Some hard truths about James Patrick Holding and his misleading videos about the libel lawsuit

This is my reply to a video by James Patrick Holding entitled

Some Hard Truths About That Libel Lawsuit, Part 1

First, Holding is a hypocrite and liar, pure and simple.   In one of his videos that was obviously directed at nobody else but me, “Screwy Moments inScriptural Interpretation 15- Romans 7 and Sin”, starting at time-code 2:00, he says that If I have a problem with anything in his videos, I should deal with him, and “no one else”.

At time code 2:40, he taunts me saying that if I deal with my problem with his videos in any way other than with him personally, then I’d be showing I was too frightened to man up and deal with him “one-on-one”.  Ok, I recently sent a settlement offer to Holding by email and other methods to make sure he got it.  See here.

He never replied “one on one”.  He never “manned up”.  All he did was post more defamatory videos filled with misleading half-truths.

Since he qualified “one on one” with “no one else”, it’s pretty clear that he was asking me to avoid telling anybody else about my problems with his videos, and to simply contact him by direct correspondence.  And Holding is a hypocrite and a liar because his response to my most recent settlement offer was not direct private correspondence, but by cartoon youtube video obviously intended more to entertain his friends and the world than to seriously interact with myself. Only in Holding’s retarded mind does “upload a video for my friends to laugh at” constitute his engaging in "manning up", communicating “one on one” and involving “no one else”.

Like I said, Holding is a hypocrite and liar.  He does not expect from himself what he expects from others.  What the fuck else would a reasonable person take “one on one” to mean, if not direct reply?

Second, some questions for Holding, and yes, I'll be dealing with his dogshit legal arguments later:

1.      In some of your third-party emails from 2015 which I forced you to disclose in the State litigation, you complained, with seriousness, that you thought I was sufficiently dangerously mentally ill to attempt to murder you.  From a private message you sent to somebody on Tweb:

Hi...I see you're on TWeb. So I'll drop you a note requesting prayer before I ; sign off.

I had a very troubling late afternoon and evening. "Bud" is getting more and more obsessed with getting me out there. He wrote today that he would get me before a jury if it was "the last thing he did on earth." Ordinarily that may not mean much, but because he is mentally ill, and his disorder is the type that makes people prone to suicide or violence, I wondered if he wanted to kill himself. Then I began to think that his obsession to get to me in person, which he has had since 2008, was because he wanted to kill ME.

I was concerned enough to write some panicked emails to some people in Washington, asking if there was some sort of order or something I could ask for to keep me from having to ever be in the same room with him.

Maybe it was irrational. But I get irrational whenever I feel like something will happen that threatens the people I love.

 Similarly, in an email to Casey Luskin, you allege that I’d try to kill you in a courtroom, therefore, you wouldn’t appear in the courtroom with me unless I was sedated and under guard:

From: J. P. Holding <jphold@att.net
Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: Reason for my call

Casey,

I just wrote Seth a half hour or so ago. This is getting to be scary. This guy just wrote me this afternoon saying that he'd get me in front of a jury if it was the last thing he ever did "on earth". I'd take that as just hyperbole except he IS mentally ill -- borderline personality disorder -- and I worked with prison inmates who had that, and know what they can do when they get that obsessed. He also had a restraining order put on him 20 years ago by his wife, over a domestic violence incident.

If I didn't live 3000 miles away I'd be buying a gun right now. He's had this obsession to get me in some sort of live debate situation for years now. I didn't think much of it until I found out he was mentally ill a few weeks ago. Now it's getting scary. I think part of it is that he's been trying to get people in the apologetics field to disassociate with me for years, by writing them long ranting emails about how evil I am, but all they do is ignore him.

There's no way I'm getting in the same room with this guy unless he's sedated and under guard.

Similarly, in an email to Seth Cooper, you specifically alleged that I’d try to kill you with my bare hands:

From: J. P. Holding <jphold@att.net
Sent: " Tuesday, October 06, 2015 3:17 PM
Subject: I think this guy wants to kill me! 

Seth, I really need some input on this. If he weren't 3000 miles away I'd go buy a gun right now to protect myself and my loved ones. 

I'm serious. This is getting scary. He has borderline personality disorder, and I've worked in a prison with a mental health unit full of guys like this. He also had a restraining order put on him 20 years ago by his thenwife, over a domestic violence issue. For years now he's had this "thing" about getting me in front of my church, or in a live debate, or in some way confronting me in person. I didn't think much of it before, now it's starting to take on a darker light. "The last thing I ever do on earth"???? There's no way I can be in the same room with this guy. He'll try to strangle me with his bare hands!

 What do I need to do? Motion for protection order? Declaration to the court expressing my concerns?

