Wherever
there is a resource space, entities capable of reproduction will inhabit it and
begin fighting one another. This can be bacteria in a broth, humans fighting
over territory, ideas competing with one another for attention in the
collective human mind. I have witnessed competition and outright war in a place
I would never have expected it, in a resource space that I created. I refer to
the comments on my YouTube channel.
Yes,
I created a resource space when I started my YouTube channel in 2010. On
this channel, I pretend to be Charles Darwin, and I take an often humorous look
at bite-sized evolutionary concepts. I try very hard to do outrageous and funny
things, often drawing the humor upon myself. You know, things like falling off
of a cliff or into a river. Like most channels it got a slow start, but it
quickly built up to have over five hundred followers. I have to date had over
34,000 views. Check it out. It’s fun and you’ll learn a lot.
Viewers
post comments on this as on most other YouTube channels. Sometimes, the
comments are pretty insulting to me. Some are insulting to the guests I
interview. But this is pretty rare. I more commonly get appreciative comments.
What really surprised me recently is that the people have started posting
comments about one another, making
some pretty brutal statements not against me but against other viewers. In
effect, I have created a resource space in which people, hidden in anonymity,
can wage war on one another, with few rules of decency.
It
is awesome. And awful, too. I marvel at it. For a while, there was a war
between someone named Atheist Rex and someone named Raining Fire, who was (or
pretended to be; one cannot know) a fundamentalist. They wished death upon one
another; Raining Fire fervently desired that God would rain fire down out of
heaven on Atheist Rex and kill his or her children. For a while, I began to
wonder if I should report this activity to Homeland Security. But, they
probably know about it already. Anyway, they might just be playing. No language
is off limits, for either the atheists or the Christians.
Usually
the arguments are just name-calling and counter-name-calling
(you’re-so-stupid-all-you-can-do-is-name-calling etc.) Sometimes the arguments
can take an interesting turn. Somehow the topic of abortion came up—a topic I
never remember mentioning online. Prepare yourselves for some interesting
mind-expanding concepts here. A woman (unless the photo is fake) accused
Atheist Rex of supporting the mass genocide of babies in abortion clinics.
Atheist Rex responded that God one time commanded the killing of all the babies
in the world: at the time of Noah’s Flood. Good point. Then the woman responded
that the babies were not really human,
because demons had sex with human women and produced satanic spawn who needed
to be killed in the Flood. That’s a pretty creative idea—one that,
incidentally, is not in the Bible. So far they have not discussed the fact
that, according to the book of Joshua, God commanded the killing of entire
populations, including the children—and these were humans, not half-satanic
creatures. Anyway, it was the first time I ever opened my inbox and found 45
comments only slightly connected with my video. The video was about the
dinosaur tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. A similar flurry of
activity has continued since this original flare-up.
I’ll
just mention that I refuse to take responsibility for any of this craziness. I
am like a man who purchased land and built a school on it, with a playground.
The man is not responsible for the bullies fighting one another on the
playground.
And
I will just sit back and see what happens next. Thank God they cannot track one
another down. I hope.
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