I have been blocked by Steve Shives

I’ve joined thousands of other Twitter users and I’ve been blocked by Steve Shives. Who’s Steve Shives? He’s a guy who lives in nearby Sharpsburg, Maryland and maintains a YouTube channel dedicated to social justice, feminism, and atheism.

He’s pretty famous for blocking people on Twitter. Evidently, he has a bot that blocks people based on who else they follow on Twitter.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, block bots are evil, dumb, and I hate them.

Back before Steve was on YouTube, I considered him an e-friend. We both lived here in the Hagerstown area, we both had blogs, and we both shared a dislike for our local newspaper, The Herald-Mail. We were also very similar in our political views until we weren’t.

I was a fan of Steve’s writing on his blog, Steve Likes to Curse. It was a daily read for me. Although the site is still up, he no longer writes blog posts. That’s too bad. I think he is a good writer. He probably writes scripts for YouTube, but listening to someone’s videos is not the same as reading someone’s written words. And to be honest, I don’t like Steve’s videos.

Here’s a recent video of his:

Steve Shives is such a polarizing figure on YouTube that he is often the subject of other YouTube creators. A good many YouTubers make videos about Steve Shives and the things he says. Some of them are quite funny.

I started having problems with Steve and his opinions even before he left LiveJournal for YouTube. Mostly it had to do with his inconsistency of atheism. Even though he gave the impression he was an atheist, when he and his wife married, they married in a local church. I know this because I saw the photos in The Herald-Mail. What kind of atheist gets married in a church?

That threw up a red flag for me.

And then there was Steve’s defense of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. Atheist Steve was a vocal defender of building it. What kind of atheist supports building religious structures for any religious group? Here are some of the posts he wrote about the topic seven years ago:

• Ground Zero Mosque: A Thought Experiment
• Why the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is wrong, and un-American
• Opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque”: We’ve Seen This Before
• Five Reasons Why the Opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque” is Bigoted and Bogus

If you can get through the above posts about the Ground Zero Mosque, give the following post a read and look at the inconsistencies. In it, Atheist Steve writes about a local church, the Emmanuel Baptist church spending an estimated $7 million on a new sanctuary and classrooms for a fundamentalist Christian private school.

• The Herald-Mail gives free publicity to a misogynist church

I also found the title of the above post to be a little silly. How can you call any Christian church misogynist when there’s such a thing as Islam? Islam is the apex predator of misogyny. It’s not even close.

How can an atheist defend an Islamic group building a religious center, but criticize a Christian church for building a new sanctuary and new classrooms? Shouldn’t atheists be consistent in standing up against all religious groups?

And that’s when the wheels fell off for me with Steve Shives. He was a pro-Islam, anti-Christian atheist who when it came time to marry the love of his life, got married in a Christian church.

In comparison, when my wife and I got married nearly twenty years ago, we got married in the courthouse, like the honest, consistent atheists that we are.