to you. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. This is how I feel. Keep that in mind over the next few paragraphs, okay?

Resuming countdown.

2…

1…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…and fuck you, Marvel.

I was having a great goddamn time watching your movie. I mean, a great goddamn time. I did not like Infinity War. Just did not like it. Mainly because I walked out of the theater saying, “Well, the rest of the world is about to discover what comic book fans have known for decades: death means nothing in the Mighty Marvel Universe.”

Quick joke. Jason Todd, the second Robin, dies at the hands of the Joker and heads off to Heaven. There, in front of the pearly gates is St. Peter with his fiery sword and St. Peter says to Jason, “You lived a hero’s life and you died a hero’s death. Welcome, and be at rest.”

And just before Jason walks through, he looks to the side and sees a revolving door. You know, the kind that’s in front of hotels and stores. Jason looks at St. Peter and says, “Hey, what’s that?”

St. Peter sighs. “Oh. That’s for the X-Men.”

(Joke addendum: So Jason Todd goes through the revolving door instead.)

Lots of laughs, the room booms, I take a bow. Tip your waitress.

And in the meantime, fuck you, Marvel.

Another joke.

Hawkeye and Black Widow are on the cliff and the Red Skull says, “You have to make a sacrifice.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” the Widow says.

Red Skull tells her, “You have to sacrifice the token woman in your Marvel franchise.”

Crowd boos. Aw, was that too soon? Yeah, it’s too fucking soon for me, too.

I fell in love with Black Widow back when she was showing up in Daredevil comics, so don’t you fucking tell me “too soon.”

How about this. How about the fact that I was really enjoying the movie. It seemed like a celebration of everything the MCU had accomplished so far. I was loving it. And I mean loving it. I was laughing. I got choked up a couple times. They had me, right there, in the palm of their hand. An incredible job of storytelling. I’m having a blast.

And then, Hawkeye and Widow go looking for the soul stone. And I’m thinking, “Maybe this is where they save Gamora.” And I was excited.

And then, everything stopped. All that celebration and fun just stopped fucking dead in its tracks. Hawkeye and Widow spend a minute or so fighting about who gets to throw themselves off the cliff, making the sacrifice.

And right then and there, I think:

Oh…one of them sacrifices themselves to get the stone! And the Red Skull says, “Nobody’s ever done that before! Here’s the stone and you both get to live!

This is going to be awesome! Because love saves them both! That’s gonna be—

Wanna hear a joke?

That’s not what happens. Widow sacrifices herself while Hawkeye is crying, trying to hold on to her. And she pushes herself off the cliff, and she falls, and there’s a glory shot of her being dead at the bottom of the cliff and Hawkeye wakes up with the soul stone and cries.

That’s the joke. And I’m the butt of it.

Crowd is dead silent. No sound. I’m standing on the stage, looking like an idiot.

From that moment on, it didn’t matter what Marvel did. I hated this movie. Sure, I loved the first act and the first part of the second act, but they fucking killed Natasha when they didn’t have to. When they had an out. A simple, easy out that follows Storytelling 101: Heroes break the rules and that’s how they win.

Let me say that again:

HEROES BREAK THE RULES AND THAT’S HOW THEY WIN.

“Dormammu…I’ve come to bargain.”

Remember that? Remember how awesome that was?

Remember Captain America believing his friendship with Bucky was stronger than Hydra brainwashing?

Remember Star Lord’s dance off?

Heroes break the rules. That’s how they win.

Marvel could have done it. They didn’t. Nope.

And it got worse from there.

Quick story. I was with a party when I saw Captain Marvel. Three women in the party all came out of the movie with the same thought: “I can’t wait to see her kick Thanos’ ass.”

Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that doesn’t happen. In fact, he swats her away like a bug.

Like a bug.

So, that cathartic moment? You don’t get it. Hahah. Neener, neener. I can just imagine all the internet trolls laughing about that moment right there. They’ve probably got it on slow mo, watching it with one hand on the mouse, hitting “rewind.” Assholes.

And don’t get me started on killing Tony Stark. Because that just means I’ll have to come to your house, Marvel, and burn it to the fucking ground.

(Not literally. That’s a metaphor. Or maybe just hyperbole. A hyperbolic metaphor. Yeah. Something like that.)

