Blog

I started Cerebral Faith in 2012. It was a simple blog on Blogspot or Blogger. I moved to WordPress in 2019 when I decided that I needed more than just a simple blog, but a more professional website to put out all kinds of content I wanted to produce, including The Cerebral Faith Podcast which ran from 2019-2024, and some YouTube videos I made before I realized that I did not like making YouTube videos with the exception of live-streamed content.

This online ministry of mine has existed for 14 years now, and in that entire time, I have had a comment section on the blog. i’ve always wanted to interact with the people who read this content, whether you agree, disagree, have some questions about what I’ve written, or just wanna tell me that what I wrote helped you wrestle through faith questions that you had. Or if you wanted to sell me some Ray-Ban sunglasses. OK maybe not that last one. I’ve had some really amazing conversations in the comment sections on this blog, and by conversations, I mean, full-blown debates. I’ve always loved arguing back-and-forth with interocular on some argument for the existence of God or my case for the Bible reliability or what have you. That’s why the comment section existed mainly.

However, I have come to the decision to disable comments on every blog post I’ve ever written. Now, comments that have already been left should not be affected. They should still be there at the bottom of posts, but this disabling I’ve done will prevent any new comments from being left on posts going forward. This is not a decision I’ve come to lightly. I have really wrestled with the idea of disabling the comments, and after a couple of years of going back and forth on the idea, I’ve decided to just disable them completely.

First and foremost, it should be noted that it is not because I don’t want people giving me pushback for my views or my arguments. I invite debate! I love going back-and-forth with people. And I’ve never deleted a comment just because they disagreed with me or because I didn’t like what they said.

Reason 1: Robot Invasion!

This problem has plagued me ever since I moved to WordPress. If you’ve commented on this blog for the first time, you will have noticed that your comment has to be held in moderation before it can be published. Several people have accused me of censorship because of this, but what they don’t realize is that I get about maybe 500 bot comments a day. These bots are posting pornography, advertisements for products, or just be lengthy comments in Russian for some reason. It’s just a bunch of spam and while it was manageable when I first got started, it got to the point where it was just nearly impossible to delete all of those comments and wade through which ones might be real. Thankfully, the Jetpack app tended to alert me when a real comment appeared on my blog, so, with a couple of exceptions, I didn’t typically delete real comments by accident in my raid against all the bot spam. But as time went on, the amount of bot comments that came into my WordPress dashboard to be held for moderation got worse and worse. It got to the point where I would get a couple thousand bot comments per day. Even using the “bulk action” and delete method would usually take me a couple of hours to completely clean out my comment section of all the spam. I don’t know why I didn’t have to deal with this problem when I was on Blogger/Blogspot, but it is what it is.

2: People Not Actually Engaging The Content.

While I will never have an issue with people leaving comments because they disagree with me, I do hold people to a certain minimum level of integrity in HOW they disagree with me. For example, if you are leaving a comment section on my essay “Defending The Resurrection Of Jesus From Matthew Alone”, I’m going to expect you to deal with some of the arguments that I wrote there. Pick which of the premises in David Pallmann’s 8-step syllogism you reject and tell me why you don’t think that premise is true. But what I have found is that Internet skeptics typically do is they will do anything, but actually deal with the argument. They will resort to ad hominem fallacies, they will say “You’re only a Christian because you were raised in a Christian Home”, they’ll bring up 30 different Bible contraadictions which aren’t even gospel contradictions and ergo wouldn’t be relevant in a case for Jesus’ resurrection, they’ll argue that evolution makes God irrelevant, etc. and some of these objections (like how evolution and Christianity could possibly be harmonized) are worth talking about, they don’t really have anything to do with the example article that I referenced. Even if it’s a serious objection to Christianity in general, it wouldn’t be a serious objection to the specific argument presented in “Defending The Resurrection Of Jesus From Matthew Alone”. And it’s just frustrating when you’re just trying to get somebody to deal with the argument that you made, and all they’re doing is just wasting your time with all of these things that have absolutely nothing to do with the soundness or unsoundness of your argument. I have become frustrated in these conversations to the point where I have treated my interlocutor a bit unkindly and have straight-up told them that they wasted my time. If I am defending the Kalam Cosmological Argument for God’s existence, you can either dispute premise 1 that “everything that begins to exist has a cause”, or premise 2 that “the universe began to exist”, but if you insist on focusing on the fact that my parents were Christian or insist on psycho-analyzing me “You are only a Christian because you’re afraid of death” or some crap like that, i’m not interested in having a conversation with you. It’s a waste of time. Pick a premise that you disagree with and tell me why you disagree with it.

That isn’t much to ask for. That is just simply asking for people to abide by the basic intellectual rules of engagement. And increasingly, I am finding that Internet atheists in particular are incapable of doing that.

3: Gary Machine Gun Objecting To My Content.

Back in the summer of 2024, there was a particular skeptic who just went by Gary, who absolutely machine-gunned my articles on the resurrection of Jesus. For one thing, he was responding to older articles, dealing with a Minimal Facts approach, which if you have read my newer content, like “5 Reasons Why I Prefer Maximal Data Over Minimal Facts” or “‘He Appeared’ The Problem Of Vagueness With Minimal Facts“, you’ll know that I really don’t use that argument anymore and frankly, I’m not even sure if it’s a sound argument anymore.

