Summations Only

I think this paragraph illustrates the problem. Not once do you reference the EVIDENCE. The phrase, "We who hold to the accuracy of . . ." is nonsensical. One does not hold to accuracy. One DEMONSTRATES accuracy through EVIDENCE.We view the world through different philosophies. You think the world should conform to your beliefs. We believe that we should conform our beliefs to what we find in the world.

OK Buz can you really justify accusing others of hypocrisy simply for taking a different view of the Bible than you ?And since I found out early on that you are quite happy to misrepresent the Bible rather than admit to making an error, I really think that your claim to be a "Bible believe" is somewhat hollow. And yes, I CAN justify that claim.

And since you've worked so hard to ensure that you would learn next to nothing, and most of that next to nothing would be ... next to nothing. Any number times zero is still zero. Simple mathematics, which I suspect you reject for being atheistic. Of course not, since they don't want you to learn about other views. Might make you start to think and they certainly cannot have that! Starting to think is what eventually led to Dan Barker's loss of faith and what causes 65% to 80% of youth raised as fundamentalists/evangelicals to leave the faith, especially if they go to college (beware the humanities departments and especially the English classes!).Though the RE programs in mainstream Christian churches ("compromisers" to you) includes learning about other religions and even having the Sunday School students talk with members of other faiths. An anecdote our minister would tell was of a Baptist girl doing such an exercise and, upon learning from a UU minister that they don't believe in Hell, exclaimed, "But then why be good?" To which the UU minister replied, "Because it is the better way."But then fundamentalist churches would never dare allow their students to conduct such an exercise, since their theology depends on isolating its members from the real world and to keep them from thinking. I'm not familiar with Winnick, but I certainly am familiar with H. Morris. That's not the only time he's lied to you and to everybody else.And as for "the reality {you} see in the real world", with you keeping your eyes wide shut, how could you possibly see anything? My friend Gary from church also used to be an extreme fundamentalist. He described how every single day he had to filter out everything that didn't agree with his theology, which meant that most of the time he was keeping himself willfully blind to reality. The massive effort that kind of self-delusion required of him finally proved too much for him to maintain, so after a lot of thought (there's that "T"-word again!) he applied the Matthew 7:20 test on Christianity, which Christianity failed miserably. So he became "an atheist and complete humanist" and has been far happier and more spiritually fulfilled ever since.Oh! Look! Yet another fundamentalist whose deconversion was not in any way influenced by evolution! What caused Gary's deconversion? Fundamentalist Christian theology!If you want to use this forum to learn about atheists, then open your eyes and learn! You can also learn a lot more about the specific question of what causes Christians to become atheists by reading their actual testimonials. Why believe the lies that H. Morris and Wintery Knight and other fundamentalists tell you about atheists, when you can get the truth straight from the horse's mouth: eg, the ex-Christian.net forum's testimonial section at http://www.ex-christian.net/...timonies-of-former-christians. The only thing stopping you is your terror of exposing yourself to the truth, for fear that you might start to think (again with the T-word!). Religion has a direct effect on the economy? Which anal orifice did you pull that piece of nonsense out of?Well, consider that mainstream churches are declining as their memberships get sucked and suckered into evangelical and fundamentalist churches (who need to proselytize and recruit aggresively in order to offset hemorrhaging their next generation, what with 65% to 80% of their youth leaving the faith) and consider how the fundamentalists and evangelical and conservative Christians wield inordinate influence on the GOP and form voting blocks that seek to vote into office candidates who are of their faith, while public opinion is only just now starting to come around to being able to start to consider voting for an atheist candidate. So then fundamentalists, evangelicals, and conservative Christians would hold much more sway over the US economy than would atheists. So by your peccable logic (the opposite of "impeccable"), that would mean that fundamentalist Christians are responsible for the US being more deeply in debt than ever before. Way to go, dude!And, yes, atheism does work better than your form of theism does -- some forms of theism can actually work well, but then they are not fundamentalist.Did you even listen to that Unbelievable radio program (that's the name of the program) that Wintery Knight linked you to? The program's format appears to pair up a Christian with a non-Christian (eg, an atheist or a Muslim) and that program paired up Dan Barker with a Christian author, Charles Foster. Foster and Barker kept mentioning how much they agree with each other on so many things, including what Barker was rejecting and his reasons for rejecting it; partially transcribed starting at 15:55 into the program (go there and listen for the original in its entirety -- you need to go through the Wintery Knight page, whose source garbled the show's URL):

