As big or small as they need to be. That's how they cheat the system.
Just as God could have created the universe with whatever false "history" he wanted, including having created it only five minutes ago with all our false memories complete and intact of things that never actually happened.
Just out of curiosity, is that a real decillion (please note your spelling error -- double "l" not single) or the downsized US version?
Is that one-million10 (ie, (106)10 = 1060)? Or a mere 1033, slightly more than the square root of a real decillion?
The issue is the difference between long and short scales. It is also covered on YouTube; eg, Numberphile's "How big is a billion?":
Yes, it's British, but they're more aware of the issue than Americans are since they switched from the long scale to the short scale in 1974 in order to eliminate the confusion of talking money with us, much to the never-ending irritation of their curmudgeons (whose tenacity is surpassed only by Scots bearing a grudge). It's also the reason why when I use "billion" on one of my pages (eg, when discussing Hovind's solar mass loss claim) I specify that I'm talking about 109 and not 1012.
The names for the large numbers were devised based on the long scale raising one million (106) to a power and then using the name of that power to create the large number name. Hence, a billion is a million squared, a trillion is a million cubed, etc. Namely, each step up to the next higher number is by a factor of one million (ie, a billion is a million millions).
One of the reforms of the French Revolution (besides adopting the metric system (succeeded) and decimal time (failed)) was to create the short scale in which each step up the next number is by a factor of one thousand, such that a billion is a thousand millions and a trillion is a thousand billions.
For what it's worth, the short scale failed in France and they switched back to the long scale. But while they were on it, they convinced us to also switch to the short scale and we stayed on it. And then in 1974 we corrupted the UK as well.
BTW, there are names for those middle numbers which are a thousand; eg:
milliard = 1000 millions, also "a thousand million"
billiard = 1000 billions, also "a thousand billion"
trilliard = 1000 trillions, also "a thousand trillion"
For example, in the Doctor Who episode, Silence in the Library, the Doctor expresses a billion as "one million million", I guess to accommodate those British curmudgeons who complain about the devaluation of a billion. Excellent two-parter, BTW, streaming on Max.
Read my web page, Number Names, for a more complete discussion and more examples. And OBTW, there are no such numbers as zillion, jillion, baziillion, or gajillion.
Bottom line: It is a far better idea to use scientific notation instead of ambiguous number names.
For a sanity check, of course. Or a reality check, if you would rather. When you have your head buried so deep in musings about the supernatural, it's easy for you to get lost and to lose perspective, to fixate on the unimportant or to take a wrong turn and not realize it.
In USAF tech school, a fellow student (obviously single) enrolled in flight school to get his private pilot license. He told us that the first time up he was concentrating so much on the instruments that his instructor had to tell him to pull his head out ... of the cockpit.
In the Navy Reserve, I completed many NRCCs (Naval Reserve Correspondence Courses), including the Quartermaster (QM) course, NAVEDTRA 14338. The QM assists the Navigation Officer; when the Signalman (SM) rating (AKA "Flags") was disestablished in 2003, it was absorbed into the QM rating. One of a QM's duties while underway would be to periodically get a fix on the ship's location -- similarly, in aircraft the navigator is the busiest member of the crew (I once worked with Leo, a WWII USAAF navigator, who had a few war stories; eg, they were transporting some nurses, one of whom was trying to put the make on him, but he hadn't been able to get a fix for so long that he was far too preoccupied to notice).
I've described this here before. Basically, you set a course using dead reckoning which simply applying simple kinematics: you know where you are starting out from and you can calculate where you will be on a specific heading at a specific speed at the end of a specific amount of time. The problem is that are factors that will throw you off your course (eg, errors in keeping your heading, wind using your superstructure as a sail, ocean currents) and cause you to end up somewhere other than where you calculated you would be. Therefore, the QM will periodically step outside and take a fix of the ship's actual position which he will then take as the starting point for the next dead reckoning leg.
When performing dead reckoning through supernatural space, there is no way to ever get a fix on your actual position.
You need to keep from getting yourself lost, but other theists are just as susceptible to the same problem, only they are lost on their own different courses and cannot help each other. You need the help of somebody who's not suffering from the same problem.