Question:  Do you know of anybody else in the world, besides yourself, who do as much as you do to try and enrage their enemy while being seriously fearful that the enemy intends on murdering them?  If your answer is “yes”, provide their names and any websites they either own or post at.  If your answer is “no”, could a person reasonably deduce from the fact that you are the only person in the world who does this shit, that you are irrational? 

What else do you do in your spare time, Holding.  Walk though East Los Angeles shouting angry racial slurs?

2.      Could you really blame a person who got the impression from your criticisms of me, that you feed off of negativity and get a “thrill” out of smearing other people’s reputations?  Some Christians might say that even if your views are basically correct, the extreme obsession you have toward smearing me goes far beyond biblically justified limits.

3.      In the above-quoted Tweb message, you say

Maybe it was irrational. But I get irrational whenever I feel like something will happen that threatens the people I love

Could a person be reasonable to draw the conclusion that you tend to become irrational when your enemies criticize your beliefs?  Or, like Steve Hays, will you unconvincingly insist that this language of yours, which looks serious and genuine, was mere satire?  I can’t wait to hear the master of trifling sophistry “explain” this one.  What, maybe you meant “more smart than I already am” when you said “irrational”?  or maybe there's no law that says you aren't allowed to give a false impression to your own lawyer?

4.      Who do you think has more to lose when and if that third lawsuit gets filed?  The person who, in your own judgment, has no life or reputation to speak of in the first place….or the person who wants the Christian world to view him as an intellectual giant who has experienced significant spiritual maturing in his 20 years of internet apologetics?

5.      Besides myself, do you negatively criticize any other persons whom you believe have such serious mental disabilities that they are likely to attempt to murder you?  Or is it only Christian Doscher who causes you to violate common sense?

6.      Did any of the CRI employees that Hank fired in the last 20 years, ever accuse him of being mean-spirited and unfit to be the president of CRI, yes or no?  Don’t lie and pretend you don’t know.  You present yourself as a top researcher, you love controversy, you know CRI has been involved in controversy before, so its highly unlikely that you know nothing about the scandal in which many CRI employees were fired or quit because Hank was such an asshole.  I ask because you seem to think it significant that CRI ignored my letter of concern about you and did nothing about it. If other CRI employees accused Hank of being a mean bastard and unfit for Christian leadership, then apparently, CRI’s ignoring my letter of concern does NOT automatically make you look better. There would exist the genuine possibility that the letter was ignored, not because CRI thought you innocent of the charges, but because CRI is as stupid as you, and falsely thinks that the way you slandered me violated nothing in the New Testament, which would apparently mean that CRI’s bible tells them nothing about slander, reviling, filthy talk, or jesting.   It would also mean that CRI and Hank disagree violently with Licona and Habermas on whether insulting one’s critic has biblical justification.

7.      You have always called me a moron and dumb ass because of my view that the bible prohibits Christians from insulting their critics.  That view is shared by Habermas, Licona, Rohrbaugh, Carson, Blomberg, and others.  Why don’t you publicly accuse these men of being morons and dumb asses for getting wrong the exact same biblical truth you condemn skeptics for getting 'wrong'?  Could it be that you actually do think them to be morons, but you refrain from saying so because you desire their public endorsement?

8.      Since you have been unable, since 1998, to answer my repeated requests that you provide the names of any legitimately credentialed Christian scholars who think the bible justifies today’s Christians to insult their critics, would it be reasonable to say that your unique application of the biblical data on riposte, and your interpretation of the bible passages most people think prohibit insulting other people, should be subject to scholarly criticism and discussion?  Years ago, I tried to give you a head start by citing to KJV Onlyist Peter Ruckman, Ph.d, but since you laughed this off, then apparently, you don’t think Ruckman’s support of your view is significant enough to justify citing it to answer my question.  If there are any Christian scholars who agree with your use of extreme riposte today, you don’t cite them in the article that is supposed to be your magnum opus on the subject, “The Christian and Harsh Language”.  Some might find this to be rather significant and revealing omission in light of your extraordinarily high view of your own research capabilities.

9. If you interpret the bible in a way for which you cannot find, or refuse to cite, any support from other Christian scholars, is there an increase in the probability that such interpretation would lead to cultic mentality?

10. Will you disclose the names of the churches you’ve attended in the last 6 months?  Or do I have to find them myself?

11.   How can you boast that nothing I ever reported to other people caused them concern about you?  All we have is your word.  A more objective proof for your contention would be specific statements from CRI, Sweetwater Baptist and others, specifying that they did nothing with my accusations.

12.   Since you can never be wrong on anything ever, especially on those “facts” that you feel you need to spread around the internet, what abusive epithets will you hurl at the Florida police detective who, after filing your criminal report against me, refused to take my own voluntary statement and promptly closed the investigation, no charges filed?  After all, anybody who decides your criminal charges against me were baseless, must surely be a "dumb ass moron", correct?   Or will you admit that in your self-professed tendency to become irrational, you might have wrongfully squawked to the police before you even had sufficient probable cause to think I committed those crimes?  Well how fucked up is THAT?  You go around filing criminal reports on your enemies based on little more than your unconfirmed hunches?  At least you are honest about one thing...yes, you get irrational when you are criticized.

