One of Christian Behrend Doscher’s most
egregious attempts to deceive me took place in 2008 while he was posing as
“spirit5er” on TheologyWeb. It took me until 2016 to find out the whole truth.
While I was engaging him in debate on
TheologyWeb in 2008, Doscher challenged me to a debate in front of my church
and said he would pay me $20,000 for that debate. Because of a crash, the TheologyWeb
version of that thread no longer exists except for a bit of it in an archive.
But Doscher preserved a version of those events on an atheist forum that same
year. Here’s what he said in a message dated October 6, 2008:
I accepted Holding's $20,000 price tag
for an oral debate at a location, date and time of his choosing, on a biblical
subject of his choosing, in front of any audience of his choosing, then asked
for the name and number of his pastor to facilitate the deal, guarantee his
promise to debate and transfer the money. Nope. He refused to give the
information on his pastor (like Holding really goes to church?!), unless I PM'd
him with an electronic scan of my bank statement showing I had at least $20,000
in my account. When I objected that people sending bank statements to people
they don't know on the internet is absurd, and they can be easily photoshopped
anyway (bank statements being little more than letters, lines and numbers, how
hard is that to alter?), he replied that he knows experts who can tell whether
a scan that shows my name and money-amount, has been photoshopped or not. As if
the prospect of meeting personally with his pastor to facilitate this deal upon
his agreement to debate, was somehow more prone to deception and falsification
than his ridiculous face-saving suggestions.
I had plenty of suspicions about
“spirit5er” so I never told him a thing. I also strung him along about his
offer of $20,000, knowing that it was likely to be false. I had no idea just
how false it was until 2016, when I started collecting documents from Doscher’s
old lawsuits in the midst of his libel lawsuit against me.
By way of background, in 2007, Doscher
briefly worked for Swift Transportation, a leading trucking company. He resigned
from that job on July 31, 2007, over an issue involving a traffic ticket and a
refusal to drive his truck. In June 2009, he filed the first of a series of
lawsuits related to these events. I won’t get into details on those cases here.
What I want to highlight is this snippet from a document he filed in that case:
(Doscher
v Swift, Motion for Summary Judgment, October 2010, p. 60)
So, let’s put the pieces together. In
2008, the same year he was often homeless and living in his car, Doscher was
also offering me $20,000 to engage him in a live debate. This was in spite of
the fact that he couldn’t even afford to spend the money for gas needed to turn
the heat on in his vehicle in the dead of winter.
It’s kind of ironic. In 2008, he offered
me $20,000 he didn’t have to pay me for a live debate. In 2016, a judge ordered
him to pay me just over $20,000 to cover my attorney fees. One way or the
other, he’s destined to pay me that amount someday. It just remains to be seen
how.
