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Author Topic:   Deliver Us From Evolution?: A Christian Biologist's In-Depth Look at the Evidence...
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 31 of 55 (810721)
06-01-2017 2:24 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by Davidjay
05-31-2017 12:13 PM


Re: Maybe Aaron has read how creationists are treated HERE
But then again, maybe Aaron has noticed how creationists are treated HERE....
Actually, creationists are treated extremely well here. For one thing, they are allowed to stay and to post.
Consider how non-creationists are treated on creationist and Christian forums. We very quickly find ourselves banned for no given reason. In some cases, we suddenly find it impossible to even connect to the forum anymore -- no explanation, no warning, no nothing.
What were our unpardonable transgressions? Pointing out that some creationist claim was false and proving it. Asking a creationist to please explain a claim that he had made. You know, attempting to have a normal discussion. Several other members have joined creationist and Christian forums and suffered abhorant mistreatment by the forum admins.
Please have the basic common decency (admittedly impossible for you "true Christians") of not playing the martyr in front of those who had actually suffered discrimination and even persecution. Yea, I know, that is completely lost on you; such are the wages of "true Christianity" (AKA, "you fucking hypocrites!").
The only reason you feel that you are being persecuted on this forum as compared to the creationist/"true Christian" forums you are used to is because on those other "forums" you are protected from anyone questioning anything that you baldly assert without any basis, whereas on this forum you are fully expected to have to support your assertions and to engage in discussion about them.
So you find it unfair that you actually have to try to support your assertions. Oh, waaaaaahhh!!!!
This applies to everybody here: if you have a point to make, then please make it, then be ready and willing to support it and to discuss it.
This ain't no creationist wading pool.
{ABE}
It is nice to say that everybody is equal on this forum, but that is not quite true. Creationists are held more equal than non-creationists.
The reason is because creationists do not last. They never have lasted. So however are we supposed to conduct any kind of dialogue with creationists if they continually disappear?
As a result, the Forum Gods, the Admins, routinely grant creationists far more leeway than they would ever deem to grant a mere mortal thinking person. You yourself are a prime example of this degree of latitude being granted you. And yet you persist in trying to bite the hand that feeds you. How sadly typical.
There is also another class of creationist, the honest ones. Don't worry about them; you have absolutely no inkling about them, since they are completely foreign to you. You see, they are seriously seeking truth.
I knew one such honest creationist, Merle Hertzler, on CompuServe back circa 1990. Most other creationists were absolutely horrible. I had actually arrived at the conclusion that the absolutely worst thing you could do to a creationist was to take his claims seriously and to then try to discuss them with him. Invariably, the reaction was extreme hostility, which naturally resulted in absolutely zero discussion of his claims. I finally came to understand that such reactions were because that creationist himself actually had no understanding of the claim he was repeating and so used hostility to mask his ignorance.
Merle was different. Unlike all other creationists I had encountered, he actually tried to engage in discussion. And he was willing to research questions put to him.
Merle arrived at CompuServe a confirmed creationist. Within a year, he found himself on the other side of the argument. You see, unlike other creationists, he was seeking the truth.
Edited by dwise1, : {ABE} -- Added By Edit

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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 43 of 55 (813890)
07-01-2017 10:58 PM
Reply to: Message 41 by Delete
07-01-2017 6:24 PM


Re: Clarification on my beliefs
Aaron, it turns out that you are precisely the type of person I've been talking about for decades.
Personal history first. In the early 1960's I had been attending a Christian church with our next-door neighbors, their daughter being 8 days younger than I. To this day, I still have no idea what denomination they belonged to -- currently, only their day-care facilities remain and are being used by the community college next-door. A church member took us to a Billy Graham show when I was about 10 or 11. I heard the calling and was baptized shortly thereafter. About a year after that, I decided that I needed to get serious about this Christian stuff, so I started reading the Bible on my own to learn what I was supposed to believe. Approaching that in a navely literalistic manner and with no mentor to help guide me, I very soon realized that I could not believe any of that stuff, so the only choice was for me to leave. Looking back, I assume that I had not even been able to get to Genesis 19 which tells of Lot's daughters getting him drunk and raping him, since I would assume that my adolescent mind would have remember that story.
Then half a decade later came the "Jesus Freak Movement", in which the burned-out hippies switched to being "Hooked on Jesus" (a very popular bumper sticker at the time). That caused local marginal fundamentalists' congregations to balloon to form the current mega-churches, such as our local one (Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel). My best friend's mother and other family members converted, so I became a kind of "fellow traveller". I learned what they had to teach and I became even more convinced that their s**t was far crazier and far more unbelievable than what I was encountering half a decade before.
During that time circa 1970, I encountered two creationist claims. One was about a living mollusc that had been radio-dated to be thousands of years old. At the time, I was just extremely skeptical of that claim, but a decade and a half later I was able to track down the source of that claim and learned that the false date was due to the "reservoir effect", which was presented in the actually cited article, so that creationist claim was completely and utterly false and deliberately deceptive. The other claim was the one about the NASA computer that found Joshua's Lost Day (see Dr. Allan H. Harvey's article, Thoughts on "Joshua's Long Day", which is one of many examples refuting that false claim). Even then, a full decade before computers entered our homes, I know that the magical powers that claim made about computers was completely bogus.
I migrated away from that community, married, enlisted in the US Air Force. Then a decade later, circa 1981, there was a creationist presentation given by Dr. Duane Gish at the local university. Since I had duty that night, I could not attend. However, it got me thinking that, since they were still around a decade later, then they might actually have something going for them. So I started looking into it and I immediately found that they still had nothing whatsoever.
My journey is described on my page, Why I Oppose Creation Science
(or, How I got to Here from There)
.
One of the things I discovered as a "fellow traveller" was patterns in their training materials. Chick Pubs labeled it as "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" -- did Jesus lie, was he a lunatic, or was he Lord? Of course, the obvious omission was the basic question of whether such a person as "Jesus" ever existed and whether he had actually said those things.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 41 by Delete, posted 07-01-2017 6:24 PM Delete has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 49 by Delete, posted 07-03-2017 10:01 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 44 of 55 (813892)
07-01-2017 11:08 PM
Reply to: Message 41 by Delete
07-01-2017 6:24 PM