I had to work on the Fourth of July, and while I was ringing customers up and stocking shelves, the Jetpack notification sound was popping up on my phone nonstop, seemingly every five minutes all day long! I was interested in having a conversation with this guy on the case for the resurrection, on whether or not my argument succeeded. But I had told this person that I really didn’t want to defend an argument. I don’t really use anymore, and that the only reason I left the articles up was just so people could see the evolution of my thoughts over time, plus there are over 600 articles on this website. It would be a pain for me to just go and delete stuff whenever I change my mind on some topic. I generally just caution people that if I say something in 2026 that contradicts something I wrote in 2014, just assume that I’ve changed my mind and go with what I said in 2026. Usually, I won’t delete an article unless I look back at it and go “Man, I was really bad at writing when I was first getting started”. And even then, it’s because I usually plan on rewriting the article with a more professional touch.

But he refused to actually read and engage with my more recent Maximal Data material (at that time, the 11 part article series “The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels” is all I had in terms of MDA content), and not only did he keep commenting on minimal facts posts, but he was just spamming. He wasn’t even waiting for me to respond to anything he had written before he wrote more. Maybe he didn’t have a job, but I did, and still do! Now, you might be wondering why I don’t just ban someone like that from commenting. Why don’t I ban people in general who tend to be a problem rather than disabling the comment section entirely? Well, you see, I can block someone’s IP address, but then they still are able to comment. I’m pretty sure I know how they do this; because there’s this thing called a VPN where you can change your IP address. VPNs are great for watching region lot content, and other cyber security issues. But when WordPress is only means of blocking people from commenting is an IP address, if somebody has a VPN and can just change their IP address, they can get around that and continue to put garbage on this website. I’ve blocked Gary maybe 30 or 40 different times. And he had a different IP address each and every time.

4: The Tranny Who Wouldn’t Let It Go.

The final nail in the coffin for me was a recent Commenter, who went by the name of Mary Ward. Although an email, it says it is Martin Ward so I don’t know if this is a woman pretending to be a man or a man pretending to be a woman. But in my essay “The Gender Of God Explained“, we had a pretty lengthy back-and-forth on the debate over the concept of so-called gender fluidity. It was a pretty lengthy discussion, and I didn’t think that it was a particularly bad discussion, but eventually in all of my discussions, if I think it’s not really going anywhere and neither party is going to concede, I typically lose interest. I just don’t want to continue anymore. And that’s true with any conversation on any topic. I mean, somebody’s gonna have to have the last word at some point. I decided I would let “Mary” be the one to have the last word. So I just stopped responding. But then she or he left another comment prodding me to respond again. I continued the conversation a little bit reluctantly, and I told him or her that I really didn’t want to continue the conversation anymore. I had grown tired of it. But they insisted. I disabled the comments on that particular blog post while leaving all of the other blog posts comment sections open. So what did Mary do? Mary left posts on subjects that had nothing to do with gender identity, trying to goad me into another argument. Sometimes in subtle ways. I said that the idea that someone who has a penis, testicles, XY chromosomes, and a male skeletal structure could somehow be a female simply because he feels like a female is so absurd to me that I don’t even take it seriously. It’s one of the few views that I consider to be so irrational and absurd that it isn’t even worth my time. It would be like someone trying to convince me that the sky is red when I can clearly see that it’s blue. I take The Flat Earth and Solipsism more seriously than the idea that gender is what you feel like, not what your body tells you. I deleted the comments because not only was this person trying to force me into arguments when I explicitly made it clear that I was tired talking about the matter, but also I want comments on my post to actually be about what the blog post was about! You know, don’t be talking about whether baptism saves or not in a blog post on the Exodus Plagues. If you wanna have a conversation on that, go find a blog post that I’ve written about baptism and then leave your comment there!

And once again, just like with “Gary”, I banned her IP address only for her (him?) to just rear his confused head yet again, typically when I post a new article.

That was the final straw. That was when I decided that this blog would no longer have a comment section.

Conclusion

I hate that I had to do this. I’ve had some great conversations on this blog in years past, but things have just gotten so bad that I have just decided that it’s not worth keeping the comment section up anymore. With that said, if you want to have conversations with me on the content that I post, I post all of these articles on Facebook both on the Cerebral Faith Facebook page as well as on my own personal Facebook profile. I also post them in Facebook groups that I’m a member of, if they’ll let me and don’t have a problem with me, sharing my content there. And honestly, that’s where the majority of my conversations I’ve taken place anyway. Most people who have ever commented on my content do so in the Facebook comment in a post linking to one of my articles. so it is not as though we have to stop talking entirely. Nevertheless, if you have subscribed to this blog via the Jetpack app, it can be annoying to have to go find the post somewhere else if you want to leave your thoughts rather than just leave your thoughts on the website directly.

I didn’t want this to be a case where a few bad apples ruined it for everyone, but it is what it is.