The loud thumps you hear at selected spots across the country are the sound of people like John Till, Brooks Trubee, Brian Holtz, and other cartoon-character Skeptics I have sliced and diced over the years, falling to the ground after having coronaries.

Why? Because they just lost their best (and in some cases, only) "argument" against myself and this ministry.

About a decade ago when I logged myself online as a writer with the Christian Apologetics Bookshelf, I decided that it would be a good idea, for the sake of personal safety (not from Skeptics, who are almost uniformly 98 pound wimps, but from released prison inmates I formerly worked with -- see more on that here, an explanation I sanction), to make use of a writing psuedonym. It didn't take long to decide what to use, because it was the name I was born with. (If you don't know what that name is by now -- in other words, if you're one of my typical Skeptical opponents -- check the authorship credit of THIS article for a clue.)

Yes, the name I was born with. Not that it's anyone's business, especially not the business of gutter-sweeping atheists like the above who spell "scholarship" with a K, but that WAS the name I was given at birth, and I have the legal paperwork to prove it: The original Social Security card; a copy of the original birth certificate; the original, onionskin court order (dated 1969) changing my name from JPH to the other name as part of an inside-the-family adoption process. So for those whose minds are as bent as Acharya S and thought I was making it all up, choose your brand of mustard when you decide what foot you want to eat.

(There are probably few who know or remember that it was John Till who first made an issue of this. He pretends that it was some great detective discovery he made; the fact is that I told him about the pseudonym issue myself, not knowing at the time that rather than being an honest person, he was in fact a pathetically self-righteous specimen still working out his frustrations over being laughed out of Catholic quarters of France. He has his punishment: He's been reduced, in part by me, to a ranting ghost who is 400 years behind on replies and keeps bringing up new topics to cover his deficiencies at addressing the old ones. Not that a pissant like him, whose greatest claim to fame is a paper newsletter with never more than 1800 subscribers, deserved the attention to begin with; he ought to thank me for keeping his worthless name out of forgottenness.)

But to the point of this item. Some time ago I proposed to make a legal change to my name, and that is now done. As of this morning (7/3/07) the paperwork is approved by a judge and filed away in my county clerk's office. The free ride for the pedantic, loser-for-life crowd (mostly Skeptics, but also a few shameful Christians like Steve Hays frustrated by their own beatings at my hand) is over now, and they're all going to have to pay the piper for their own prior pedantry in which they figured they could avoid some heavy reading and research by just using the pseudo-who-nanny-nanny-boo-boo as a substitute for substance. They'll either have to change all their articles (Till will likely go to his grave doing the editing, unless he burns his cortical motors off trying to figure out how to do a universal search and replace command), or else look bigger fools than they do now refusing to acknowledge it (which many may not mind anyway, being as insensate to their own foolishness as they are). Then they'll have to do some real arguing for a change, and which of those will be harder for that kiddie keptic crowd is hard to say.

My reasons for the change are partly professional, partly personal. There is the matter of that I am so well known as JPH that it makes good sense to make the legal change. On a more personal level, I have lately rediscovered some family heritage that has motivated the change as a way of honoring lost relations I never knew, but now wish I had discovered and known earlier. Suffice to say that I was not the first Holding to be interested in apologetics. (I also wasn't the first with an artistic bent, but that's another matter.)

So now. If you're a frustrated atheist or other opponent looking for an excuse to not do some heavy research, I do have some suggestions for what else you can do now that the "I knoooooow what your reeeeeal name iiiiiissss" hobbyhorse is something you can't ride any more as you pop your caps into the air. Before I do that, though, I have some kudos to deliver. There were, actually, a handful of Skeptics who did respect The Name, and as this chapter closes (as it were, on the heads of the raspberry berets who played the Name Game) I'd like to acknowledge them. (I may add more later as I find them, or take off others if I find they've misbehaved; Richard Carrier got struck, for one.)

