After having already announced he will no longer debate Creationists, apparently PZ Myers felt it necessary to explain, yet again, why he will not be debating me at any point now or in the future:
Who is Vox Day? He’s a recipient of wingnut welfare, a pretentious nobody who had a rich and rotten crook for a father and who writes cheesy fantasy novels in between penning cheesy political discourse. I’m not some bigshot in my field, but I can recognize an ambitious nobody with nothing to offer, so no, I won’t ever be debating that clown.
What an astonishing surprise! I find it totally indicative of his characteristic laziness with regards to facts that Paul Zachary should assert I am a recipient of “wingnut welfare”, as if that was relevant anyhow. First, it is public knowledge that I had a record contract, a music publishing contract, a book contract, a national syndication contract, and three different million dollar game contracts before I turned 28. None of these had anything to do with Daddy’s computer graphics hardware company, which I left after two years of working there after college. I never needed any welfare, and unlike Paul Zachary, I never lived off the taxpayer either.
Those who like to imagine my father’s investment in WND had anything to do with my column being published there are clearly finding it convenient to forget that I was nationally syndicated by the syndicate arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, that bastion of wingnuttery, five years before I wrote my first column for WND.
What the butterfly collector is too stubborn to accept is that his continued evasion of my two challenges on the existence of gods and evolution will always haunt his intellectual credibility as a would-be spokesman for atheism and scientific materialism. I have heard from numerous atheists who find his intellectual cowardice to be more than a little troubling given his usual tendency to create conflict rather than to avoid it. And he has handed an out to every single individual he ever hopes to challenge in the future. Why should they debate a nobody like him, a clown who isn’t even a bigshot in his own field?
As for the PZ Myers Memorial Debate, we are still in search of an atheist to champion the argument that the logic and evidence for the nonexistence of gods is stronger than the logic and evidence for the existence of gods. It is certainly informative to see how many atheists do not appear to believe they are able to effectively make this case; in light of this, many Christians may find this to be a useful tactical approach when confronted by aggressive atheists in the future. This tends to confirm my previous observations that while atheists like to challenge the beliefs of others, they are very ill-prepared, and in many cases downright unwilling, to defend their own. So, if you want to shut them up, simply go on the attack. They’ll run away with alacrity.
When the criticism of my WND columns on Pharyngula was first brought to my attention, I referred to Paul Zachary as Pharyngurl because I genuinely thought he was a woman on the basis of the arguments he was presenting. Years later, it is highly amusing indeed to see that he still runs like a girl.