And if nothing else, we can get you to ask questions that should be asked. Which is supposed to be the real function of religion, according to my minister: not to provide "answers" (which cannot be questions, one would add), but rather to get us to ask the right questions.
I don't know what the scholars say, I don't have any interest what the scholars say.
He means the apologists whom he chooses because they say what he wants to hear. That's what apologetics is: first decide your conclusion and then find "evidences" (I used that apologetics term deliberately) to support your conclusion, distorting those that don't quite do the job or just flat out fabricating them. We see that all the time in creationism.
What I think has no affect on whether you can present a model explaining how Jesus created the Universe, you know the title of your thread where you chicken out once again, surprise, surprise.
Again, apologetics. In this case it looks very much like The Two Model Approach (TMA) which is the foundational basis for "scientific creationism". Basically at the end of a very busy evening of duty (in a somewhat chaotic environment):
Posit that there are two-and-only-two "mutually exclusive" "models" for origins: the "Creation Model" and the atheistic "Evolution Model."
One of the obvious problems with this is that evolution (ie, biological evolution as we all understand it, but creationists refuse to) is in fact not contrary to the idea of Divine Creation (which creationists also refuse to understand). So they are positing a conflict which in fact does not exist.
Into the "Creation Model" you put young-earth creationism and into the "Evolution Model" you put everything else, "including most of the world's religions, ancient and modern" (Dr. Henry Morris, past President of the ICR, Father of "Flood Geology", cofounder of "scientific creationism", and master debater (take care to not delete that "de-", or not if it suits your fancy)).
Part of the problem is that there are a far greater number of actual models than the TMA will allow. Just the existence of roughly 288,000 different "creation models" based on that same number of different gods in human history (and possibly also prehistory), all of which the creationists dump unceremoniously in the "evolution model", is decisive evidence that there are far more than just two "mutually exclusive" "models".
Despite the TMA's efforts to lump all those non-"Creation Model" ideas into the "Evolution Model", that is a deception. Every single "non-'Creation Model'" needs to be evaluated separately. To put it in colloquial terms, "There are a thousand different ideas of how this should work. Disproving this one idea only eliminates that idea, but does nothing to eliminate the other 999 ideas."
IOW, each and every idea in the "Evolution Model" must be addressed and disproven in order to disprove the "Evolution Model".
Please note that since most of those ideas in the "Evolution Model" come from "most of the world's religions, ancient and modern", they are of supernatural nature which is immune to testing and disproving. Hence, as per the TMA, it is impossible to disprove the "Evolution Model".
Then use the TMA to set up a false dichotomy (AKA "false dilemma") that seeks to "prove creation" solely by "disproving evolution".
In the case of a true dichotomy, such a proof can be useful. And indeed I have seen it used in several math classes as proof by contradiction: basically, assume the opposite and show that to be impossible.
But that can only work within a very narrow set of conditions:
Oh frak it!
OK, it's late and proceeding through the logic will take so long that I will greatly exceed my not-even-allowable intake of post-stressful-duty tequila.
The bottom line is that creationism attempts to "prove creation" solely by "disproving evolution". The "logical" basis for that is, again, the use of a true dichotomy applied in a proof by contradiction. But they don't actually do that.
Remember that "scientific creationism" and "The Two Model Approach" are part and parcel of a deliberately crafted deception whose purpose is to deceive both the courts and the general public.
Their "Creation Model" is the only part of the TMA that is actually defined, but they also must never divulge it to the public nor to the courts -- refer to my page based directly on an ICR publication which describes their creation model. Pure YEC, through and through. But if they were to ever directly present it, then that would give away their entire game. So they don't.
In all their "two model", "balanced treatment" public school materials, they never ever directly present their "Creation Model", but rather are extremely vague about some "unnamed Creator", etc. Yet at the same time, they present the "evolution model" as being "atheistic".
Indeed, the only actually defined "model" in the TMA is the "Creation Model" , which is the standard for consigning the ideas that disagree with it to the "Evolution Model", "including most of the world's religions, ancient and modern."
(picking up on this line of thought the next morning)
OK, creationists' "Two Model Approach" is complete and utter bullshit.
But it makes me wonder whether the TMA isn't just an instance of standard apologetics bullshit that is far more pervasive and pernicious. Instead of being something particular to creationist false and deceptive argumentation, could this be typical of the fundie approach to everything?
