[Vision2020] Atwood Responds

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

I had given up hope, but Atwood finally responded to Joe and me.  I'll let Joe take care of himself, but here is my reply.

Dear Roy:

Thank you for your response. We cannot go forward unless you and Wilson take responsibility for past actions and proclamations. We cannot go forward to the truth on a path that is littered with falsehoods, distortions, evasions, and deceptions. It just doesn’t work that way.

Let me start with this one: “Every time I tried to suggest an alternative understanding to your claims, you twisted and distorted what I have said. So I saw little point in continuing our interactions.” Since November, 2003, when you said that there would be no communication, you offered no “alternative understandings” at all. Please tell me where I have twisted or distorted anything.

Since you have not written to me, it would be impossible to do anything with non-existent replies. Since you failed to respond, you have 4-years of detailed responding to do. I eagerly await your individual replies. You failed miserably in the dialogue that you now seek. It should be very easy to correct “absurd accusations.”

With regard to NSA accreditation, I challenge you show any untruths in my report. I wrote only one letter, not multiple ones. My focus in the report is on intellectual honesty, integrity, and academic collegiality. I was horrified that the head of TRACS would share my report with you after I requested confidentiality. I was also amazed that you were allowed to essentially work for TRACS (pitching “Trinitarian” accreditation) while NSA was still only a “candidate” for accreditation.

Why didn’t you correct the record when Dickison said that NSA was accredited in public testimony. (Tom Hansen recently posted the recording of his voice.) In your May 23, 2003 letter to the editor, why did you disguise the fact that TRACS was your agency, not the fine liberal arts associations mentioned in the letter that you obviously preferred?

With regard to comparisons to the Taliban, here are the parallels: women are second class citizens; God’s law will become the law of the land; execution of homosexuals and adulterers; and the destruction of one’s enemies.

It would help very much if Wilson took back his belief in the limited franchise and his recent reaffirmation of executing gays. What would really help is for all of you to repudiate Greg Dickison’s “when we have our way” articles in “Credenda Agenda.” These are fundamental axes to grind, and I will keep grinding them.

In my column in the Statesman, all that I did was state that the League of the South frequently appears at protests with Sons of the Confederate Veterans (one of whose officers was married by Richard Butler), and the Council of Conservative Citizens. When editors put “neo-Nazi” in the headline, I immediately objected, and the editors refused to run a strongly worded letter of correction. A version of that letter ran in the Daily News.  In that letter I also accepted Wilson's self-profession that he is not a racist.

With regard to my views on evangelical Christianity, all you have to do is read “God, Reason, and the Evangelicals” and see how I have been very careful in distinguishing ones that I respect and the ones that I do not. (Please read the book!) One does not become the president of a regional theological conference, which has many active evangelical schools, if one is perceived to have a prejudice against evangelical Christianity.  If I have a bias against Christianity, why would I support, with a substantial monthly stipend, an Indian Christian graduate student for five years?

In one of my internet essays, I have shown 15 differences between Wilsonian Christianity and conservative evangelical Christianity. You know just a well as I do that many other conservative Christians criticize you, and I hear from them regularly praising by work of exposing Wilson for the theological fraud that he is.

As an emeritus professor I am not “former” (you should know better), but I continue to use my academic skills to teach and write and to call people such as you to account.

I do not wish to communicate with you off-line as you suggest. I will keep my part of this new exchange fully within the public eye.

Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick Gier