13. How could you possibly excuse away your failure to contact Rohrbaugh concerning his belief that you pervert the NT, by characterizing such contact as amounting to involving him in your “personal problems”, when the issue is limited to scholarship?  He said you "pervert" the NT and ALL Context Group scholarship, and you think emailing him asking "in what ways do you believe I perverted the NT and Context Group scholarship" constitutes bothering him with your personal problems (!?) FUCK YOU.  the ONLY reason you didn't contact him the way any scholar would contact another upon such rebuke, was because you were genuinely fearful that he would confirm that I quoted him accurately, yes, he really did say that.  What’s funny is that under your own stupid definition of “personal problems”, most of what people think constitutes "scholarly stuff" in Christian scholarly journals is mere bothering each other with "personal problems".  As soon as scholar A contacts scholar B to resolve an accusation of taking something out of context, or whatever, this is “contacting them about my personal problems”.  Well fuck you, that’s not the case.

Now let's get to Holding's videos and the crap he thinks passes for honest presentation of the facts and legal argument.

The state court was wrong to impose Holding’s attorney-fees on me.

First, the Washington state law that allows the out-of-State Defendant, who prevails with a motion to dismiss, as Holding did, to have his attorney-fees imposed on the Plaintiff, requires that the Defendant had been served the summons and complaint in that case “personally” (i.e, by a human being). 

(5) In the event the defendant is personally served outside the state on causes of action enumerated in this section, and prevails in the action, there may be taxed and allowed to the defendant as part of the costs of defending the action a reasonable amount to be fixed by the court as attorneys' fees.

Immediately after a process server gave Holding summons and complaint on August 5, 2015, Holding began telling me and everybody else that the summons was missing from the papers the server gave him.

On August 7, he denied receiving a summons:

On August 11, he again denied receiving a summons, see last part where he says “Oddity is, I have not got a summons yet…”

On August 13, Holding answered my previous request that he clarify he had been served summons and complaint.  He again denied being served a summons:

 

Knowing Holding was a liar, I specifically asked Holding to name all the documents that he had received from the process server.  If he was lying, his specification would make it impossible to “explain” later.  On August 14, he specified that the Complaint was the only document he received, and that the papers the server gave him did not include a summons.


  
When I informed him that the process server had filed with the court a return of service stating he served both summons and Complaint on Holding, Holding insisted, in an August 25 email, that somebody, (myself or the process server), was lying:
 

But one year after he made these statements, he filed a motion with the Court asking to have his attorney-fees imposed on me. Knowing that the applicable fee-imposition statute required a showing that service of summons and complaint had been “personal”, he plainly declared, through his attorney:

“A summons and complaint were served on defendant in his home state of Florida on August 5, 2015.” (Motion, p. 1, dated August 12, 2016)

The above excerpts are from my Opposition brief where I argued both these and other legal matters showing that the facts of the case did not meet the legal standards for imposition of fees. What did Holding do after he shit himself with worry after I filed my Opposition brief exposing his lies?  He attached a declaration to his Reply brief, “explaining” that the service on August 5 was indeed missing the summons:

…and that the process server served him personally with the summons several weeks later:

Several problems that should have prevented the judge from thinking personal service in this case was established:

a)    It would appear that Holding’s late declaration saying he received personal service of the summons from the same process server weeks later, was a lie, because the server placed in the mail on August 27 his under-oath affidavit that he served summons on Holding on August 5, and he neither expresses nor implies he delivered a summons at any later time.  That is, if Holding was telling the truth, we would expect the server to have admitted he made such second attempt.

b)    The server never did, in fact, EVER file an amended return of service admitting he made any second attempt to serve summons.  He admits to serving summons on August 5.

c)    Holding says that in discussing the issue with the process server, Holding agreed to simply allow them to MAIL the summons to him, which is of course inconsistent with his later claim that the summons was delivered personally:

That makes the server’s failure to file an amended return of service even more suspicious, because the server was hired by me to PERSONALLY serve the summons to Holding.  If you pay a process server to personally serve summons on defendant, and all they do is mail it to Defendant, that’s breach of contract.  Any fool can “mail” a summons to anybody. You hire a process server because of the law’s insistence that service of such lawsuit paperwork be “personal”.  Holding's explanations are not the inerrant word of God.

d)    The process server filed a return of service saying he served Holding personally with summons and Complaint on August 5, but he never filed an amended return of service to correct the date, despite the fact that such amended statement would have been legally mandatory since the original return of service was made under penalty of perjury, and under Holding’s version of the facts, it’s statement that summons was personally served August 5 was false.   Holding wants us to believe the process server was this irresponsible, when in fact serving summons and complaint is usually never close to this complex and convoluted, any dummy over the age of 18, capable of handing papers to another person, can do the job correctly with minimal thinking.

