James Patrick Holding

There is an apologist named “James Patrick Holding” (this used to be a pseudonym until he changed his name, and skeptics were really excited about this because his real name at the time was “Robert Turkel,” which is infinitely sillier-sounding than “James Patrick Holding…” a childish observation to make, in my opinion, and which I think cost the skeptics some credibility). He runs a site called Tektonics.org

I’ve never come across another Christian apologist who takes it as far as he does, and who seems to be as sure he’s right as this guy does. He has drafted up meticulous rebuttals, full of insults, to almost all the atheist stuff that’s out there, and none of it seems to have affected him even enough to realize that so much as *creationism* is wrong (based on an exchange I had with him while still a Christian, during which I tried to convince him otherwise… I’m sure he would be even less likely to listen to me now).

It’s kind of a case study. The guy does this full time, and from what I can tell he lives alone in a basement or something. It scares me because he is the same personality type as me, and he seems sort of like the person I might have turned out to be, had I not faced the outside world and discovered the experiential discrepancy between my beliefs and the world out there… had I merely holed up at my computer and defended the faith to the end.

Take a look at his site.

I might browse through and nitpick at some of the things he’s written.

4 Responses to “James Patrick Holding”

  1. JP Holding has an enduring reputation for personal invective, childish insults, and sneering contempt.

    When reminded of the scriptural instruction to “be gentle as doves”, Mr Holding’s interpretation was “according to metaphorical lexicons of the period, doves were reputed as vicious fighters…Jesus’ words there are closer to my methods than you may realize.”

    • The thing about his caustic prose is that he uses it to argue for Christianity, which has neither the kind of evidence to justify such certainty, nor the doctrines that promote such an attitude. It is kind of like wartime propaganda. You would never believe it, but it’s so brazen that you have a hard time believing anyone could be that wrong and that brazen.

  2. You debated creationism with him? That’s rather odd considering that the creation/evolution debate is not something he gets into.

    • I wrote him, as a Christian saying that I was concerned that he believed in creationism–or rather, that I suspected he’d think the evidence for not-creationism was sound, if he looked into it. That particular exchange did not last a long time. It ended with me sending him an article that he didn’t have time to go through at that time.

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