To summarize what the TMA does, creationists use it to "prove creation" solely by attacking their strawman "evolution model", thus never ever having to present any evidence for creation, never ever having to argue for creation, never ever having to support creation, never ever having to even present creation. That is why they constantly attack "evolution" (whatever that is supposed to mean coming out of their lying mouths) and never ever even consider attempting to support their own position.
And that is what we're seeing here in ICANT's approach to "proving" his assertion by constructing a false dichotomy and doing nothing other than attacking his strawman "opposing position" based on his own ignorance. He has no evidence for his assertion, nor even any kind of model or argument for it. All he has is a strawman to attack leaving his assertion as "the only alternative."
So you continue to refuse to do anything to support your claim.
You continue to insist that "disproving" some pitifully nonsensical strawman idiocy intended to represent some "opposing view" is supposed to "prove" your beyond-massively important bit of nonsense.
HOW again?
That is nothing more than creationism's "Two Model Approach" yet again. Complete and utter stupid bullshit.
Do you have an actual argument or not?
If not, then please just simply fuck off, already.
Consider the Robin Williams joke (paraphrased here):
Robin Williams paraphrased:Here's proof the God has a sense of humor. He gave Man two heads, but not enough blood to use both of them at the same time.
That second head is of course the penis.
But that joke does illustrate something that's been found to happen in the brain. Basically, we use the neo-cortex for rational thought and the limbic system for emotional reaction (which includes the amygdala which handles strong emotions like fear and which has been found to be enlarged (and hence hyperactive) in the brains of "conservatives" like MAGAts). Medical scans have shown that when we experience strong emotions like fear or anger, blood flow to the neo-cortex shuts down and is redirected to the limbic system. IOW, when we see red then we have stopped thinking and cannot act rationally.
So then, yes, emotions are antithetical to rational thought and hence to critical thought.
You fancied yourself a missionary to the godless evolutionists, but if we don't already believe you without evidence, you won't show us the evidence?
That is exactly what he's doing, because that is precisely how they roll.
Two decades ago I was on a Google "origins" forum where a creationist inadvertently revealed their secret strategy; that was a real epiphany for me. After decisively refuting a claim he made (the old sea-salt claim, as I recall) such that he himself admitted that his claim was false, I asked him why creationists have so little to support their position (well, nothing actually) that they have to resort to such unconvincing false claims, to which he replied (from memory): "You only find them unconvincing because you are not yet convinced."
That means that they don't care about the evidence, they don't care about the truth, and they don't even want to convince us about anything. All they care about is convincing themselves and keeping themselves convinced.
I've posted this before from Quora, but it's been a year so here it is again:
quote:Why do people get angry when I try to share the word of God with them? I only do it because I care about them deeply and don't want them to end up in hell. I feel like some people avoid me because of this. Is there any way to get through to them?
by Doug Robertson, studied at University of Maine Updated Dec 11 2018
The entire process is not what you think it is.
It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn't about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can't leave yours.
If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn't already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools.
On the other hand, it is extremely effective at creating a deep tribal feeling among its own members.
The rejection they receive is actually more important than the few people they convert. It causes them to feel a level of discomfort around the people they attempt to talk to. These become the "others". These uncomfortable feelings go away when they come back to their congregation, the "Tribe".
If you take a good look at the process it becomes fairly clear. In most cases, the religious person starts out from their own group, who is encouraging and supportive. They are then sent out into the harsh world where people repeatedly reject them. Mainly because they are trained to be so annoying.
These brave witnesses then return from the cruel world to their congregation where they are treated like returning heroes. They are now safe. They bond as they share their experiences of reaching out to the godless people to bring them the truth. They share the otherness they experience.
Once again they will learn that the only place they are accepted is with the people who think as they do. It isn't safe to leave the group. The world is your enemy, but we love you.
This is a pain reward cycle that is a common brainwashing technique. The participants become more and more reliant on the "Tribe" because they know that "others" reject them.
Mix in some ritualized chanting, possibly a bit of monotonous repetition of instructions, add a dash of fear of judgment by an unseen, but all-powerful entity who loves you if you do as you are told and you get a pretty powerful mix.