Re: Clarification on my beliefs
Please consider this link to another message I posted here: Message 81.
Basically, there is no inherent conflict between evolution and creation. Science describes how the physical universe works and creation tells us who created that physical universe. No conflict.
But when creationists try to dictate to God how He could have Created, well then, that is where all the trouble starts.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 45 of 55 (813895)
07-01-2017 11:20 PM
Reply to: Message 41 by Delete
07-01-2017 6:24 PM


Re: Clarification on my beliefs
You describe precisely the problem that I see with creationist claims.
May I quote your post here?

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 51 of 55 (814065)
07-04-2017 2:31 AM
Reply to: Message 49 by Delete
07-03-2017 10:01 PM


Re: Clarification on my beliefs
By all means. All I ask is that you attribute my name to it.
I would never do anything less. I would even link to your own on-line resources, as I have done for others.
My site organization splits off to various topics, only one of which is "creation/evolution" -- at the bottom of pages I provide links back up the chain.
My "creation/evolution" section (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/index.html) starts with a home page in which I try to explain what it's all about. So far that has never succeeded, so I'm constantly trying to rewrite it. The position that I'm trying to argue from is very different from what everybody else is arguing from, so they misinterpret me from their own mistaken positions.
From there, I basically branch off in two directions. I have a quotes page in which I've collected quotes from various sources: http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/quotes.html. But the main linkage to the rest of the site is my links page: http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/links.html.
I've got all kinds of stuff on my links page. I started the whole thing off as a way to link to content that I had uploaded to CompuServe in the late 1980's. So there's a CompuServe depository that I post, but then there's also what I had researched post-CompuServe.
And I discovered Christians and creationists opposing "creation science", so I posted about them. A major influence was Glenn R. Morton. When I started learning about "creation science" circa 1981 and found that their claims were completely bogus, I simplistically assumed that they simply did not know that simple fact and would cleave to truth once they learned the truth. IOW, I had forgotten almost all my fundamentalist Christian training from the Jesus Freak Movement. Instead, any idea that did not conform to their narrow YEC theology could not even be considered.
Just as an aside, I also began to realize that most creationists showing up in forums were just parroting what they had been told and had no idea what they were talking about, so when you tried to actually discuss their claims with them (which is what I would always try to do), they would immediately become defensive and abusive and whatever else it took to break the connection.
Glenn R. Morton was a BA Physics who had become a YEC and studied with the ICR graduate school. In the bleak job market for BA Physics graduates, he went to work for a petroleum exploration company. In that position, he hired on several ICR geology graduates. In the Q&S section of a 1986 presentation to the International Conference on Creationism, he asked John Morris of the ICR how old the earth is. John Morris replied, "If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning." (it's on my quotes page) That is when Glenn R. Morton described the experiences of those ICR-trained geologists who all suffered "profound crises of faith" when confronted on a daily basis with rock-hard geological evidence that they had been taught did not exist and could not exist or else "Scripture has no meaning."
My Links section used to explicitly include a "Selected Creationists" section. Now it's more implicit with Dr. Allan H. Harvey's essays, Ed, Carl Drews, and Glenn R. Morton.
And there was also Bill Morgan, a local creationist activist. An atheist acquaintance had encountered him through a pages-long diatribe, to which I responded point-by-point -- basically it was a poor-man's reproduction of Chick Pub's "Big Daddy?". All that Bill Morgan ever responded with was that one single name on a quote was wrong.
That started a 20-year email correspondence. That resulted in a long series of him lying about everything and anything, including vicious personal lies from him. All of which thoroughly condemn all Christians in the eyes of his victims.
ABE:
Of course, one could protest, declaring him to be that "one bad apple", Christians aren't perfect, don't condemn us all because of one bad experience, etc. True enough, except that he's not the only "bad apple", but rather most of the creationists we encounter behave like him; he's just one of the more extreme examples.
But the main problem that I see is that the creationist and fundamentalist communities not only tolerate creationist misconduct and dishonesty, but they actually encourage it.
Edited by dwise1, : Added to last sentence, followed by ABE section

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