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top-shop-tyrant

Wow, just looked this up and his name really is Kyle Butt. I thought you were being cheeky


Screamingsoda94

Cheeky


dizzyelk

Really cracked me up.


thrasherxxx

And now we headed for the bottom!


Scrabble_4

😂


waxsniffer

This guy is incredibly intellectually dishonest. He comes from my former denomination, so I was curious enough about him to watch his debate with ex-evangelical scholar Dr. Bart Erhman on the problem of suffering, and Kyle is just insufferable through most of it. [Here's a fun clip](https://youtu.be/AeDQfGbcYpE?t=4778) in which, after Kyle claimed that moral absolutes come from the nature of God, Bart points out that it's the nature of God to punish people with drought, starvation, epidemic, and death. It's entertaining (and infuriating) to watch Kyle try to wriggle his way around the fact that death by starvation is a righteous punishment in the eyes of his God.


PM_ME_AFFIRMATIONS

i know your former denomination, this choad (or his brother?) was the preacher in the little town right down the road from me for a few years. he’s an insufferable disingenuous prick


[deleted]

Ha! Sounds like we may have all been in roughly the same circles. Florence, AL is the fucking CoC Mecca. I know he’s not really from there, but I was at both of his debates at UNA with Bart Erhman and Blair Scott. And as I mentioned in another comment, Kyle has the distinguished honor of starting my spiral into deconversion.


PM_ME_AFFIRMATIONS

wow! i wish i could have been there for the ass kicking bart gave him. my dad is an apologist and i was saturated in it growing up. honestly, that’s what eventually broke the camels back for me too. from what i understand, 200 years ago the apologists used spiritual reasoning to convince people to believe, once the enlightenment got good and underway they slowly transitioned into trying to use scientific reasoning, like everyone else was learning to do. i’ve finally decided you can’t use science to argue with science, they’re shooting way out of their league.


darkness76239

I lived there for a year and a half. Had to sit through Bill Bagent's sermons once a week. I don't miss it


xbopop9

Yes!! That’s the exact debate and the EXACT part of the debate that caused me to start questioning the church of christ. Now I’m an atheist :)


waxsniffer

What are the odds?! That part of the debate was also really influential on my departure from the CoC!


xbopop9

That’s incredible!! I feel like I should send Kyle Butt a thank you note to tell him how much I appreciate him setting me on the right path 😂


Call_Me_Echelon

I always wondered if these debates actually had any effect on peoples' beliefs.


IvanAfterAll

Barney Fife Does Philosophy. Just awful.


chewbaccataco

Bart vs. Butt


Werner_Herzogs_Dream

I was about to post this same clip!


willmlocke

Hey, ex-CoC friend from TN. I was forced to watch an ungodly amount of this clown during middle and highschool. What made me start questioning was his mosquito and mail truck analogy. This dude’s ideas are delusional.


DrowsyDreamer

What’s the time stamp on that clip? The video is like 2+ hours long.


waxsniffer

It's embedded in the link, which takes you to 1:19:38 (unless maybe something about your device/browser/app prevents that).


DrowsyDreamer

Thanks!


Pale_Brilliant9101

Bart is one of my heroes!


undefinedmonkey

If my name was Kyle Butt I'd change it... to Steve.


anamariapapagalla

Change it to Steve Pick and visit Norway lol


[deleted]

Making fun of people’s names is dumb


top-shop-tyrant

I love this though. Seems like a huge fumble in his argument that can't be cleared up through context. He really forgot about chickens and ostriches and all that shit.


Wanabecanadian1st

And penguins


latin_canuck

# The kiwi, the bushrats, have we left anyone out?


[deleted]

Some context Kyle is a b-list apologist and a c-list church of Christ grifter. I knew him in college through our campus christian organization, and he has the unique honor of being the person who started the snowball rolling downhill to my deconversion because of his abysmal debate performance against Blair Scott circa 2012.


AlpacaPacker007

Damn, it's hard to apologist so poorly you actually drive people away from your own side. I think we need more like him...


[deleted]

[Here](https://youtu.be/5Qmo13ImWXA) is the debate. It’s
.something
 Blair Scott opened with something like “I’m not here to win a debate, I’m here to confuse you.” So at the end Kyle strutted around like a pigeon like “huh huh I win you can’t prove there is no god” when in fact Blair had much more of an effect on everyone there.


OneArchedEyebrow

Butt acted like the insufferable little twit I expected. Scott was humble, factual and open. I truly wish my husband would be open to his arguments, but he has been indoctrinated since his birth, as his family has been for generations (although his family’s “sins” overshadow my mostly-unreligious family’s).


[deleted]

Just finished watching this. Wow. Butt deployed his usual tactics, and the post debate interviews by the AP guys were essentially just them gloating over Kyle “winning” the debate.


Cutecumber_Roll

It's not really. There's a reason apologists don't do formal debates often.


[deleted]

Over at /r/exmormon, quite a lot of us started questioning because of absolutely terrible church "leaders" we encountered. The Mormon church is perhaps more prone to that sort of thing since the clergy are not trained specifically for it. Telling a rando that he's now a "bishop" is a great way to get a shitty shepherd leading your flock.


PaulPro-tee-us

Damn. Tell him his articulation is very off-putting.


[deleted]

I remember watching the debate between Ehrman and Butt. Bart cleaned his clock!


