Aww, it’s too sweet. Karl Giberson is apologizing for the way evangelicals dishonestly propagandize, and he mentions me.

I have to confess that the temptation to ridicule one’s debating opponents is all but unbearable, especially when playing street hockey on the Internet, where one must shout to be heard. In the past few months I have tried hard to come up with clever rhetorical attacks on Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and countless others whose ideas I was supposedly challenging. PZ once wrote the following about me, which I thought was pretty clever: “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter, and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth.” Of course, I responded to his evangelistic assault on me by calling him “Rev. Myers” in an essay on Salon.com. And so it goes. (I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers — you can’t win.)

I have a feeling, though, that if he’d expanded on the sentiment it would have been to explain that I put poison on the blade, carry a dagger on the left for the occasional cheap shot, and like to taunt my opponents into a brash rage. I ain’t one of them aristocratic fencers with their pointless pinking, I’m a brawler.