It’s popular to think of joking as completely harmless (probably in reaction to the people who can’t tell the difference between a joke and a serious philosophical position), but while joke are not the same thing as policy papers, that does not mean that they are always harmless. I take a look at the conditions in which joking about evil can predispose one toward evil. Of course you can watch it on YouTube instead:
I’ve occasionally seen references to using science to construct morality, so I discussed why this is impossible. (This is also a position which any who believes in scientisim—that the only source of knowledge is science—is forced into if they don’t want to hold morality and all associated human actions, such as law and criminal justice, to be completely irrational. They’re not going to want to do that because then they’d be holding that all the most important things in life are irrational.) And of course you can view this on YouTube:
I recently got a chance to take some pictures around my yard. They’re not great, but some of them are a little interesting, I think. The gallery is here:
http://www.chrislansdown.com/photos/2017-12-07-Around_The_Yard/
And here are a few pictures from it:
Arad and I talked about art from a Nietzschean perspective. You can watch the discussion on YouTube:
The distributist made a very interesting video on the sex abuse scandal in Hollywood:
Towards the end he brought up a very interesting point about Hollywood’s current anything-goes morality being replaced by a more strict feminist morality, and touched upon the idea that this might be self-defeating because a puritanical morality dominating would result in Hollywood ceasing to make the sort of movies from which it derives its power.
But this also brought up another very interesting point: if you leave aside the particulars of feminism, a sleazeball has a very strong interest in aligning himself with vocal proponents of morality because it gives him cover for his misdeeds. If the vocal proponents of morality (in this case, feminism) ceased to give the cover, the powerful sleazeballs would cease to have a reason to support the vocal proponents of that morality. Or in short, it’s possible that the only reason Hollywood supports feminism as it does is as a cover for its sins and if feminism were to cease to provide that cover, Hollywood would cease to support feminism. It’s an interesting idea, and I invited the Distributist onto my channel to talk about it. I think it was an interesting conversation. You can also watch it on YouTube, if you prefer:
A viewer asked me to talk about this parable, so I did. You can also watch the video on YouTube:
This is sort-of a followup to Social Media is Doomed. If we take as given that social media is in the phase where its push-based notification system is creaking under the weight of its large userbase and stressing users as a result, if one does not simply abandon all social media, how is one to deal with this and stay sane?
I am not at present giving a definitive answer for two reasons:
But I would like to sketch out some techniques I’ve found to work. They’re not rules, just heuristics.
This is probably the most important thing. If people post too many things which would require you to come to terms with them in order to get along, don’t follow them. On social media where being friends and seeing updates are not the same thing, then by all means be friends with anyone you know but be careful to turn off status updates (or whatever the push notifications are called) as soon as you can tell that they’re not thinking of their status updates as public. It’s way better than losing friends.
Everyone’s social media app loves to buzz you every time you have the slightest interaction with anyone, since they desperately want your eyes looking at the advertisements they show you. Just turn off the notifications for everything but direct messages and check on occasion. The number of times anything bad will happen because you didn’t catch somebody’s status update in a timely manner can be counted on no hands, for most people.
The default interface of most social media is designed with one goal in mind: to get you to watch as much advertising as the social media company can manipulate you into watching. There are probably some exceptions, but however it is that the social media company makes money off of you, that’s what they want to trick you into doing, as often as they can. And they may not even realize that they’re training you through stress reactions and pavlovian training to do what they want; they probably only measure their success at making money, not what effect these things have on you. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether they mean well. You can do just as much damage by not realizing how to measure how much damage you’re doing. Protect yourself from everyone, not merely intentional villains. Most every social media platform has some alternative way of interacting with it that doesn’t get nearly as much attention. Tweetdeck for Twitter is the obvious example, but there are others. Maybe read Facebook via email that automatically goes into a folder. Whatever the platform offers that isn’t the standard, use that if at all possible.
