The Snit

BASSENCO once remarked to me that a certain atheist film maker who posted about her having attended Hyles-Anderson College could not get the facts straight if you nailed them in a straight row across his forehead. She did apologize for this outburst and assured me that the poor boy meant well.

She even said something like, "He writes screen plays, and that's how he thinks--like it's a screen play." She then showed me the synopsis he had written of "the facts" about her history of speaking up about abusive churches. His intention was to post the following record of her life.

In it, she had been a student at Hyles Anderson and had met Voyle Glover there: both untrue. There were all kinds of inconsistencies like this, but nothing damaging. And she was right: all the facts that he knew were neatly pieced together into a seamless garment.

He'd fit her, Voyle Glover, Dave Hyles, Vic Nischik, and I don't know who else all into a tidy synopsis that was sheer balls, but it made sense. It was like those grand pageant movies from the 1950s where all the characters named in a particular book of the Bible all connect up somehow in the script. When I had finished howling with laughter, she let him know that he'd gotten his facts wrong. And, luckily, he never posted the Cecil B. DeMille version of the foes of Fundamentalism. She may have put a flea in his ear.

Anyway, years later, she showed me another post from him, this one not so nice. He was unhappy with her first Conference of the Lambs and had written several things about her motives that were not only balls once again, but downright unfair. It all just came out of his head. She made some sort of ineffective protest to him, but I think she sensed that his reach was limited, and there was no point in giving credibility where none was due and none existed anyway.

But when her book about spiritual abuse came out, this rather mercurial young man did outright misrepresent her words. Took them out of context and made them mean the opposite of what she was saying, then assaulted her integrity for having said something she never said.

I privately wondered if the Fundamentalists would jump on the wagon on this one, but a few of them saw the deception, and it was pretty blatant. I started ruminating about refiring this blog.

But I am superfluous:

On May 6th he leveled the ridiculous charge(s) that Schizophrenic Christianity blames the victims.
On May 7 some hemming and hawwing were sharply evident on his blog as he reluctantly recommended the book
On May 8, more hemming and hawwing with a distinct foot-in-mouth tone of voice and a sulky suggestion that her previous book was simply better, that's all.
On May 14, his blogs disappeared entirely.

That's called a snit, and he'll probably be back once he recovers from whatever tongue lashings he got from normal people.