What we are left with, then, is a process server who chose to file only one document with the court, a return of service asserting that summons was served on Holding August 5…and Holding’s denial that this was the case.

 

The point is that the Washington fee-imposition statute requires the court to make a factual finding that service of the suit to be “personal”, and this evidence indicates such service was anything but certain.  Since process servers would not be expected to carry out their duties as carelessly as Holding’s version of the facts would require (their job depends on telling the truth), it is Holding whose story sounds more unbelievable.

This should have been enough to convince the court that since whether the summons was served personally or not, could not be reasonably determined, Holding’s motion for fees failed the statutory criteria, and should have accordingly been denied.

 That Holding is a consummate liar (i.e., that he committed perjury by asserting intentional falsehoods in an under-oath court document) is clear once we focus in just a bit more closely on one of the statements he made.  Let’s look at it again:

 Really?  Holding wants the Court to believe that in August 2015, he was “unaware of what a summons was or that it was a necessary component to initiating a lawsuit”?

I’d love to see Holding “reconcile” the ignorant state of mind he claimed was true about him for August 2015, with a claim he made the previous month, July 2015, that he knew all about the basics of civil litigation sufficiently to not need a lawyer to defend himself.  Here’s a screenshot from the defamatory “skepticbud thread” which Tweb smartly removed from public view:

Lest Holding or his followers trifle that he doesn’t say how long he ran such law library, he specified in a later July 2015 post to the same thread that he had run, in his previous job as a prison librarian, a prison law library for 7 years and saw prisoners filing plenty of civil lawsuits against various Defendants:

How could you have “a lot of experience with pro se litigants” in civil actions, and NOT know that lawsuits require a summons ?(he qualifies later that he was aware of prisoners filing frivolous lawsuits, so Holding cannot trifle that he meant prisoners in criminal cases representing themselves pro se...he obviously meant CIVIL cases)

How could Holding notice “many” inmates filing frivolous lawsuits over the course of 7 years, and NOT know that lawsuits require a summons? 

How could Holding consider himself sufficiently knowledgeable of the basics of civil litigation that he doesn’t need a lawyer, while also NOT knowing that a summons is required to start a lawsuit?  Is holding the kind of person who would profess basic knowledge of auto mechanics, while NOT knowing what an engine is?

How could Holding “know about filing in court and how to do it”, along with all these other claims to knowledge of the requirements of civil litigation, and NOT know the nature of that piece of paper that is necessary to initiating civil lawsuits? 

Gee, maybe between July 2015 and August 2016, the intellectual giant Holding “forgot” about the most basic rudiments of civil litigation?  What else did he forget?  Maybe that Genesis is in the bible?  Apparently the very large storehouse of mental information has an exceptionally large leak.

Sorry, but I publicly accuse Holding of perjury, and he won’t be doing a very convincing job of dumbing down his claimed August 2015 ignorance of summonses, with the legal prowess he boasted of possessing on July 2015.

For those of you who would trifle further in the blind effort to grasp at any speculation in the cosmos that might possibly defend this bitch:  No, there is no legal exception that allows prisoners who file lawsuits from behind bars, to skip the summons and serve only the complaint.

And you know perfectly well that if some atheist bible critic had been caught in this exact same perjury, you wouldn’t be putting forth ANY of the efforts to harmonize this crap, that you do for Holding.  When atheists fuck up, it’s because they are brainless wastes of human flesh.  When juvenile delinquent Christian apologists fuck up, this is their innocent ignorance due to original sin.  FUCK YOU.

 

Lest Holdings followers trifle about maybe this or maybe that, they need to remember that they all think Sparko, owner of theologyweb, is a smart guy.  Let’s see from a July 2015 theologyweb post what his impression was of Holding’s legal knowledge:

Now what?  Maybe you’ll trifle that to “know the legal system inside and out” doesn’t necessarily mean one will know that a summons is required in a lawsuit?  Yeah right…and maybe a Christian could be reasonably said to “know the New Testament inside and out” while being ignorant of Apostle Paul.

You will trifle that maybe Sparko was speaking hyperbolically, but you cannot show anything in the immediate context that would support viewing his words to be hyperbole, while the entire message is bristling with signs that he was speaking plainly.

The truth is that Holding not only lies and exaggerates, he manages to get other allegedly “smart” people to think his claims of superior knowledge are literal and correct.

More replies later, IF I decide to reveal more when in fact due to the pending third lawsuit it could just as easily be argued that I shouldn't reply further.