I had a feeling Mighty Timbo was bailing out when he ended his last comment here by saying, “Contact me again when you’re interested in genuine discourse.” A strange thing to say, considering that “genuine discourse”—as opposed to following a Jack Chick style script—is exactly what I have been doing, and what he appears to be trying to extricate himself from. He did, at least, promise to let me keep reviewing the material on his site: “You are always free to use quotes from my site. It is my request that when you do so you provide a link to the page you took the quote from. And you can certainly use anything I say as a springboard for any future articles.”
Except… quite suddenly, his entire web site has disappeared. This is not just a glitch. As of 5:00 AM GMT, his domain was listed as cancelled, and sortly thereafter someone was able to purchase the domain name and point it at The Secular Web.
I have to say I feel more than just a bit of sympathy for Mighty Timbo. I was a Christian for many years, and I used to have this sort of experience too. God is mighty, God is wise, God is loving, and God speaks to you, and leads you into some new and bold adventure. And because you really truly sincerely believe, you trust God, and you head into this glorious crusade full of confidence (and maybe even just a touch of smugness). And then you hit a point where you need for God to actually exist outside your own head—and everything inexplicably falls apart. The things that can’t possibly be false somehow fail to be true. And there you are, high and dry, with no way to climb back down. Or at least not gracefully.
Sigh. That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad I’m not Christian any more. Life makes so much more sense when you’re not complicating an already difficult life by trying to figure out the motives and intentions of an “all-powerful” deity who keeps letting you down when it really counts.
Well played, sir. Well played.
It’s worth mentioning that dot.tk has a policy that its freely registered domains (which christian-apologetics.tk was) receive 25 hits over a 90 day period or they are automatically put up for renewal, for free, by anybody. http://www.dot.tk/en/faq.html#u
I am guessing this is exactly what happened here. Most likely it will result in a 3 month break for Tim, and maybe Ol’ Jehovah will show up in the meantime, eliminating the need for his sermons disguised as poorly constructed arguments.
The lesson to be learned here? If you’re going to start up a lame apologetic website, spring for the $7 yearly registration fee instead of using a free domain provider. Turns out that while you might believe your God controls life, the universe, and everything, he doesn’t have much say when it comes to DNS.
It’s a bit odd, in that I visited his site last night (or tried to) and was turned away by a “Quota Exceeded” message from uhostall.tk. Seems odd that his hosting provider would complain that he had too many hits at the same time as his DNS provider was complaining that he had too few. God works in mysterious ways, I guess.
Sounds like I guessed wrong. From the Wikipedia article on the .tk TLD: “Also if a domain’s redirect target doesn’t work (even temporarily) the domain is taken offline.”
So he cheaped out on hosting AND DNS, maxed his webhosting quota and got suspended and .tk pulled the free domain registration. Ouch.
I thought for a second that maybe Timbo was the only existing True Christian™ and got raptured along with his website, but that’s even less likely than him presenting sufficient evidence to back his ridiculous assertions. His attempts to defend his other articles were equally laugh-worthy. At one point in the comments of “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” he was insisting that Luke 22:51 counted as evidence that God heals amputees.
I wish I’d thought to redirect to http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/god5.htm instead. Ah well, maybe he can refute it when you’re interested in genuine discourse.
I have a reliable report that Timbo was just as surprised as anyone else when his site went down, so my first fear appears unfounded, which makes me feel a little better. I’ve never crushed an apologist so bad that they tried to erase themselves from the Internet, and Timbo seems like a basically decent fellow apart from his poisonous beliefs, so I’d have hated for him to be the first.
Now, however, I can continue my “discourse” without feeling bad about it, so it’s all good. As it happens, I’ve kept a couple of browser tabs open with his web pages in them, so I’ve still got a bunch of his lost posts I can reply to and quote from. 🙂