An Army of One

Hi Infixion,
I do not envy you the position that you are in. While my family is not fundamentalist several of the members are practicing catholic. I am never going to forget the scandalized expressions on their faces when they told me that I needed to be confirmed (I pretty much dropped out of the church in my early teens) for a priest to perform at the weeding and I said that I could care less. My wifes family is baptist and some of them are real die hard fundies (the extended not the immediate so I lucked out there) so when we get together we try to avoid the topic, although some of them have on occasion been foolish enough to tell me that I needed to do gods will, you can guess from my writing tone where those comments went .The advice to avoid the issues is a good one if you want to maintain good relationships with your family, but that sounds like it will be unlikely. When I have been in these situations I have always found a polite but firm offense to be the best tactic. I also bear in mind that the odds of my ever changing a fundamentalists mind (backed as it is with faith and not reason) with logic and reason are slim at best. The other thing that I do (and I believe has been mentioned on occasion here) is to learn the creationist arguements as they have a tendency to be passed on to the fundamentalist by preachers or prayer group leaders in a repetitious form. As they will likely NOT want to discuss it with you one on one your only tactic will be to understand their arguements and strategy in advance (i.e. defeat superior numnbers with an advance understanding of their strategy. Dawkins is good although I disagree with many aspects of his selfish gene theory, S.J. Gould is another good author. Two outstanding books for the non-scientist are "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" by Michael Ruse and "Creationism on Trial" by Langdon Gilkey but anything that goes over the refuted but still oft-recycled creationism arguements is good for standing against the Gish Gallop, or another term that I like to use the Morris Morass

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz