By: DAVID RICE Re: Taking Fundies to Task A.S.R.C. Rev David Michael Rice P.O. Box 13670 -

By: DAVID RICE
Re: Taking Fundies to Task

A.S.R.C.                               Rev David Michael Rice
P.O. Box 13670                         -------------------
Columbus, Ohio                         ----------------
43213                                  -----

                        January 5th, 1996

To Dennis Conley, Editor, The Believer's Chronicle

   I have received your undated letter today, Friday the
fifth. I am somewhat at a loss to understand why you felt the
need to castigate Mister Till in a letter you have presumably
mailed to each one of your 1,586 subscribers. (At the
first-class rate used to send the letter I have received, it
would have cost you $507.52 in just postage, let alone any
refund for issues not received by subscribers.) I cannot
imagine why you would send such a letter to anyone other than
Mister Till.

   Enclosed please find the returned check of $14.17 (from
you). When I sent my subscription check, I had made a
personal commitment to pay for the right to read your
newsletter. Now that the newsletter is defunct, perhaps as a
personal favor to me and my sense of commitment you will keep
the check and use the money in some worthwhile endeavor. You
could send it to the American Civil Liberties Union, or the
Institute for First Amendment Studies, or to Planned
Parenthood, or some such organization.

   Well over two weeks ago I received from Mister Till what
could be called an "advanced copy" of his letter to you,
though what the entire contents was, I do not know. He voiced
his concerns about just how large your readership was, and he
expressed his doubts that it is as large as you report.
Surely you must understand that a busy man like Mister Till
should not expend his valuable time writing for a newsletter
than may have few readers. Mister Till's The Skeptical Review
appears to be a full-time job in itself, let alone working on
his daily Internet correspondence and fulfilling any
traveling and speaking commitments Mister Till may have. If
The Believer's Chronicles has, let one say, 80 or 90 readers,
I cannot see how it would be worth Mister Till's time (or
anyone's) to write for them.

   Before I address the second letter (the one with your
check) you have sent to me, I would like to discuss the first
letter (not dated either) that I received on or around
November 23. You asked me how I had heard of The Stupid
Christian Chronicle.

   I read about The Stupid Christian Chronicle in Mister
Till's The Skeptical Review, of which I am a subscriber. The
submission requirements for The Stupid Christian Chronicle,
as reported by Mister Till in The Skeptical Review, were odd
enough to make me want to see if he was mistaken (that is not
the only reason I subscribed to The Stupid Christian
Chronicle: I subscribe to many religious newsletters).

   As I said, I cannot conceive of why you would send the
second letter I have received from you to anyone other than
Mister Till, since your complaint appears to be with him.
Most of your readers will never see Mister Till's letter
which you are responding to, as no doubt few of them
subscribe to The Skeptical Review. Mister Till brought up
many perfectly valid questions and criticisms: you could have
honestly answered them, or you could have told him you choose
not to answer them. Instead you resorted to special pleading,
evasion, and the ad hominem. Rather than deal with Mister
Till fairly and rationally, you appear to have chosen to use
him as an excuse to abandon publication of The Believer's
Chronicle.

   I question your sanity when you write that "Satan" was
responsible for you throwing in the towel. It may please you
in a megalomaniacal way to believe you have such powerful
enemies as "Satan" (and Mister Till), but surely you do not
expect your readers to share in your hallucinations and
delusions of grandeur. I suggest that if you really believe
"Satan" had a hand in your abandoning the newsletter, perhaps
you could benefit from psychotherapy. I am not a psychologist
or psychiatrist, but I can see when someone is in trouble as
you appear to me to be. Your blaming "Satan" for your
decisions does not appear healthy to me.

   Needless to say, I think Mister Till had NOTHING AT ALL to
do with your choice to no longer publish The Believer's
Chronicle. That lame dog won't hunt. Over the many years I
have read Mister Till's articles, I have found him to be,
without exception, extraordinarily fair to Bible
Inerrantists--- he goes to great length to provide space for
Inerrantists to express their beliefs and to address
criticism. I have never met Mister Till, nor do I owe him any
favors: therefore, when I say that I find his honesty to be
impeccable and his motives to be fair, just, and virtuous, I
do so out of the respect he has earned. If more Born Again
Christians and Bible Inerrantist were as intellectual honest
and fair as I have always found Mister Till to be, I dare say
a great many non-believers would not look at Christianity
and Christians with such well-earned disdain. Sling as much
mud at Mister Till as you wish: I will not buy it unless and
until you produce some evidence that it is justified. Be
ashamed, Mister Conley.

   You have refused to explain which parent publication The
Believer's Chronicle calved off of--- that refusal is absurd
and irresponsible! I have never heard of such behavior of a
publisher outside of samizdat. Your story about a division
among the ranks of A.S.R.C. being responsible for your
silence on the issue seems weak to me.

   Perhaps you have acquired the proprietary mailing list of
the parent publication and you don't want them to know.
Perhaps the parent publication was worth Mister Till's time
writing to, but not yours.

   So you see why Mister Till's inquiry concerning the parent
publication is a valid one. Why have you not, as far as I
know, told Mister Till who the parent publication is? Why do
you wish Mister Till to be unable to contact them?

   As for the size of your readership (ex-readership), again
Mister Till had excellent reasons to question you on the
issue. Instead of giving the man some kind of good-faith
assurance (the post office would be quite happy to give you a
receipt that you could have mailed to Mister Till), you chose
to insult and belittle him in a letter that was presumably
mailed to over one-and-a-half thousand people. I, too, find
myself skeptical of your claim [of] over 1,500 subscribers.

   As to your newsletter, I found the "believers" to be
ignorant, childish, arrogant, obnoxious, and grossly
ill-informed--- to such an extent that I pause to wonder if
the newsletter was an elaborate put-on (i.e. con job) to make
people who believe in God to appear foolish baboons. The
article on numerology was sufficient to demonstrate your
complete lack of sincerity.

   Concerning the grossly foolish, inane, asinine numerology
article, if one is to take the author's word for it, God has
used the "power in numbers" to show us that the Messiah Jesus
is The Beast of Revelation: multiply the English alphabet's
sequence by nine (A=9, B=18, C=27, all the way to Z=234).
Adding up the word JESUS, we get 666. MESSIAH also reduces to
666. Now, would you publish this Novian numerological
technique along with the other one? Why or why not?

   Needless to say, one can manipulate numbers to perform all
kinds of mysterious tricks--- does that mean God is
responsible? Or does it means that ignorant fools are too
stupid to think critically? Innumeracy is a social problem
that is exasperated by editors like you who choose to fuel
it. (You may pick up a book about the problems of Innumeracy
at Prometheus Books.)

   To conclude, I found your behavior towards Mister Till to
be dastardly and your braggartly rationalizations to be
discreditable. If your goal was to make yet one more
Christian look the incompetent, arrogant, irresponsible,
ignorant, self-righteous, bumbling dullard, you couldn't have
done a much better job. Just what WAS your goal for your
newsletter? To make believers appear to all be imbeciles?

... "Leave it to an ATHEIST to decide there is no god." -- net.fundy
* Shy.David@EdenBBS.com
--- Silver Xpress Mail System 5.4H1
 * Origin: "And furthermore, 'Don't call me brother.'" (1:124/9005)