Some thoughts about smiling as a form of communication. You can also watch the video on YouTube:
That’s a slightly click-baity title, so let me clarify: I mean social media not in the sense of all ways of talking with people on the internet of any kind, but rather the giant platforms people typically mean when they say “social media”: Facebook, Twitter, etc. And when I say doomed, I mean, in their current form. I strongly suspect that there will be a Facebook corporation (or whatever it’s called) in 50 years time.
Social media is currently organized around a push-model of media delivery. Basically, it uses notifications for when people say things to you. And it does this regardless of whether you know them or not. This is not long-term viable for human beings. Conflict is deeply stressful to us, and we’re reasonably good at settling into mutually acceptable patterns with people we regularly come into contact with—especially family members. Though even there, plenty of people aren’t good at it and these relationships don’t all last. push-based social media forces us into contact with people in a relatively intimate setting with whom we haven’t developed the patterns of interaction which let us be comfortable with each other. And that just doesn’t work.
People not wanting to argue with random strangers in an intimate way is often ridiculed as “wanting to seal oneself in an echo chamber” but it’s basic human nature: people don’t have the energy to accommodate themselves to a large number of people, and worse social media contacts are often quite temporary in nature. Developing a mutually accommodating relationship to a person is often a waste of energy because they disappear from one’s life in 6 months.
For this and other reasons, social media where you interact in an intimate way with people you should be interacting with in a formal way is a disaster. It is simply against human nature.
Of course when social networks are relatively young this doesn’t cause as many problems because the members of the network are self-selected and most people just don’t run into that many people. Thus the network gains a lot of strength of this not-long-term-viable approach in terms of early growth. But eventually the downsides emerge; Facebook, for example, has become an excellent way to hate your family, friends, and neighbors. It’s also, apparently, an excellent tool for kids to bully each other with, and especially for girls to bully other girls with. I won’t use facebook for basically any amount of money, but its addictive properties do keep many bound to it.
The result is very likely going to be the platform’s gradual shift away from push-notifications to pull-notifications. Push notifications for private direct messages, since that’s the same thing as mail, email, SMS messages, etc. But pull notifications for other things, like status updates. The other thing is that on more personal networks like Facebook, people are likely to generally adopt rules of politeness very similar to teatime rules—do not under any circumstance discuss contentious issues.
The problem from Facebook’s perspective, of course, is that this reduction in engagement is bad for their bank account. For at least a fair time they were experimenting with showing you the things other people liked, in addition to showing you what other people shared. That’s really what eventually drove me off of Facebook, actually. And I notice that Twitter is doing it too. In fact the twitter phone app as become basically unusuable because of it. Between that and their constantly showing me the “in case you missed it” tweets, the phone app has become dysfunctional. Sure, it’s serving twitter’s ends and not mine, but I’m getting close to uninstalling it, in which case it will serve no one’s ends. I’m a little odd in that I analyze this sort of thing, but I’m not odd in my reaction—people burn out all the time.
So when you put all this together, it’s an inherent problem social media faces—growth and maximum engagement are achieved only by running hard against human nature. And you can only do that for so long before human nature revolts. As I said, I don’t expect that Facebook and Twitter will all go out of business—heck, there’s still a MySpace for crying out loud—but I do think we’re going to see big changes.
Blogging, by the way, is far more in accord with human nature because it is a pull-type medium. You go to a blog and read it, or read it in your RSS reader (I use newsblur). It is convenient to take or leave as you find interesting and useful. It does not, therefore, introduce demands that you accommodate yourself to someone who probably won’t be around in six months anyway.
Arad, who runs the channel Zarathustra’s Serpent, is a Nietzsche scholar. We had a discussion about what Nietzsche’s philosophy actually was. And as usual, you can watch it on YouTube:
I’ve put up some photographs of a fascinating black and yellow spider I found in my yard:
http://www.chrislansdown.com/photos/2017-12-01-Black_and_Yellow_Spider/
Here’s a sample:
This is a follow-up to an earlier response I made. The first part is A Response to Logicked. You can also view this episode on YouTube:
A look at the problem with voluntarism, and why it’s so very, very wrong. (Voluntarism being the idea that morality comes from God’s will, not from his intellect.) Of course you can watch it on YouTube:
Also includes a bonus explanation as to why freedom is found in doing God’s will. You can also watch the original on YouTube:
A discussion with my old friend Max Kolbe about his atheist days. I actually met Max when he was an atheist running a popular blog on politics and news (and other things), and still remember the post when he announced that he was no longer an atheist. As I recall, the wording was very simple: “He is risen.”
I’ve always found the idea of religion as bad science to be absurd, so I decided to have some fun with it. You can watch the video on YouTube:
Or you can watch it on YouTube:
I recently made this joke on Twitter:
There are of course plenty of non-corporeal entities which atheists ordinarily believe in, but many of them they have some alternative explanation for. Logical propositions are just expectations, as are mathematics, mathematical structures, etc. But they do tend to believe in the existence of agreements between people which are not easily reducible simply to expected behaviors.
In my tweet I chose one of the bigger agreements between people, the United States government, but really any sort of agreement will suffice, even something as simple as an agreement to borrow a shovel and return it when its use is finished. I like the example of the US government, though, since it exists not only through time but even through generations; it existed among people who are now dead and exists now among people who were not alive at its creation.
But clearly the United States government is not made up of any particular matter; there is no physical experiment one can device which would detect it. It has no weight, nor color, nor smell, nor sound. We know about it only through testimony and by its actions. And it only acts in the physical world through people.
In theory, if the principles that many atheists put forth were actually their principles, they would have to deny that the United States government exists, or at the very least claim that there’s no evidence for it.
But of course it’s not very hard to show that “their principles” are not in fact their principles. The much harder question is: so what are their principles?
That’s an excellent question I’m still trying to figure out the answer to.
I’ve always found the idea of “the God of the gaps” rather strange. In this video I look at the history of it and consider why anyone even thinks about this strange idea. Or you can watch it on YouTube:
I was recently talking with my friend Andrew Stratelates of the Escaping Atheism Project about the odd topic of people who believe in both subjective morality and self-improvement. In my experience the most common approach to reconciling these two is along the lines of “I subjectively want to do things that I subjectively want to call self-improvement”. The Distributist made a good video about a thought experiment in which one is offered a pill which would instantly wipe out all traces of impulses to conventional morality, enabling one to live out a hedonistic life with far more success because of one’s ability to manipulate and use others without guilt. I strongly recommend it:
His basic point is that when one considers the idea, one knows that it is wrong, even though one’s theory holds that there should be no reason not to and perhaps even a good reason to do it. I recommend watching it.
That said, there is still the easy response that the person doesn’t want to because part of instinctive (arbitrary, groundless) moral impulses are to retain them. And this is, ultimately, unanswerable. If one is claiming that one wills something, not that it is true, this is unanswerable. One can debate truth, but one can’t debate will. (Which is why you can kill a man in self defense but not because he has a persuasive argument.)
And the whole thing would be utterly unremarkable except for the oddity that the people who are taking this easy out of disclaiming rationality in favor of pure will also claim to be the most rational people around. I’m not going to get into why—in part because I’m still working on the psychology of the thing and have no answers I’m yet confident enough to give—but I do want to note this oddity. The people who most often talk about being rational and being unwilling to be as irrational as their opponents also (when pressed) explicitly disclaim being rational on most every human subject. It’s ironic, but also quite interesting.
This is closely related to my post The Theory of Unbelievable Stupidity. You can, of course, watch it on YouTube:
The YouTube atheist entertainer Logicked made a video about a hangout I was on with Rob from Deflating Atheism. You can also watch this video on YouTube:
Out of sympathy for some of the atheists in my comment section, I should note that I also made a second response to Logicked, where I watched the rest of his video and realized that he’s a liar. As a result I’m not going to pay any more attention to this man (unless he repents, of course) because there’s no point in dealing with liars. Here’s the second video, if you’re interested:
I should note that I was using the phrase “the overman” in a somewhat specialized way; I didn’t mean Nietzsche’s exact idea of the overman, but really just “anyone who creates values”. You can also watch this on YouTube:
I should also note that Arad (Zarathustra’s Serpent) and I had a conversation about Nietzsche’s philosophy in which some of this was clarified:
I’m finding myself in a very strange place with regard to my NaNoWriMo novel: I’ve got writer’s block. This isn’t something I’ve experienced before, as ideas come very readily to me. This problem isn’t universal, it only comes down to novels. I’m not sure whether it’s just science fiction or all fiction. Since what I really want to do is work on my video game idea (the order of the wilds), I’m inclined to say it’s not all fiction.
