Should intellectually honest fundamentalists live like the Amish?

As I said, it doesn't matter to me but I don't see the relevance of this. I asked if there are signs of strain in the Alleghenies that deerbreh gave as an example, or in the downslope from the mounded area at the north of the Grand Canyon? You didn't answer. Are neat parallels maintained with strain? Those pictures don't look like strain maintains any kind of neatness whatever but produces deformities.Just out of curiosity, how do you explain the difference between the soft-looking buckling of the Alleghenies and the jagged sharp straight stratifications upthrust at angles in the Rockies? I'm not talking very soft, just not totally lithified. And also, has anyone SEEN a totally lithified rock deforming under strain? If not, how do you know it was totally lithified? Something must have to happen awfully rapidly to preserve a raindrop impression. I'm not sure this has actually been proven, although again, it isn't important to the discussion as far as I can tell. So what happens to soft strata/rocks/sediments under deforming pressures?This message has been edited by Faith, 08-25-2005 05:03 PM

What a bunch of irrelevant trash. I'm obviously not talking about inadvertent or unconscious communications. I'm talking about civility. You generally exhibit very little of that, which may explain your inability to get the point.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-25-2005 05:11 PM

I'm usually just asking what you mean, I simply want to understand what you are saying when you've only given a brief assertion of something without explaining it. I'm not asking for a thesis. Nevertheless I do enjoy the links when I have time to spend on them. The last batch are nice.As for the rest, you were talking down to me. Still are. You don't need to discuss any of this with me but if you intend to I don't appreciate the personal comments. My motivations are none of your or anybody's business. Perhaps teachers get into the habit of assessing their young students' motivations. I am not a young student. If you want to discuss, leave the personal remarks out of it and deal with the communications themselves. If you find them unsupportable for whatever reason, just exit the thread and keep the personal remarks to yourself.

Well that was informative but I still don't know how the area deerbreh posted about in Maryland got such nice curved strata as shown on the diagrams at the link he posted somewhere back there. And you missed my point about the parallel strata over the Grand Canyon, also shown at a link I posted. The whole stack that is the wall of the Grand Canyon follows the curve of the mound or hump to the north of the canyon that then slopes downward and curves again to horizontal, and according to the diagrams the strata remain neatly parallel and simply follow the curve of the mound and the slope without a break. Should I expect to see strain in the rock along those curves or not?

I disagree that I'm unwilling to learn. I don't think that is what any of this is about. And your analysis of my supposed unwillingness to learn IS personal and unwelcome. However, I will drop it.Having spent the first half of my life having faith in the ToE with all its ramifications and accoutrements, though attempts to find convincing proof of it were frustratingly unsuccessful, there is not much that could ever persuade me back to it. Probably the only thing that might would be a truly convincing demonstration that the book of Genesis allows for the possibility.{Edit: But even with the possibility open I'm not sure there's anything on the ToE side that could ever convince me at this point. I know too well by now that the whole thing is an edifice built on interpretation and nothing else, and that the whole creationist-evolutionist flap is a war between plausible interpretations, so that there simply is not and never will be any kind of evidence that will not be subject to somebody's more convincing reinterpretation of it.I will I hope go on to apply this reasoning to the pictures you posted of unconformities. Hutton decided they must have taken a long time to form. I'm not so sure and he can't prove it and neither will I be able to prove whatever interpretation God allows me to come up with.}This message has been edited by Faith, 08-25-2005 08:15 PM

This is not a science thread, holmes. I don't think I'm obliged to treat it as if it were.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-26-2005 08:43 AM

"Hutton" stands for geologists. Don't jump the gun. I haven't gotten back to this yet. Those old Christians had a lot of indefensible ideas, including bizarre ideas about how the flood might have happened. I GOT the point about the unconformities. I've thought about it before. Still thinking. Hang in there.

What is the matter with you? I used the name "Hutton" knowing full well who he is and when he lived and obviously used it as a symbol.