Tony Stark dying doesn’t mean anything to Tony Stark. He’s dead. It’s his wife and daughter who have to live with that. So, fuck you Marvel for making that little girl who was so awesome an orphan. Because you couldn’t write an ending where Thor and Scarlet Witch and Captain Marvel and Spider-Man and everyone else Thanos killed hold him down, beat the shit out of him, cage him, then make him watch as you return the stones back to their proper time lines while he sits in prison for the rest of his…oh, yeah, immortal life. Can’t have that ending. Instead, we’ll have Tony murder a few thousand people.

And hey, Tony didn’t know that Gamora has a good heart, did he? She’s on Thanos’ side, and he murdered everyone on Thanos’ side, which means TONY STARK MURDERED GAMORA, DIDN’T HE?

Didn’t think about that, didya?

Mass murder isn’t what heroes do. It’s what villains do. And maybe that’s why he had to die. Because in the end, Tony Stark chose murder to solve their problem. Fuck you Marvel.

I loved-loved-loved the first half of this movie. And I hated-hated-hated every bit of the second half.

So, fuck you Marvel. Fuck you for giving me a character to fall in love with, then fuck you for giving her a stupid death that doesn’t make sense with the rules you created.

 

 

“So, those with depression and schizophrenia can just choose to not be depressed and schizophrenic?”

— Me, debating freewill

 

I suffer from depression. All my life. Actually, it’s more than depression. Recently, I was re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder because the older you get, the faster your body breaks down. And that means there are times I’m not completely in charge of my brain. (Actually, nobody is really in charge of their brain, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Let’s just say that once you discover you have something wrong in your head, you start studying how the brain actually works, and you never like what you find out.) When a bout of depression hits, it doesn’t wear boxing gloves. Or, maybe it does, because you can actually hit people harder with boxing gloves, you know. Which is one of the reasons why MMA is safer than boxing. And…

…yeah. Brains. Funny things.

When I get hit with a bout of depression, I stop doing the things I love. I stop eating. I stop showering. I stop getting out of bed. I stop reading. I stop writing. And I become fixated on stupid things. I start to clean. A lot. I re-organize my comic collection. I move around the book shelves and the books on them. Then, I do those things all over again. You just can’t tell what I’ll obsess over when depression comes a’calling with its haunting siren song.

This time, it was weird. This time, it was presuppositional apologetics. From Wikipedia:

 

Presuppositionalism is a school of Christian apologetics that believes the Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and attempts to expose flaws in other worldviews. It claims that apart from presuppositions, one could not make sense of any human experience, and there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian.^[1] Presuppositionalists claim that a Christian cannot consistently declare his belief in the necessary existence of the God of the Bible and simultaneously argue on the basis of a different set of assumptions that God may not exist and Biblical revelation may not be true.

 

So yeah. I got caught up in that. In fact, I watched hours of Youtube videos. And a couple people really caught my attention. Caught it and wouldn’t let go.

Matt Slick

I watched people like Matt Slick go on and on about his version of the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God and watched even more hours of people dissecting it and demonstrating its mistakes. And it has huge mistakes. Like, right in the first premise argument killing mistakes. As someone who studied philosophy in college, declared philosophy as a major, tutored philosophy and did student teaching, I took one look at Slick’s TAG and shook my head. If he had turned it in while I was a student teacher, I would have returned it with an “Incomplete” grade. It’s so wrong, it isn’t even wrong. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of how to build a disjunctive syllogism. What is a disjunctive syllogism, you may ask? I’m happy to answer!

A disjunctive syllogism (modus tollendo ponens) is a valid argument form which is a syllogism having a disjunctive statement for one of its premises. It usually looks like this:

Or:

P versus Q.
Not P
Therefore, Q.

A real example for illustration:

This die either has 10 sides or 20 sides
The die has 10 sides
Therefore, it does not have 20 sides

In other words, by affirming the P, you disconfirm the Q.

However, Matt’s lists his syllogism like this:

 

Either God, or not-God.

Not-God cannot account for the laws of logic.

Therefore God can account for the laws of logic.

 

Now, there are so many problems with this that I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s start by stripping away the text and go for the way he structures the argument, which may help us see the most basic problem.

In short, Slick’s argument attempts to use the following form:

 

P or —P

Not —P

Therefore, P

 

The basic problem here is Slick’s formulation is essentially just begging the question. And no, “begging the question” doesn’t mean “raising the question.” It means that you include your conclusion in one of your premises.

He’s also created a false dichotomy, which undermines his disjunctive syllogism. (He also likes to move away from evaluating the form of his argument and get to “the facts,” which demonstrates he knows there’s a problem here.) When I say “This die has 10 sides or 20 sides,” I offer two choices. There are no other choices available in the argument. But by presenting “God” and “not God,” he has not presented a dichotomy. (He likes to say “true dichotomy,” which is a lot like saying “code of bushido” or “ATM machine” or “PIN number.”) He also ignores the fact that “not-God” (which he calls atheism) also includes all world views that do not include the Christian God. That includes Buddism, Hinduism, Platonism, and any other world views we haven’t discovered yet. It also makes a category error of defining “atheism” as a world view, which it clearly is not.

This brief video covers some of the basics here as well as some other really fun objections. There are other videos, but because Rationality Rules invokes Odin and Valhalla, it’s my favorite. Take a peek.

 

 

Darth Dawkins

Darth Dawkins, aka Darwin’s Deity, aka Evolution False, aka a dozen other pseudonyms is the presupper that I could not stop watching. Not because I found any of his arguments intriguing or compelling, but because he really is a train wreck. I mean, a train wreck of highly combustable, radioactive material. Watching a video with “DD” is like watching Godzilla plow his way through a city. And not fun, cool, anti-hero Godzilla…wait. No, not like Godzilla at all. Godzilla is fun. Comparing this guy to Godzilla is an insult to Godzilla, and I must now apologize.

DD’s chief argument works like this:

 

Because atheists cannot justify their presuppositions, their entire world view is irrational. Therefore, they can’t even justify they exist.

 

This is the kind of shit philosophy professors pull on freshmen. It’s invoking the problem of hard solipsism, that nobody can be sure that anything outside their own mind is real. It’s something you learn in Philosophy 101, it freaks you out, you try to find ways around it, discover you can’t, and then, you either live with it and get on with your life, or you have an emotional breakdown and turn to magical thinking to save you. DD believes this little problem—which has been around for centuries—is “news to atheists.” The problem of solipsism has been around since before Socrates and Plato and has been addressed by philosophers ever since. Renee Decarte’s famous “I think therefore I am” directly addresses it. But for some reason, DD thinks it’s some kind of magic trick to convince people to turn to his god.

If you’re really curious, I can explain the problem. If you’re not, skip this paragraph and move on. See, when you ask someone, “How do you know that?” and keep asking them, eventually, they have to say, “That’s what I see and what I think.” Eventually, everyone hits epistemological bottom. You can’t prove Aristotle’s three logical principles (presups like to call these “logical absolutes,” but in no Philosophy class in the world will you hear a professor use this term): the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. We cannot prove these to be true other than experiencing them, and since our senses can deceive us, being 100% certain about anything is impossible. That’s the problem.

Presups like DD like to use the solipsism problem in extremis. In other words, if you can’t be 100% certain about something, YOU CAN’T KNOW ANYTHING!!!11!!!!!! Which is false. While our senses can fool us, that doesn’t mean they always fool us. In fact, we can attribute degrees of certainty to propositions. If I take my glasses off, is my eyesight better or worse? Clearly it is worse, therefore, my eyesight has degrees of certainty. I can still see the eye chart, but not the lower letters. DD also uses the old Sye Ten Bruggencate trick of asking, “How do you know you’re not a brain in a vat?” Well, to begin with, proving a negative is almost impossible, and it’s shifting the burden of proof. It’s also a disingenuous question. That is, asking someone to prove something that you don’t believe. Do you believe we’re all brains in vats? No? Then don’t ask me to prove something neither of us believes. And until you can prove I’m a brain in a vat, I’ll keep believing I’m not.

Presuppositions cannot be proven. They’re an accepted part of philosophy. If you walk into any philosophy department in the world and start making claims such as “You can’t know you’re a brain in a vat!” and “You can’t justify your presuppositions!”, you’ll get laughed out of the building. In philosophy, we all agree presuppositions cannot be justified. That’s what makes them presuppositions.

And so, with that in mind, if a presuppositional apologist uses God as a presupposition, doesn’t that mean they can’t justify the existence of G—

 

SHUT YOUR DIRTY MOUTH, ATHEIST! YOU CAN’T EVEN KNOW YOU’RE NOT A BRAIN IN A VAT!

