I have to admit, the sort of response to TIA posted on WND tends to amuse me, especially in light of the non-reading atheist reviews that insist TIA is just another theologian’s apologetic:
I am shocked and saddened after reading Vox Day’s “The Irrational Atheist,” which I purchased at your site.
I have never been so conflicted about a book in my life, because it is simply outstanding in places – absolutely irrefutable. But his claim to be a believer is belied by his use, even at times glorification of, at least 14 types of terms for sick, vile and disgusting sexual perversions (some of which I had to research to find out what they meant, and which turned my stomach when I did), five mentions of grossly immoral and/or irresponsibly behavior, five slang references to body parts let’s just say which are below the beltline (yep, you guessed them!), three mentions of crude bodily functions, (to be exotic, one is even in German, and again, yes, those are the ones you’re thinking of), and five vulgar and/or crass nicknames for women.
In summary, to rip a quotation from Day out of context, “… by the ‘end’ it was getting pretty painful.” His particular humor specialization certainly appears to be the sexually perverted and scatological varieties.
Poor Oscar doesn’t seem to realize that the game argot goes along with the game designer’s analysis. And not only does he misassign the Rasmussen quote to me, I don’t recall any toilet humor in the book. I imagine a more well-read critic would be inclined to view the quote from Heller’s Catch-22 as a literary reference. Oscar claims to be shocked by the Offspring culture I inhabit, he’d probably keel over dead were he ever exposed to Slipknot culture.
In any case, I don’t quite see the point of pretending to be something you’re not. One of the things I always despised about Christians before I became one was the insufferable hypocrisy that many of the most annoying ones tended to exhibit. Now, hypocrisy is far from the worst of evils, in many cases it’s merely the homage that vice pays to virtue, but it’s a particularly problematic one if you’re going to be communicating with non-Christians. TIA isn’t written for old people who have to google a Hentai reference, it’s written for those who understand the point I’m making about the New Atheists.
Like it or not, that’s the world we live in and you can’t change it by pretending it doesn’t exist. And I note that my humor inclines to the cruel and the morbid, not the sexual and scatological.