Sorry, I have absolutely no wish to participate in someone's brainwashing ritual.
That's all that ICANT is doing with this topic: convincing himself. He has no intention nor interest on convincing us about anything, rather he is only interested in keeping himself deceived.
BTW, that creationist on that Google forum who admitted that his claim was false. A couple months later he used it again on a new forum member as if he had never admitted that it was false. That was one of several instances of creationists engaging in deliberate lying. Of course I called him on it and of course he ran away immediately.
Also, when I joined that forum it had a few administrators on either side of the issue. Then they started leaving until we were left with only one admin who was a creationist. Immediately he established his draconian rule in which he would arbitrarily suspend anyone who would challenge any creationist claim. Compared to that, Percy is a saint, so when creationists here complain about him all I can do is roll my eyes.
But that does not negate the fact that ICANT is just bullshitting us, jerking us around as he has a nasty habit of doing.
Drunk or not, we reach a point of "Das reicht!" ("I have had it up to here with that nonsense!"). He needs to either shit or get off the pot.
And if you think that's disrespect towards him, I assure you that he is getting all the respect that he deserves, more even.
And as for his supporting your Jesus, he is being very effective in filling us with disgust. If he's a shining example of Christianity, then he confirms our decision to leave that sorry excuse for a religion.
Edited by dwise1, : Improved translation of "Das reicht!" (literally, "That reaches!")
So is your disgust with the religion itself or is it with creationist believers?
Is there any separation? Consult the Matthew 7:20 Test. By their fruits you will know them. A wicked tree bears wicked fruit, but a good tree can only bear good fruit. Christianity has most certainly born much wicked fruit.
Of course, Jesus as depicted in the Gospels was applying an absolutist test that no religion could possibly ever pass, not even the purest form of Christianity (should such an impossible form actually exist). But it's still good for throwing it back into the teeth of stupid fundies. Especially when they act as if they have never ever read that part of the Gospels.
It's not just creationists, though they are among the worst of religious hypocrites. Even more dangerous are the Christian nationalist types (who have gone by different labels since the 1980's, though a current very descriptive label is "Christo-Fascist"). Your bias towards associating my disgust for that religion with creationists is because of the focus of this forum. Rather, my disgust is because of the great evils that believers are zealous to commit (not just willing to commit, but rather foaming at the mouth in their zeal to commit those atrocities).
Please remember that I am an engineer by my very nature: my first and foremost question is always, "How does that work?" Very little of my thought process is based on ideology, since I know that ideologies are flawed and not subject to examination, testing, or correction.
BTW, a couple days ago I changed the occupation field of my profile to: Intelligent Designer (ret.)
So I do recognize the functions that religion can serve within society and even for individuals. Sadly, it's a matter of trying to balance what little good and what massive damage, especially in the case of Christianity.
(Though i will admit that I *do like* to bust your balls a bit about your drinking! )
This past year I came across a quote attributed to Hemingway (from memory):
quote:Write while drunk, then edit while sober.
Alcohol does help the words flow in the mind, unlike cannabis. Though the older process of typewritten text getting published took much longer, providing a buffer to allow for more deliberation before posting. Computers shorten that time too much.
It's almost Darwinian in a way. You can generate a lot of text which would then go through the selective sieve of editing the next morning.
I remember the joyful liberation provided by a word processor program. I hated writing in school because the entire process was too laborious. First you write your first draft. Then you rewrite it as your second draft. Then the whole thing again as the third draft. And the fourth, etc. Writing and rewriting and rewriting over and over again. In order to avoid that, I tried to do all that work in my head before even starting to write the first draft. As a result, I could never get any writing done. Even with my jr. high school skill of touch typing.
So, in 1984 I had access to a text editor at work and I was taking classes at night, basically cashing in on my GI Bill bennies (I had enlisted a few months before the old GI Bill, the really good one, was replaced). I had about an hour after work before I had to leave for class, so I typed out the notes from my research into the text editor. Copy and paste, edit, reorganize, etc. Within half an hour I had my 2/3 page assignment completed, something that earlier would have taken my more than a week to accomplish. I was sold on the technology.
