On June 10th, at 3pm I met MrBatman on the Blue Politics discord server. I told him I was excited to meet him and wished to discuss religion with him, and after a short introduction everyone agreed we would have an informal debate.
He began to engage me and ask me some questions to verify my position. His first tactic was to control the narrative of the debate and try to push me to disagree on something, or to get me to answer his question incorrectly, which failed – but in the process of answering him he then accused me of rambling or using too much time. In any case we had essentially no disagreement for about 5 minutes until he brought up Jeremiah 3. This was the first scripture he had brought up. His statement was the standard error that “God divorced Israel”. I disagreed with his interpretation and he immediately over shouted me and asked me to let him finish (!!) and then went on a long rant quoting multiple scriptures. During which he made precisely 10 claims, summarized in note form below (this is sort of for my own reference, sorry if some of these might not make sense immediately)
1. Jesus is the truth
2. Nothing new in the New Testament — must know and understand who is the personage of Jesus is
3. NT is The validation of the Old Testament
4. “Because Jesus said he came to bring nothing new” only those words
5. Hes bringing it to its full meaning
6. “You have heard …, But I tell you….”
7. I don’t know the truth
8. Paul Studied under gamliel
9. Jesus had to die to “kill the torah”
10. I was a pedophile, that I was lying, and that I was stupid (ad hominem, collected as one claim).
At this point I attempted to stop the debate because he was clearly fillabusting or grandstanding and I asked the moderator if I would be allowed to respond. There was some back and forth overshooting as MrBatman initially refused to stop talking, but eventually I was able to speak.
I explained that the context of Jeremiah 3 was explicitly stated as “In the days of King Josiah,” and that the actors were not “Israel” i.e. the nation of Israel but the context in those days was Norther Israel vs Judah the righteous nation, which is borne out in the text of Jeremiah 3, 4 and 5. MrBatman refused to listen to my explanation and started overshooting me but this time a mod did not intervene and I did not record his points. When eventually I was able to respond again, I continued with the following notes;
1. God did not say he was going to completely destroy or divorce Judah (4:27, 5:10, 5:18, 5:19) and that his goal was to keep his promise from Leviticus 26 (eternal promise, cross-ref with many other repetitions of the eternal-ness of the covenant).
In response to this MrBatman called me a liar and claimed I was only rambling my own opinion, and he claimed specifically I had not quoted any scripture. Of course by this point he had lost the debate so I announced in chat I was exiting the debate due to the ad hominem, name calling, lies, overshooting, loading (quoting half a dozen or more scriptures and not allowing me to respond) and other tactics. He specifically stated he was not interested in listening to my opinion because it was irrelevant and that he was only here to educate me. I had already considered that I had won the debate by this point as he clearly misunderstood the history and context of Jeremiah 3, had lied repeatedly, and had announced he was no longer debating but simply lecturing. But that kind of sealed it.
Notably he did continue the discussion for over 30 minutes with other people; yet he not once quoted scripture to them, everything was his own opinion or take on some kind of scientific/dna/etc. argument.
Conclusion: MrBatman is an extremely disappointing debate partner because he immediately commits ad hominem and will overshot and lie, and accuse you of committing crimes, etc. if you disagree with him. His position is strongly isogenic and therefore incredulous; he reject the Bible as an eisegesic authority on God's word. It is unlikely I will debate MrBatman again because he has nothing to offer and is in fact unfamiliar with the field of hermeneutics. Yet I consider this debate an important victory; I have coined the “MrBatman” argument as a way of expressing the idea of why an isogenic argument is not credible, to people unfamiliar with the nature of isogesis-exegesis.
Let me be clear; I really made him angry by countering him out of scripture; he continued to debate some atheists for 30 min after he switched away from me, continuing on to call *them* pedophiles as well during one of his rants. At the end he called me out specifically by name and said I was an evil sinner who was going straight to hell. He again said I did not quote any scripture. There's really no need to say too much more on this I think.
Appledog 1 MrBatman 0