My NaNoWriMo novel this year is a continuation of one I abandoned due to lack of time when my third child was born, and it’s a science fiction story about space exploration. And to give background, while I don’t read much science fiction, I grew up on Star Trek and loved it, and also loved Star Trek: The Next Generation. I liked Deep Space 9 and grew cold on Voyager, but space exploration SciFi is something deeply engrained in me. And yet, I can’t help but think that it’s time is past. All modern Science Fiction is either magical fantasy or something that could as easily be set on the present day earth. But if one is writing magical fantasy, why wrap it in a veil of science-sounding language and pretend that it’s not magical fantasy?
That question has been occupying my mind for a while now, and I can’t think of an answer to it. The only answer I can think of is Sturgeon’s Law (this version being published in 1958):
I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.
I had heard this in my youth, mostly (as I recall) as a defense against the fact that Science Fiction had elements of adventure, which was considered immature by people who had grown old and tired and disliked fun. I’ve no doubt that that defense needed to be made, just as I’ve no doubt that Sturgeon defended science fiction in the time period of 1938-1958 against some unworthy attacks. But at the same time, I’m not sure that this defense really holds against the problem that I have with modern Science Fiction. I think a great deal of modern science fiction is very well written but ultimately serves no real purpose.
And to be clear I don’t mean that SciFi is escapism. I’m all in favor of escapism. I don’t mean that SciFi is childish. In fact I think that the real problem is that SciFi isn’t nearly childish enough. I’m coming to think that SciFi still exists for only two reasons:
There is probably something of a case to be made for SciFi in the vein of #2, along the lines of why we give crutches to people with broken legs and feed mushed up food to people with broken jaws. It is right to be gentle with the weak.
But it seems to me that outside of truly hard SciFi like Andy Weir’s The Martian, which is just the story of a castaway surviving until he’s rescued which could as easily be told in a jungle or a desert island, Science Fiction is riddled with inescapable plot holes because it refuses to take its magic seriously.
And this brings me back to where I started—as an author, I have a huge, almost pathological dislike of plot holes. I don’t claim that all my plots have been perfect, but I certainly put a lot of work into making them consistent and coherent and as close to free of plot holes as I can make them. And I can’t explain to myself why I’m bothering with a genre where that is impossible, especially when I could have a lot more fun with magic if I just admit that the world is filled with magic.
Please bear in mind that this is basically me thinking out loud. These aren’t conclusions, and I’d be very happy to hear a strong argument that I’ve got it wrong.
Some considerations about how we regard invisible things, and how we’ve developed a false sense of being familiar with them. As usual, you can also watch it on YouTube:
It’s a despicable article, sure, but instead of just pointing out how awful it is, I think it’s worth looking at it from a different perspective, to ask why it was written at all, and what purpose does it serve to the author. You can also watch the video on YouTube:
In the course of a small conversation I had with Mr. John C. Wright in the comments of one of his blog posts, I said that if moral agents persisted across time, they must necessarily be outside of time and therefore conjoined to time by something outside of both and one is then just a little bit of thinking-things-through from God. His reply contained this very interesting question which I’d like to answer at length:
If the Ohio river is inside time, and flowing, and the water changes from moment to moment, in what way is it wrong or illogical of me to call it by the same name “the Ohio river” on Wednesday as I had done on Tuesday?
(I should note, if anyone is unfamiliar with Mr. Wright and his work, that he is a Catholic ex-atheist and is discussing the idea of atheistic ethics in the grand Catholic tradition of taking ideas seriously regardless of which “team” they might benefit because nothing is more important than the truth. Christians are in the pleasant position of not needing to fear the truth, because Jesus Christ is the truth. And the way and the life, but that does not directly bear on the moment.)