• Kyle Gerkin -- the Skeptic I respect and like the most for so many reasons, and who once said, memorably, to me, that it shouldn't matter if I used Krusty the Klown as a pseudonym. (I'll leave that one for Brooks Trubee, though.)
• Charles Salvia
• Robert Price -- Yes, odd as it seems, the Secular Web's friendly ice cream man has never, never played the Name Game. That I know of. I'm not clear on why, especially since he once spilled the beans on Acharya S on the same issue. But he deserves the notice for it. As does:
• Richard Packham.

With that said, now that the rest of the Skeptics are writhing in agony on the floor, no longer sure what to do now that they can't play the Name Game, I have a few suggestions as to what you can complain about instead.

• "Holding is into making money." Sure -- that's why I left a public library job that paid nearly three times what I get from the ministry work. Toby's air conditioned doghouse will be here next week, but it costs less because he's so itty-bitty. There are some Skeptics who think that Christians have no right to raise money to pay themselves for a service (never mind that Dan Barker and Reginald Finley and others do -- and I don't object to them doing so), as if "ministry" meant living in a cardboard box. It doesn't, even though it also means not enriching yourself, and I do neither. As readers of mine who has visited will affirm, the Holding household is a VERY modest one. The whining Skeptics never explain what standard of living I am permitted (as if I need or want their permission) to have, so it's rather hard to say more, but I challenge any of them to meet me on TheologyWeb (on this or any issue listed here) and present their case. We could use more humor there.
• "Holding doesn't link to articles by his opponents." Wrong -- I do, when they respect The Name, as Robert Price did, and when I think they deserve it by their quality. Which of course means not many get them. The real reason Skeptics want links is because they can't gain readers the normal way -- by quality defense of their views and by reputation. It doesn't become hard to figure this out when I check my stats and find all of 3 people a month clicking links from an article on Till's site to mine, versus over 800 per month from a site like Answers in Genesis. I find that places like John "the Liar" Loftus' blog get only 550-650 visits a day compared to 2500-3000 for Tekton. Who do these germs think they're fooling? They NEED this ideological "affirmative action" because no one cares what they say and no one reads their material -- and half their visits come from themselves checking their own pages.
• "Holding made a blunder with his software. Ha ha!" That I did. So this is the worst they can find after 10 years that I did wrong? Skeptics bring this old moldy up time and time again because they're convinced Tekton has "sycophants" that think I'm God Almighty. They don't, but when the Skeppies bring this up these days they're just proving they can't find anything worse -- or more recent -- that passes the test of relevance and validity. And never mind the scores of (in many cases worse) blunders committed by my Skeptical opponents over the years. Do you think that if I lied the huge way John Loftus did, I'd be in better stead with them? It sure seems Loftus is. While some reasonable Skeptics have condemned his actions, the usual crew that hops up and down like fleas on my back any time I forget to say "excuse me" after sneezing has so far lined up behind Loftus looking for the correct portal for their noses.
• "Holding said ___________." This comes usually from people who think that just quoting a verse like Malachi 2:3 is an argument against Christianity. I have answers to all of this sort of thing on the toon site. Speaking of which....
• "Holding draws perverted cartoons." I expect this one to come up more often as more Skeptics discover my hobby. In fact I wish it would come up more often because it's amusing. I rate my toons "PG" which means there's stuff in there that uptight, Chick-tract-totin' people would have a problem with. Too bad for them.
• "Holding used a sock puppet on the Brian Flemming forum." Sure I did. A "sock puppet" is a second account on a forum, and I had only ONE. (I know Skeptics can count at least THAT high.) I was on there as Sheila Rangslinger, my lead toon character, and I am SO sure that the Skeptics there were so confused that they really thought they were answering a 6-foot, blonde, female rabbit in real life. Fer sure.

But anyway, now that you guys have to abandon the name fetish, it's time to move on.

You heard me. Don't just sit there with your jaw hanging slack to the floor. Go.

Oh, there is one more thing....

I'm thinking of using the other name from now on as a writing pseudonym.