FEY has continued to demonstrate some exemplary debating in that thread - he's demolished every one of Faith's arguments as she posts them, and he's been
considerately polite the entire time. His own experience in abandoning the YEC position as hopelessly and irretrievably inaccurate is serving him very well in an encounter with someone who clings to demonstrably false beliefs...and even when Faith attempted a rather nasty
ad hominem by telling FEY that he might as well "give up the Bible entirely" and told him he had "abandoned God's word," FEY simply continued to politely knock down her arguments. He didn't take the bait, he didn't go off topic, and he kept his cool, over a prolonged debate with one of the most frustrating opponents.
I can't say enough good things about his performance in that thread.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.