Unfortunately the only way to begin to address this question is by asking another question, and one so basic as to make most readers understandably grown: when we say “the Ohio River”, what, specifically, are we talking about? I know, I know, but hear me out. I promise I’ll keep it short.
When we say, “the Ohio River”, we are in truth referring to the form of a river which is instantiated in a particular place, for a duration of time. If we want to talk about the matter of the Ohio River, we must use far more cumbersome language, such as “the present riverbed of the Ohio River” or “The water flowing at this moment through the Ohio River”. Now, I think that the only reasonable position with regard to forms is Scholastic Realism, which is a sort of hybrid between Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism; scholastic realism holds that individual forms participate in the ideal of their form which exists in the mind of God, and it is from that participation that we can refer to two things by the same name and actually mean something by it. However, we need not go down the path of scholastic realism for the present purpose because the Ohio River is not a moral agent.
Before I get to the obvious objection to scholastic realism, let me address the Aristotelian objection to scholastic realism. Which is that the form of the Ohio River exists within time because it is subject to change. The Ohio river came into being and will probably go out of being; it grows and shrinks and occasionally has changed course. But the problem is that something is needed outside of the particular form in order for this to be the same form, rather than one form giving birth to another form and dying in childbirth. Why is it one Ohio River rather than many Ohio Rivers, in the way that wood gives birth to fire but is not fire? Aristotelian realism isn’t wrong, it is merely incomplete. (Which is why Saint Thomas could baptize it.) And so we return to the obvious objection, which was raised during the Endarkenment (more commonly called “the Enlightenment”).
The obvious objection to saying that the Ohio River, as a single thing, participates in the idea of Riverhood within God’s mind is simply to deny that the Ohio River is really one thing, but is instead a collection of things so similar that we give them all the same name. In this view of the name “the Ohio River” does not describe a thing in itself but rather a relation to us. “The Ohio River” thus means, “all that matter which is related to us in the manner of the water currently in the riverbed located as you’d find it on a map labeled ‘Ohio River’.” More colloquially, whatever water happens to be in a particular set of places going in particular directions. As with all forms of reductionism, it is unanswerable in itself except by negation. If a man says that there is no chair, only a collection of atoms in a particular arrangement he finds it convenient to call “chair,” there is nothing one can do to help him, except possibly giving him a vigorous beating with the object in question. No one is a sincere reductionist.
But it doesn’t matter, for the Ohio River is not a moral agent. If the Ohio River does something destructive, such as flooding a man’s house and property, no one holds that justice demands that vengeance be exacted upon the river. And in the case of one who holds the functional view of the river, he holds that it is not even possible to exact vengeance upon the river, for the water which did him harm is long gone.
This is not the case with moral agents. If a man killed my brother yesterday, I claim the right to kill him today because it is the same man who killed my brother. If I told people, “I claim the right to kill this man because he reminds me of the man who killed my brother” they would laugh at me or restrain me, depending on how serious they thought I was. And if they asked me, “But is he the same man?” and I replied, “I call him by the same name as I called the man who killed my brother.” they would grow angry with me. “Is he the same man or not?” they might reasonably demand of me. And if my final answer is, “He is not the same man but I am accustomed to treating him as the same man” it may well end with my fellow villagers striking me down. And if I were to say, “He isn’t but for convenience I will say that he is,” it would be to the shame of my fellow men if they did not strike me down.
Morality requires identity across time to be meaningful. There may be no such identity, but if so there is no such thing as morality. This is why, to uphold morality, is to uphold identity across time. And once a man believes in actual identity across time, it is just a short hop, skip, and jump to believing in God.
Which is probably why pagan philosophers so often did believe in God.
Or you can watch it on YouTube:
An explanation of a sentence from my video on the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. You can also watch this video on YouTube:
(This is continuing thoughts from Fun Exploratory Sci-Fi Without Magic is Hard and Why Science Fiction Will Never Die, both of which are related to a science fiction story I’m working on writing.) As I’m working on a Science Fiction story about the first ship from the Milky Way to explore the Andromeda galaxy, the various sorts of magic required to make any sort of space exploration story weigh on my mind because I tend to prefer hard SciFi to soft SciFi. I think that this is in part because if one is going for magic, why bother with the SciFi at all—why not just go whole hog and actually have fun with the fun parts?
