jupiter
Posts: 97
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Gawp's both a troll and an IDiot but my guess is that the thing keeping him tied to these boards is the fact he's a pitiful failure.
He's clever and articulate, with flashes of self-awareness. He clearly enjoys the verbal sparring and intellectual challenge at ATBC and he keeps up reasonably well, within the constraints of his training and prejudices. However, despite his intellectual gifts, he's had little academic or financial success and he's chosen to blame his failures on a cartoonish fantasy of a liberal hegemon. He can't allow himself to admit that the eggheads of LIE-beral academia could possibly educate or enlighten him in any way, yet his native curiosity won't let him just abandon one of the few sources of mental stimulation available to him.
Thordiddy and Larry F. seem to share Gawp's frustration and discontent, but they both operate at much lower wattage and their persistence seems motivated by animosity plus pigheadedness shading into obsession. Neither one is all that far from the tinfoil haberdashery. Dullard that he is, AFDave is relatively successful: he has a position of some authority in his congregation (teaching kids, which proves that God has a crude sense of humor) and he was an Air Force pilot (which you may not have realized, since Dave's so reluctant about tooting his own horn). That's a partial explanation for AFDave's sunny delusions of competence but I suspect that above all, he's a classic example of ignorance being bliss. He'll plow through his self-assigned mission here, moving from triumph to triumph, and then depart to conquer new worlds.
But pity poor Gawp. If he were just a bit dumber, he could join AFDave in unearned but unshakeable self-regard, basking in a Gawpocentric universe. Instead, he's compelled to propose and defend his batty geocentric model; somewhere in that ever-so-slightly overpowered cerebellum, he must recognize this as the humiliating joke it is.
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