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The second comment is this: I had a chance to read some of the letters that were written to Dan by some of his Christian friends -- he puts them on the Internet. These are letters that were written as a result of his announcement to them that he was going to abandon Christianity. I don't think there was a single one of those letters which takes issue with Dan's characterization of his own internal conflict, battle between faith and reason. I found that curious and I found that enlightening. It's a false and corrosive dichotomy to assert. That perhaps tells us something about what Dan was rejecting.

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What was Dan saying no to? Was he saying no to a Christian culture that was capable of asserting that dichotomy to itself?

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What he was denouncing is something that I would denounce: a narrow, life-denying literalism which bears no acumen? to scrutiny {DWise1: cannot stand up to scrutiny?} ... which cannot begin stand against any of the trends in biblical scholarship.

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In that section, Foster suggested that Barker in his arguments against Christianity is setting up strawmen based on his experience with fundamentalist Christianity and expressed the wish that Barker could have had the chance during his deconversion to have spoken with others from other Christian traditions so that he could have seen that fundamentalist Christianity is not the norm and that rejecting it should not necessarily lead to rejecting Christianity itself. And indeed, when I refer to Christianity in our exchanges, I am referring to fundamentalist Christianity, just as I am sure that your usage of "Christianity" refers to the same thing, what with all the other "Christians" being compromisers!As a non-fundamentalist, I am free from that "narrow, life-denying literalism" that cannot stand up to scrutiny, whereas you are entrapped in it. I am free to question anything and honestly seek the answers, whereas you don't dare question anything and even if you could you cannot honestly seek any answers, since you must filter everything through your theology. I am free to learn about anything I want to, whereas you must avoid learning about anything that might possibly conflict with your theology. I can read and listen to opposing ideas and try to understand why they hold those opposing ideas, whereas you must never allow yourself to do the same. I can even test my own ideas, beliefs, and assumptions freely and when I find that I have been in error I am able to correct my ideas, beliefs, and assumptions; you could never possibly dream of allowing yourself to dare to attempt the same. And furthermore, I am able to read and evaluate others' claims and arguments, such as yours, and to respond directly to those claims and arguments, whereas you are unable to do the same and have to resort to making up even more nonsense.While a non-fundamentalist theist should be as free to do those same things as I, I feel that being an atheist affords me a bit more freedom than they have, since they can easily be trapped into reinterpreting what they find into the terms of their own religion (eg, the infamous "So many different religions, but they all worship the same God, even the Buddhists" -- hint: the Buddha taught against believing in the gods, because that would only keep you from Enlightenment). But regardless, it is abundantly clear and blazingly obvious to even the most casual of observers that atheism works much better than fundamentalist Christianity does. Though of course, because of your theology's control over you, you cannot allow yourself to see that which is so clear and obvious to the rest of us. No worldview is perfect, though atheism is still far better than fundamentalism. And atheists are not trying to force atheism on anyone, nor do they want to. Even though some individual ex-Christians, like ex-smokers or ex-drinkers or ex-drug addicts, may want to help those still trapped in those nasty habits gain their freedom as well, though there may also be issues raised by ex-Christians who still harbor a lot of anger towards Christianity for various reasons (eg, for its having lied to/betrayed him, for its having forced him into deconversion, for how it handled his deconversion). There is no atheist mandate nor motivation to recruit, unlike the Christian mandate to proselytize. Rather, the vast majority of atheists just want to live and let live, something that fundamentalist Christians cannot abide. Remember that when you see an atheist pushing, it's because he's pushing back in self-defense against unrelenting Christian aggression. In that Unbelievable radio program, Dan Barker made it quite clear that he's not trying to convert people to atheism and that he's quite fine with people being Christians -- he even mentions getting letters from people he had converted to Christianity and had talked into getting into the ministry; the name of the Freedom From Religion Foundation refers to their work to protect church-state separation, something that Christian co-guest Charles Foster agreed with completely, as I recall.No, rather it's fundamentalist Christianity that's forcing atheism on everyone. Especially on their own members, though by painting Christianity in such a horrible light, they are showing non-members that Christianity is definitely not the way and they should not even consider it.Again, thank you so much for your generous and untiring contributions to growth and spread of atheism.