But the problem is that you can’t do space exploration as hard SciFi. This was captured fairly well in a post by Jasyn Jones titled, Hard SF Does Not Exist. And he’s right. There are of course exceptions like Andy Weir’s recent book The Martian, but the sorts of stories one can tell in hard SF are not very different from the sorts of stories one can tell on earth. People get trapped for many months at a time on Antarctica, and there is nothing preventing someone from setting a story on a desert island. (For example, two women were recently stranded at sea for months.) But if you want to actually do space exploration, you need magic to accomplish it. To put things in perspective, it took 9 years for New Horizons to get to Pluto. Proxima Centauri, the closest star we know about, is approximately 5,400 times further away than Pluto is. Even if we could travel to Proxima Centauri ten times faster than New Horizons (which seems doubtful), it would still take more than twice as much time to get there as has elapsed since Julius Caesar became the emperor of Rome. Just the amount of fuel necessary to power a ship for 5400 years would be staggering (ball park, assuming a gigawatt nuclear power plant, it would need about 5.4M Kg of fissile material, according to this), to say nothing of the near-perfect oxygen and water reclamation necessary, the meters of shielding necessary to protect the people from cosmic rays, etc. It would take tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of rocket launches just to assemble such a generation-ship in orbit around the earth. And heaven help the people on it if they need any spare parts for their ship during those five millenia.
I should probably note that there are proposals, like Project Daedalus which can span that distance much faster—on the order of 50 years. But they involve fusion engines firing for years and consequently truly massive amounts of deuterium and tritium, both of which are extremely rare. Project Daedalus depends on a bunch of stuff which there’s no good reason to believe can reliably be made to work, and that in order to get a 500kg mechanical payload to do a flyby. To move people in a way that they can land on a foreign planet requires exponentially more mass and consequently initial fuel, etc. In short, the human race is not going anywhere outside of our solar system in real life.
And yet, as I said in my last blog post on the subject, I do think that exploratory Science Fiction is great because it is the heir to Greek epics like the Odyssey. (Of course, the Odyssey did have magic in it, but the magic wasn’t Odysseus’s, it belonged to the people he met.) But all exploratory sci-fi relies on what amounts to teleportation. Does this mean that Science Fiction is just bad fantasy? Is it just fantasy for people whose imaginations are too weak to entertain the explicitly fantastical?
There is another possibility, though: what if Science Fiction was possible in an earlier time, but isn’t now? The Science Fiction written from about 1850-1950, was often set in our solar system. There are a million counter-examples, I have no doubt, but what if it was the Science Fiction (scientifiction, as C.S. Lewis called it in the days when he was writing it) that was set in our solar system which was the source of vitality in science fiction?
Space exploration set in our solar system actually did have the right scale to it. One can get to the moon in days; one get can to Mars in months. The moons of Jupiter are more like a year’s travel time; and all these are the right time scales for the Greek epics. Stories set here were—when we didn’t know what was on the moons and the planets—actually were quite plausible for the future. The science involved in getting to these places was actual science, not merely magic with a veneer of science lightly glued on top.
Alas, time moved on and we found out that there are no civilizations to explore on the moon or on the other planets; any civilization which happens there will be human settlers living in very highly technologized dwellings. They will live there, if they live at all, in little bubbles of planet earth which they’ve brought with them.
I grew up on Star Trek; there is something utterly magical about Science Fiction. But it seems very possibly that true, hard science fiction is as much a thing of the past as the wild west is. We may be in the unfortunate position that to recapture the magic, we must capture it in a genie’s bottle. And that will always leave us with the question of where we got the genie’s bottle, and why we take it for granted.