I guess we aren't going to get to the unconformities on this thread as it is nearing its end and you want to have this side conversation about my supposed iniquities. No, I meant what I said about the whole thing being a matter of interpretation. Hutton SURMISED that the uncomformity had to be old. There is no way to PROVE any theory about what happened to create such an unconformity. The best you can have is educated guesses about all of it. That is the case with the ToE and the OE on every point. It is all conjecture, all competing plausibilities.I also meant it when I said that you'd have to show me that Genesis can accommodate millions of years. I don't see it. Hutton had apparently not grappled with the implications of Genesis in his naive Christian faith.As I said, it is possible that a dino and a human could be found together, but it is apparently highly improbable given the way the fossils sorted themselves. That's is a typical story, told by others here at EvC. You believed in YEC on blind faith. You hadn't possessed it yourself, thought it through, made it your own. That sort of belief is easy to lose. That's the kind of Christian faith I also had as a child and I lost it at adolescence under the influence of teachers and friends. But I had no belief in YEC or any other theory of origins at that time to lose. I would have to guess that leaders in my childhood church were evolutionists because with a woman pastor for some period it was clearly a liberal church I now know in retrospect, but they never taught anything on the subject. If they had I suppose I'd have taken evolution on faith the same way I took God on faith.As a teenage atheist I started thinking about evolution. I found it hard to prove in my own mind. It certainly wasn't that I had any allegiance to any other theory at the time, none whatever, it's just that I couldn't see how evolution could have worked -- and I had no desire to criticize it, I just wanted to understand it. The answer everyone gave was "lots of time." Well that does not explain how you get through tiny increments of apparently useless changes that have no reason to be selected because they are nonadaptive, such as early stages of antlers, to a finally useful adaptation. Millions of years isn't going to make that process make any more sense. I guess you could surmise that female preference for tiny bumps on the male head was a factor that led to the selection of bigger and bigger bumps, or that the ones with the bumps butted competitors out of the way from the very start or something, but it seems farfetched to me. But there's an example of evolutionistic thinking -- a fine plausibility and nothing more to go on as with all evolutionistic thinking. Anyway I couldn't convince myself that anything along those lines made sense BUT I nevertheless continued to believe in evolution, I just couldn't make the case for it I wanted to be able to make.I didn't become a believer in YEC until I'd been a Christian for some years and read some of the creationists.The childish things *I* put away were atheism and the ToE.

THERE IS NO IMPLICATION THAT I THINK HUTTON REPRESENTS THE BE-ALL AND END-ALL OF GEOLOGY JUST BECAUSE I CASUALLY USED HIM AS A SYMBOL FOR THE FIELD NOR THAT I THINK DARWIN WAS THE PINNACLE OF EVOLUTIONISM. WOULD YOU PLEASE GET OFF THIS FINGER-POINTING MANIA YOU ARE ON???This message has been edited by Faith, 08-26-2005 11:40 AM

You appear to be blathering away about some sort of historical fine points that I could not care less about. I haven't denied anything about such things because I haven't given them a moment's thought TO deny them. I don't recall saying anything more than generalizing that OE ideas are conjectures that are not subject to proof. That there were many phases and versions of OE is irrelevant. As I recall I mostly emphasized that the interpretation of descent was simply surmised from the ordering of the fossils and was not and is not subject to proof. I believe this. YOu may think me wrong but calling me a liar is WAY out of line.

YOur personal attacks are offensive in the extreme and you are a lousy psychoanalyst if you think frustration with your false needling insinuations is some sort of proof of your puerile theories about my motives. That's the most primitive stupid kind of psychologizing there is.

What a smug self-satisfied piece of BS. Speak for yourself and leave your theories about why I believe what I believe out of it.

No it is not a true statement. "Make my faith work" is meaningless. I don't "need" anything to "make my faith work." I believe what I believe because I believe it is true. I don't NEED it to be true, I believe it IS true. I didn't CHOOSE to believe. You psychologize and relativize these things.{EDIT: And I didn't mean smug ABOUT YOUR FAITH, but about your opinion about my motives and about what faith is.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-26-2005 12:59 PM

Not believing that God authored the Bible leaves you open to every kind of doubt and whim of doctrine.