Why I often enjoy my worst critics (two examples)

Okay.  I admit that my most zany detractors can be (and, when I’m paying real attention to them, often are) exasperating.  They misread, and read crazy things into, just about everything I write.  They make wild accusations.  They harshly criticize not only my faith and my views, but my appearance, my movie preferences, my employment, my taste in music and literature, my character, my writing style, my personality, my punctuation, and just about everything else about me.  It’s as if they cannot grant me a single redeeming quality, no matter how slight and inconsequential.

And sometimes they flatly make things up.  Every once in a while, for instance, I see accounts of absolutely awful things that I’m supposed to have said — in conversations that never took place, whatever the anonymous poster sharing them may claim.  And did you know that my daughter has told close confidantes of hers about what a terrible parent I am, what a rigid and overbearing fanatic and tyrant I was throughout her childhood?  One of those confidantes revealed this on an apostate message board a few years back.  Alas, though, I don’t have a daughter.

But the more bizarre and extreme critics can also sometimes be cute, and even downright funny.

Two examples:

Back in 2004 or thereabouts, I was responding (somewhere) to an attacker who was accusing me, as some regularly do, of being a nasty and vicious brute.  Having had enough of the “conversation,” I cheekily admitted to him that “The total depravity of those who disagree with me is an important article of my personal faith.”

It was obviously — at least I thought it was transparently, obviously — a bit of humor directed toward some of my more extreme critics, who like to portray me (just as this one was doing) as mean-spirited, callous, unloving, hateful, arrogant, narrow-minded, and cruel.

But the humor plainly wasn’t obvious enough for them; for more than ten years — the most recent iteration was four days ago — they’ve been treating the statement as a candid and serious revelation of my inner core.  For once in my wretched and ignoble life, they say, I was being honest.  It confirms for them what an unfeeling and egotistical swine I am.

Don’t you find that funny?  I do.

And, just yesterday, responding to an aggressively vocal atheist who frequently (but always civilly) comments on my blog, preening himself (as I see it) on his supposedly superior rationality, I wrote “You made a dubious claim. Are we supposed to accept it as true simply because you assert it?  You need to be aware that, by posting here, you’ve joined an evidence-based community.  We go by reason here, not by bare, unevidenced assertions.”

It was, I thought, a transparently obvious spoof of the sort of pretentious and self-congratulatory language that some fairly militant atheists routinely apply to themselves.  (Or should I call them “Brights”?  Some have claimed that title — to distinguish themselves, I guess, from us Dulls or Dims.)

Once again, though, the humor was wholly lost on at least a few hostile ideologues and/or total-war critics.  There are folks out there, even as I write, who are pointing out — entirely seriously! — that, despite my supposed commitment to reason and evidence, I haven’t provided irrefutable proof for my religious beliefs.  Some of them actually seem to be indignant about my brazen hypocrisy.

Wow.

So, yes, my really over-the-top detractors can be, and often are, noisome.  I grant that.  But they can also be a source of mirth and diversion.  Thus, in an odd way, I appreciate having them around.