If you hang out in the right parts of the internet, and especially if you’re a Christian who ever talks about atheism, you’ll encounter a variety of atheists lecturing you about:
And so on. Many of these people seem to be simply repeating things they’ve heard from more charismatic people. But among the atheists one meets, there’s a subset who is astonishingly angry. They’re extremely aggressive, and at the same time generally very poorly educated and uninterested in thinking. By and large, they do nothing but make extremely confident assertions and accuse you of logical fallacies in your response. Even if you didn’t make any sort of argument at all but just asked a question. And very curiously, they get almost frothing-at-the-mouth angry if you simply make contradictory assertions to their assertions.
One possibility for some of them is that they are cult recruiters. Many of their qualities are exactly the approaches of cult recruiters when interacting with skeptics in front of potential recruits. (The key is to realize that attacking the skeptic is showing off for the potential recruit, who in this case would be a non-cult-member atheist looking on.) I’m only at the stage of wondering about this possibility; the behavior seems to line up fairly well, but that’s circumstantial evidence at best. All sorts of things are compatible with all sorts of theories; compatibility is very weak evidence.
Another interesting possibility is demonic possession. Some of these sorts of atheists may be cooperating with demons for the purpose of sewing discord and disorder, and whatever the man may think the object is, demons are concerned with souls. To try to make Christians angry and wrathful would be a victory for a demon. Peace is the right ordering of the world according to God’s will; sin is, therefore, disorder. Demons like to scatter out and separate.
And again, actions merely being consistent with a theory is extremely weak evidence. I’m not trying to oversell this; while demonic possession is real it seems to be uncommon and so skepticism at any given possession is not the same thing as skepticism of possession in general. But the nice thing here is that erring on the side of caution is practical. At least it seems to me that the best thing to do after interacting with an anonymous demoniac online would be to keep the knowledge of God’s dominion over the world close to one’s heart, to keep in mind that Christ has defeated death and overcome the world, and to pray for the demoniac. That is also a very good strategy if it’s merely an angry unthinking blasphemer one is dealing with.
C.S. Lewis once propounded the theory that Scientifiction (what science fiction was called in the days when he was writing it) was really the modern form of the Greek epic like the Odyssey. In the days of Homer you could set a tale in a land where all the normal rules didn’t apply by merely putting it on an island no one has been to in the Mediterranean sea. Since modern man has been to all of the islands in the Mediterranean, we have to put the far-off lands farther off. In the 1800s it was still possible to put it deep underground, as in H.G. Wells’ Journey to the Center of the Earth, but in the 1900s the only real candidate was on another planet.
I think that this theory is essentially correct, especially as regards science fiction which is about adventurous exploration of places as yet unknown. I don’t think it applies nearly as much to space empires made up entirely of humans which are set in the far future as much to have a free hand with the political setup as for any other reason. But space exploration is the sort of story I’m writing for NaNoWriMo this year, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. But unfortunately, (so far) writing relatively hard sci-fi, where faster-than-light travel and free energy for propulsion are my only two main cheats, this brings me into language difficulties with encountering new species. There’s no plausible way in a relatively hard sci-fi way to have two creatures who developed along entirely different evolutionary pathways would have worked out the same language when they may not even both have heads.
I believe I’ve basically just committed myself to ignoring the problem of microbe contamination; when two unrelated species meet there’s an overly good chance that one or the other will contaminate the other with microbes to which the other has no resistance and thus inadvertently wipe most or all of the other species out. Basically, an even worse case of what happened when Europeans came into contact with Native Americans. This is basically an insoluble problem since we need our symbiotic bacteria to live. One could, possibly, confine everyone to leak-proof space suits on away missions, but that has its own problems, especially where the fun is concerned.
But language is just really a problem. If one can’t speak to another or even figure out that the other is speaking, it really cuts down on the dramatic possibilities. On the plus side, my story is set within a Christian universe so I could always introduce something like a “soul stone” which allows rational souls to communicate without words. For added fun, it could even be something like a statue to the archangel Gabriel.
Anyway, the point is that hard sci-fi is very difficult to write without plot holes for the sort of stories one often wants to write because the sort of stories we often want to write are not really about outer space in the future. That setting is just our excuse.
Chris Lansdown 
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