No conspiracy, CS. I'm just airing some reasons why EvC is short of creationists.

Sure, Jar. Over the years I've cited pages of observable evidence pertaing to history, fulfilled biblical prophecy, archeological discoveries etc, whereas you schooled members have produced no observable evidence for the alleged zero singularity, the BB, alleged biogenesis or early life following it.

I registered there a while back, if for no other reason, to lurk more efficiently. I may come out of the closet soon.I'm logged in there right now. They're having some sort of database (almost typed dadabase*, which may or may not be the same thing) problems and you can't access any of the topics. And both Google and Yahoo are listed as being there. This can't be a good thing for the sites search index.MooseABE:*Per here - Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition.Of course, that is an out of context sentence.Edited by Minnemooseus, : ABE.

It would seem appropriate that when replying to a request for evidence that you actually provide some.
Do you not think it strange that you didn't?tbh: Your repeated claims to have evidence and repeated refusal to provide any is becoming laughable (and a little bit sad).

Why should I repetitivly repete evidence that you all reject, not willing to admit to one Biblical miracle?Go figure why creationists regard this site as an adventure into futility?

If that is true then please provide a link to a post where you cited pages of observable evidence pertaing to history, fulfilled biblical prophecy, archeological discoveries etc.

Oh, okay. Well, when you say it like this:

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You evolutionists claim the best from both POVs, so as to allow yourselves the advtage over the bonafide Bible believing creationsts.

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It looks like you're adding intentions into it. They do X so as to Y would mean that the reason for X is Y. But that's not true at all. I don't accept evolution so that I have an advantage over creationists.But I think I might get what you're trying to say:That because the evolutionists cover both sides of the spectrum, or practically the whole continuum, then we do have an advantage over the creationists and that leads to less and less creationists coming around.But that should be telling you something. Not, as you notice, that we're conspiring against the creationists, but that we're all looking at the same thing. It doesn't matter your background, facts speak for themselves. The real reason that creationists are on shortage, is because they're on shortage of facts.In Message 145 you wrote: I remember when we were discussing that chariot wheel. You were saying that the Bible says the wheel should be somewhere, and then a wheel was found near there so therefore that's evidence that the Bible was right. I tried to explain to you the logic of supporting evidence and eliminating coincidence and how what you thought was evidence really wasn't working like you thought it should.It had nothing to do with me being unwilling to accept a miracle from the Bible. It was straight forwardly about how the nature of evidence works. Unfortuantely, we didn't get anywhere and you stopped responding.

Buz, in support of the proposal that Nuweiba was the site of the Exodus crossing you claimed that: Message 175With regard to actual observation is the Nuweiba site:The shallowest part of the Red Sea?The shallowest part of the Gulf of Aqaba?Shallower than any of the rival sites (the traditional Gulf of Suez, the Bitter Lakes preferred by modern scholars or even the Straits of Tiran proposed by others who choose to place Mt Sinai at Jebel Al Lawz) ?

Yes, that's an good example of Buz exhibiting the precise problem creationists have interpreting evidence. Another familiar example, though not necessarily from Buz: If there was a global flood then we should find seashells atop mountains, and since we've found seashells atop mountains therefore there was a global flood.But I don't believe the creationist shortage here has anything to do with anything EvC Forum is doing. I believe it is due to much more global forces:

• Social websites.
• Move to mobile platforms.
• Creationism no longer actively seeking confrontation with science.

All discussion boards should be affected by the first two issues. If I'm correct then participation at discussion boards generally should be declining all across the Internet.--Percy

As an off topic aside:Knowing that you intended on creating a marketable product in creating this dicsussion board, do you feel like you're falling behind into the old ways in not having a moble app n'shit like that? That maybe you should've gone to market already?

Or at least be listed on Tapatalk, if it's practical.

The industry is innovating away from me faster than I'm implementing. It's beginning to look hopeless.--Percy