You don’t seem to know what “personal attack” or “troll” means. My last comment had two paragraphs. The first one explained the difference between addressing an argument and attacking the argument’s author. The second paragraph diagnosed why you made that earlier absurd statement, that just by criticizing Foster’s ten arguments I was attacking him personally. The second paragraph is ad hominem, but the first one isn’t. Do you see the difference?

The fact is that practically everything you say in these comments is ad hominem. You commented on an article that discusses in some depth ten arguments for theism. You ignored all those arguments apparently because you think theism as the study of God is impossible. Yours, I suspect, is a born-again, fundamentalist Christianity that holds God up as a great mystery. But “theism” is rather the belief that God exists. If you think God is real, you’re a theist in the relevant sense.

You seem to have no idea what “trolling” means. You think that because I referred to Dan Foster at the beginning of the article that I was trolling him. But there’s a big difference between wanting to start a conversation or wanting Foster to read and to reply to my article, on the one hand, and trolling someone on the other. The difference is that the troll starts a conversation _in bad faith_. The troll has no interest in a genuine conversation. All he wants to do is to draw someone into a lengthy conversation to waste the other person’s time, and to provoke the other person with inflammatory statements to try to force the other to get emotional so the troll can laugh about it. If you want to know what trolling is, have a look at Trump’s Republican Party.

So far from trolling Foster, my substantive response to his article was an invitation to a philosophical dialogue, to a discussion of the arguments rather than to a tribal battle of insults. Your long, meandering, ad hominem comments are trollish because that’s the Evangelical’s strategy for converting people. You want to get personal, to find emotional weaknesses to exploit so you can offer the Bible or a personal relationship with Jesus as the only answer. What you don’t want to do is philosophize because you chalk that up to human vanity.

You say I deliberately opened my article with “an attack of Dan's person.” But what are you talking about? The opening paragraph just introduces Foster’s article. There’s no personal attack in it. The article’s title says his arguments are feeble. That’s an attack on his arguments, not on him since it’s possible for an intelligent person to make bad arguments. The subtitle suggests that Foster is “hapless,” but that’s weak as a personal attack. It means he’s unlucky—for running into my response to his article.

“Benjamin Cain” is a pen name. Ben is my middle name, and I chose “Cain” for the dark religious connotations because my writings tend to destroy bad religious arguments. From a Gnostic perspective, Cain would be a Promethean hero for going his own way, especially since all we can do is see through the religious myths that tend to make excuses for unjust earthly regimes. Of course, if you think the biblical God is real, Cain was a fool who was justly punished. But if you know what the Bible is and you see through the ruse of exoteric Christianity, Cain might represent the existential stakes in all our choices in life. Mainly, though, I like how the name puts the fear of God into hapless exoteric Christians.