Actually, my primary writing tool is a text editor, not a word processor. Word processors are nice for formatting, but a text editor is the Swiss Army knife. I remember on a C Programming forum (now defunct) where someone had typed a simple sample program and could not get it to compile, rather it kept throwing syntax errors about the quotation marks. He posted the source code and my immediate question to him was, "Did you create that source file with a word processor?" Sure enough, he had. The word processor used special characters for the open and close quotes, whereas the compiler expected both to be the same as well as being an entirely different character.
NoteTab Pro is what I've settled on for decades now. Every time I get a new computer, I install it.
I've primarily only worked with PCs. First I upgraded from my TI-99 to an IBM XT clone, the difference between night and day (my original background was as an Electronic Computer System Repairman (AFSC 30574, from which I transitioned in the Navy Reserve to Data Systems Technician (DS), hence one of my email addresses, DSC30574) which led to my Computer Science degree while on active duty (school computer was an IBM S/370; I was fluent in reading hex dumps in EBCDIC to a degree far greater I ever could when I had to transition to ASCII, even the S/360 assembly was far easier to disassembly on sight than Intel 8086 code) since the MS-DOS utilities opened access to all levels of the computer, something that required special third-party programs on the TI-99. The point of that is that I was very comfortable working close to the metal such that I tended towards embedded programming.
My first two civilian jobs were with defense contractors with the first had me using a Data General minicomputer and the second a VAX11. My third civilian job had me working on a greenhouse control system controlled by an XT running MS-DOS, so I learned to exploit the shit out of every possible feature in DOS and the BIOS. From that point on, every work station I worked on was a PC, the later ones with Windows.
At home, we stuck with PCs since we were struggling to get by and a Mac was too expensive. We did work with the first generation of Macs at Hughes Aircraft for creating presentation slides that combined graphics and text; I loved that so much that I bought Windows 1.0 which was a disappointment (it only supported about 4 printers, none of which was mine). My next exposure to Windows was 3.1, which was actually useful. My experiences with later versions of Mac were rather problematic and left a bad taste.
I did the UNIX classes at the local JC and even earned their UNIX certificate. I set up a Linux box at work, but most of our work was still with Windows. My favorite software on the PC were the GNU Linux utilities for DOS, but they were 16-bit and no longer worked when Windows went to 64-bit.
When I started at my last job which lasted 22 years and from which I retired, we used a DOS version of vi in the lab computers, so I learned that editor (that was before my UNIX classes). But I never encountered emacs.
With NoteTab Pro I have multiple tabs so I can keep many files open at the same time and switch between them easily. I even use it to create web pages, though I do so by writing HTML by hand.
Of course, Jesus as depicted in the Gospels was applying an absolutist test that no religion could possibly ever pass, not even the purest form of Christianity (should such an impossible form actually exist). But it's still good for throwing it back into the teeth of stupid fundies. Especially when they act as if they have never ever read that part of the Gospels.
IOW, that test, which Christians believe came out of Jesus' own mouth, is unrealistic. Yet Christians (not I) believe that it must be taken literally, especially the fundies. They will apply it, but only to others and never to themselves, which hypocrisy is the reason I keep throwing it back at them, as I clearly said.
Actually, I knew one fundamentalist who applied it to his own religion, though that was before we met. My friend at church (UU), Gary, whose story I've told here several times. He now describes himself as "a complete atheist and thorough humanist" and that he is now far more spiritually fulfilled than he ever was as a Christian.
Christianity as a religion has indeed borne quite a bit of wicked fruit. My focus, however, is on Christians as individuals and not on Christianity as one giant Groupthink.
There's always the matter of people being themselves regardless of their religion: good people will always tend to be good and bad people will always tend to be bad. Indeed, bad people who join a good organization will tend to use that organization as cover for their misdeeds.
So when we find those "bad apples" in a religion, why are they there?
Is it just the luck of the draw and the religion itself has no effect on their numbers? When recruiting from the general population, we would expect to find roughly the same percentages of certain types in the religion as in the general population. Of course, other factors keep this ideal case from appearing.
Does the religion attract those bad people? That could be either deliberate (eg, a sexual predator seeking to exploit access to victims) or despite original good intentions (eg, they want to become good and the religion claims to be able to do that, but once in they discover ways to exploit the system -- eg, a local creationist uses "because I love Jesus" as cover for his pathological lying, calculated deception, and abusive conduct).