I DON’T NEED TO TALK TO YOU! 

 

And yes, that’s the typical rhetoric tactic of presups. Screaming insults at anyone who tries to ask them questions. But there’s another tactic presups use. And it’s essentially asking you the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

The Presup Red Herring

See, when I was in college, in debate club, we had a rule: no red herrings. A red herring is “a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic” (wikipedia) designed to avoid answering questions. It goes like this:

Me: “If God is one of your presuppositions, how do justify it?”
Presup: “How do you know you’re not a brain in a vat?”
Me: “Sorry, that doesn’t answer my question.”
Presup: “I asked you a question. How do you know you’re not a brain in a vat?”
Me: “Excuse me, I…”
Presup: “If you’re not going to answer my question, we can just stop talking. See, this is a typical tactic for atheists. They refuse to answer questions.”

 

If you think I’m making this shit up, just watch the following video. I assure you, I am not making this shit up.

 

 

Standard tactic. Institute a tone of interrogation with you asking all the questions. Then, when someone asks you a question, ask them a diversionary question in return and get upset when they don’t answer. There are hundreds of hours of this.

And I’ve. Watched. All of it.

Conclusion

This morning, an old friend of mine posted something on Facebook. And like an incantation, it broke my spell.

 

“The primary problem faced by those attempting civil debate is that moral, rational, and scientific arguments don’t work on those with immoral, irrational, and unscientific mindsets.”
— my friend Greg

I sincerely believe both Matt Slick and DD are trolls. They’re not trolls like my friend Ken—who may be a curmudgeon, but he’s a sweet and generous curmudgeon who looks out for other people—but people who aren’t interested in having honest debate.

I debate to learn. Slick and DD debate to win. They aren’t interested in truth or convincing others. They just want to score points.

For those two weeks of depression, I wanted to find out how to contact these people and engage with them. But engaging with them won’t do anyone any good. And if I ever did engage them, I wouldn’t engage their arguments. Instead, I ask the following questions:

 

1. Can you please show me a Youtube video or podcast where these arguments convinced someone to give up atheism and begin believing in your God?
2. Have you ever submitted your arguments to a logic or philosophy journal?
3. Do you agree using rhetorical techniques such as red herrings and other distractions do not benefit a discussion but only cause confusion and frustration?

 

That’s how I’d engage with them. Fortunately, I don’t have to because I don’t want to. Not anymore. Greg’s words lifted the haze off my head. Sometimes, that’s all it takes. A friend giving you a smack in the face (metaphorically, of course) that wakes you up.

And if you ever wanted to know how far my head can go down a rabbit hole, now you know. Sorry about that.

EXT. DAY – TWO DAYS AFTER DIANA’S FIRST APPEARANCE AS WW IN NY

PANEL ONE

JESSIE WILKINS, a professional ambush reporter, approaches DIANA after she stops a bank robbery. He rushes up, putting the microphone directly in her face. DIANA looks confused.

WILKINS
Wonder Woman! Can you answer a few questions for me! Why are you dressed this way? Do you think it’s a good example for young girls?

DIANA
Excuse me?

PANEL TWO

WILKINS pushes closer, pressing on the advantage of confusion.

WILKINS
Do you think you’re a good example for young girls running around dressed in your underwear?

PANEL THREE

Close up of DIANA as glares at WILKINS, not saying a word.

PANEL FOUR

Same shot. DIANA responds.

DIANA
Where I come from, we celebrate the human body as beautiful and we do not shame our children into believing they must cover themselves.

WILKINS
So you…

DIANA
On your way to speak to me, you rushed by a man sitting on the corner with a sign that says, “Will work for food.” And you did it without any pause or hesitation.

PANEL FIVE

WILKINS
So you believe you are a positive influence—

DIANA
That is a man who is literally begging for the right to live. Begging for the right to survive another day. And you did it without thinking. Because you have seen it a thousand times a day and it means nothing to you. A man who is literally begging for the right to live. And you are not disgusted by it. Or disgraced by it. Or dishonored by it.

PANEL SIX

DIANA begins flying away, holding the homeless man. WILKINS holding up the microphone. She looks down at him.

WILKINS
—a positive influence on young girls?

DIANA
And yet you persist. You are a pathetic creature. Go home and apologize to your mother that you have dishonored her so miserably. She deserves better than the likes of you.