A descriptor of "nothing?"

I was trying to reply to this post by Richard Carrier and got a "Nonce verification failed" message, so I'm reposting it here to save it. Did I get banned, or is there something not working on his site? I noticed this particular post doesn't have any comments on it yet, which is unusual for his audience.

Christians are prone to deciding what to believe based on groupthink, cult-think, and intuition (otherwise known as emotion in lieu of reason).

I bristle at this caricature of "intuition," however as a romantic I don't see "emotional" as a pejorative. It does seem, however, that you are using it as a pejorative here. Is this merely a rhetorical strategy, like the "mic-drop moment" you describe in the other post? My sense of "intuition" is described in the following example. Imagine you are someone who is very talented and familiar with the ins and outs of Euclidean geometry, and use it every day in your work (you might be an engineer or an architect, for example). You've never used any other form of geometry. Now, try to learn how to use elliptical and/or hyperbolic geometry. First, embrace the new "fact" of this geometry that there is not a single line parallel to a given line passing through a point not on that given line, but rather there are zero (elliptical) parallel lines and all lines drawn through that non-colinear point will eventually cross the given line, or there are an infinite (hyperbolic) number of lines parallel to the given line that pass through that point. Try to forget all of your training and visual intuitions (especially if you are an architect enmeshed in an x, y, z world) and embrace this new reality. Is the struggle I describe above inherently emotional in nature? I'm not sure "emotional" is an adequate descriptor, or if it is then in this case it seems the emotions aren't seen as pejorative and lack the rhetorical power of the pejorative I perceive in your description. When it comes to morality, however, I cannot bring my romantic self to engage in perfectly dispassionate assessments of things like "good" and "evil." There is a fundamental passion when it comes to morality, and in my opinion you can't have "good" and "evil" without simultaneously acknowledging "beautiful" and "ugly." Aesthetics is central to any sort of conversation that tries to describe a "moral reality." That all said, I can't for the life of me understand why people allegedly with faith in a god of "love," "mercy," "vengeance," "hardened hearts," and "hope" seem so squeamish about embracing the emotions that this particular god encourages them -- even commands them -- to embrace with "all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind." All of the apologists appeal to emotion in the end, and they appeal to aesthetics such as "eternal," "unchanging," "omni-omni-omni," and several others when they describe "nothing" as bad and undesirable and "something" as good, among other things.

So there is no coherent argument that God must exist “because atheism predicts nothing will exist.” It doesn’t. It predicts pretty much what we observe exists.

This might be a distraction, but there are theories in physics -- informed by intuitions (aesthetics) of symmetry that describe a universe with exactly equal parts matter (mass plus mc^2 mass-equivalent energy) and anti-matter. It you ascribe a positive value to the former and a negative value to the latter, this leads to a sum total of mass and energy in the entirety of the universe to be exactly (not approximately, not close-within-measurement-tolerances) zero. This was the case before the big bang (if it makes sense to describe a "before" to the big bang that gives time any meaning), it is the case now, and it is the case forever. Net-zero mass/energy is a somewhat counterintuitive notion of "nothing," however it does have some efficacy when countering some rhetorical claims of apologists such as "something cannot come from nothing." Of course, this idea of "nothing" is not the one the apologist is using. The apologist is appealing to something more akin to meaning, which is fundamentally emotional, and not all that helpful for this topic. Again, maybe a distraction but there may be something worth considering in there.