Good evening on this the twentieth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I don’t have much because today my oldest son was recovering from a minor outpatient surgery he had yesterday. It went well, and he’s doing quite well—up and active—but he gets upset very easily in an atypical way that suggests that all is not normal. Which I wouldn’t expect it to be, it’s just in the category of appearances can be deceiving since he seems to be doing so well.

Yesterday on twitter I declared myself an alinguist. That is, someone who lacks a belief that language exists. Words exist, of course, but they’re brute facts and “language” is just a fiction that bronze-age people used to explain words. And since I don’t believe in language but communicate just fine, communicating with words is obviously not evidence of language. But if anyone has such evidence, I’d be glad to hear it. After which I will summarily dismiss it as not evidence, of course, since there cannot be evidence that language exists, but being willing to listen marks me out as being very virtuous. And just to make things clear, linguists don’t believe in Klingon or Sindarin, I just don’t believe in their language either.

And so forth. Sometimes one needs the emotional release afforded by parody. It’s not like any atheists will actually get it, of course, but on the other hand you never know when you’ve tilled the ground so that someone else can plant the seed that will one day turn into the tree that will bear fruit. And the inspiring incident was some twitter atheists showing up out of nowhere and saying stupid things at me with all the self-assurance that goes along with an impressive incompetence at the basics of logical thinking. Which is not in itself a justification for making fun of them, but on the other hand making fun of them may be a bitter medicine which helps them. Some of them are so bad at thinking that the only response which seems at all honest is to point out that they’re far too bad at thinking to be attempting thinking on serious issues, and should go back to the beginning. That sounds harsh, but where it’s true—and the people I’m talking about are incompetent at secular thinking, not just thinking on religious matters—anything else would be doing them the disservice of allowing their false notion of competence to go unchecked. Such people won’t learn from me, of course—I often recommend courses in logic at local community colleges for that reason—but they weren’t going to do that anyway. If a man has a clear compound fracture in his leg, but for some reason challenges you to a 5k, the thing to do is not to politely humor him and slow up so he’s not too far behind. The thing to do is your best to get him to a hospital. Now imagine if both his legs had multiple compound fractures, and there was a gaping wound in his left arm, and you saw him struggling mightily to lift a gun to his head because (due to loss of blood) he thought it was a fly swatter. Now just replace all those things which the epistemological beliefs of the average twitatheist, and you’ve got an idea how badly off these people are. Sportsmanship is for healthy people. Who are playing sports.

God bless you.