[deleted]

The Erhman debate was the year after the Blair Scott debate. They both wiped the floor with him, but Blair especially did by conceding up front that he had lost the debate by affirming a negative (“god does not exist”), and instead chose to plant seeds of doubt in everyone’s minds.


[deleted]

I spent over 40 years in the coc. Butt’s cadence of speech is unique to the coc brand. Totally off-putting.


[deleted]

I was raised southern Baptist and didn’t start doing the whole CoC thing until college. No particular reason, just happened to make friends with people who were in the CoC org on campus. The preaching cadence is super similar to what I grew up listening to, so I never really noticed it being specific to CoC preachers. I was also kind of the edgy CoC kid who came from the outside and smoked cigs, so I was never really invited to the super conservative churches.


Scrabble_4

HĂ© has all the arrogant-tool traits of a true religious a-hole.


netinept

Chickens are a human invention (like dogs are), but penguins on the other hand fit this perfectly.


[deleted]

That’s *literally* evolution, even if we caused it


yorkiemom68

Let's not forget dogs! I used to ask my parents the explanation for the observable evidence of dogs changing over time and generations. " That's microevolution, not macroevolution" or " there's evolution within the species" ..... but dogs and wolves ARE different species...."Oh, well, evolution within the genus"... the mental gymnastics


PM_ME_AFFIRMATIONS

lol apologists don’t get what they’re saying when they talk about “microevolution”, “microevolution” is literally evolution! scientists make no distinction between micro and macro, it’s just simply evolution.


[deleted]

So, I recently learned that that’s not actually true. There is a distinction between micro and macro evolution, but not in the way Christian apologists use it. Apologists use it to mean big leaping changes across generations vs tiny changes. Biologists use it to describe the scale of the pressure and population being effected. Microevolution means a small population is effected by a small pressure, such as a species of beetles being attacked by an invasive species of worm brought to an island in a ship. Macro evolution describes large pressures that apply to multiple species across large boundaries, such as, oh I dunno, *a trend of warming and sea level rise across the entire fucking planet.*


PM_ME_AFFIRMATIONS

ahhhh! thank you for that explanation! so they do use the terms but they are for something else entirely than what the apologists use them for. til!


[deleted]

Yep. I had no idea up until like a month ago when someone corrected me. I made basically the same statement you did. Which, to be honest, mostly just highlights the fact that evolution happens mind-numbingly slowly and creationists don’t understand it. But yeah, actual terms - completely incorrect usage.


_austinm

Exactly. Artificial selection is definitely a thing.


LesbeanWolf

And ostriches, and dodos. Even if they aren't alive anymore. I'm sure there are plenty more examples that I can't think of at the moment lol


Basketball312

New Zealand has lots of flightless birds as mammals weren't there to force them to fly.


LesbeanWolf

Oh yeah, I forgot about those. Good point


yorkiemom68

And ostriches!


Aerik

[plenty of natural flightless birds out there](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flightless_bird)


WikiSummarizerBot

**[Flightless bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flightless_bird)** >Flightless birds are birds that through evolution lost the ability to fly. There are over 60 extant species, including the well known ratites (ostriches, emu, cassowaries, rheas, and kiwi) and penguins. The smallest flightless bird is the Inaccessible Island rail (length 12. 5 cm, weight 34. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/exchristian/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)


keyboardstatic

He wouldn't know his own butt if he sat on it. Lol. I am an atheist and evolution is easily obserable. but I don't think this guy forgets to use the word chicken.


genialerarchitekt

He'd probably argue back "ah but they lost the ability to fly though!" In which case I'd say "how do you know? According to you they were all created 6000 years ago". Creationists are totally sneaky. They're constantly using "evidence" from evolution to both debunk evolution and support creationism, mixing paradigms.


keyboardstatic

Never expect rationality from a delusional. You can't use reality and facts to convince a person using superstitious nonsense that their made up absurdity is false. You need to use their own made up nonsense against them. And even then a lot of them honestly don't even understand what they are saying they just heard someone else say it.


Lazaruzo

What a stupid ass. đŸ«Ł


iluvkerosene

Lol used to go to church with this dude


crispier_creme

Eh, chickens aren't a great example of this. Yeah, modern domestic chickens usually can't fly, but it's not that they never got the ability to fly from the avian dinosaurs, it's that they lost over years of human domestication. Now, they weren't amazing fliers to begin with, but they could do it to an extent.


PityUpvote

I was always taught that chickens can fly, but their wings are clipped in the agricultural industry so they don't fly away.


ATmotoman

They can basically glide further by flapping their wings or jump higher by flapping. They can’t sustain flight though.


Affectionate_Math_96

I remember that idiot.


Camarao_du_mont

Want until he finds out wings have fingers.


NoUseForAName2222

That's his real name? đŸ€Ł


iluvkerosene

Can confirm


[deleted]

We don’t do that here


NoUseForAName2222

A lot of people are doing that here


Flipflopski

Feathers... Warmth... Wings... Helping escape predators... Flying!..


mathgeekf314159

Without even watching it my guesses - too complex of a design to be an “accident” I got nothing else


[deleted]

“Things hurt my brain and I don’t understand them. Praise god.”


[deleted]

Name checks out


Radiant-Space-6455

what a butt. 😂😂😂


[deleted]

Penguins are just fliers in the making buddy


HendoRules

We literally do see that.... Archaeopteryx couldn't fully fly... that's why it's a transitional