Does the religion actually create bad people? Does its teachings and practices actually groom members to become abusers, deceivers, bigots, fascists, or traitors (eg, what we currently see rearing its ugly multiple heads in Christian Nationalism)? Does the religion give people the justification and excuse to express their worse impulses?
Christianity is supposed to make people better, yet we repeatedly see it making them worse. And stridently so as they proclaim that they're committing their atrocities for Christ. And their "Brothers in Christ" provide them with a church community that reinforces and nurtures their worse tendencies and motivates them to sally forth to wage culture war against everyone else.
So the Christian religion is not a neutral factor here.
My attitude towards philosophy:Dammit, Jim! I'm an engineer, not a philosopher!
In the definition and redefining and argumentum ad dictionario (ie, an informal fallacy which I coined standing for relying on dictionary definitions for term), it becomes very clear that the sides of many of these conversations use words completely differently:
Scientific types, including engineers, use words to describe the world and how we find things to work. As a result, we must often create and adjust new definitions for describing something new. Of course, our newly created definitions are accompanied by explanations of those definitions: basically, "Here's this new thing we found. Let's call it by this name which kind of describes it and here is how we define that new name. Now let's discuss it."
Non-scientific types use words to redefine the world. They use definitions as long-established authorities which cannot be questioned even though they are very arbitrary. Practitioners include philosophers, theologians, apologists, and lawyers. Basically: "Here's the result I want, so let's see if I can find some definition that can get me that result. Or one that I can bend enough to get there. Accept it and don't you dare try to question it! Or think about it too much."
Though I may have given philosophers shrift that is too short. My overall opinion was changed by a video by our favorite deity, Mr. Deity (AKA Brian Dalton) in his Way of the Mister series.
Circa Time Mark 4:40, he points out a major difference between philosophy and apologetics. My summary (you can reference the horse's mouth at that time mark) is:
Philosophy's basic goal is to work out how to seek truth, which includes how to think, how to evaluate ideas and arguments, etc. Philosophy supports developing processes for starting from premises and developing them into logical chain of conclusions. IOW, you proceed from a starting point and arrive at a conclusion.
Apologetics takes the exact opposite approach: start with your conclusion and then cherry-pick whatever "evidences" (a strictly apologetics term) you can find to support your conclusion and ignore any and all actual evidence that contradicts your conclusion.
At 5:45, he says that philosophy is not about defending a position (which is all that apologetics is about), but rather philosophy is about challenging what we presume to know so that we can go on to discover new things. Which is the opposite of what Christians try to do through apologetics, described earlier as a practice of "prostituting philosophy." "Christian philosopher is almost an oxymoron."
Though actually the video I had seen was something of a "Part One" to that video, MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm Leaving Atheism!
Or not. Viewing it again, this one is an exercise in philosophobabble (similar to Star Trek's technobabble (listen closely to Geordi LaForge some time), only here for philosophy).
Watch it just for fun!
Edited by Admin, : Embed video.
Edited by dwise1, : slight typo correction, plus added a concluding statement to "Apologetics takes the exact opposite approach" for sake of parallelism: "Accept it and don't you dare try to question it! Or think about it too much."
Mormons are Christians! Just because it's not YOUR Jesus does not give you authority to deny that fact. I suppose that you also deny that Catholics and other denominations are also not Christians, like Faith always did (and candle2 also, as I seem to recall).
Some drink the dogma of another belief. Some become atheists and join atheist clubs. Some make videos.
Same with fundies once the scales have fallen from their eyes.
So what's your point, Self-Appointed Arbiter of What is Christian?
Here is a deconversion testimonial from a few decades back.
It's the testimonial of a life-long Baptist boy who went to college and started dating a Catholic girl. He really cared for her a lot and was saddened that she was going to Hell for not being Baptist (because only Baptists are saved).
Then one day she broke down in tears. She explained to him that she really cared for him and was saddened that he was going to Hell for not being Catholic (because only Catholics are saved).
That woke him up! So he went to the college library and asked for the most complete history of Christianity that they had. The librarian asked him several times if he was really sure he wanted to read it and he insisted that he did, so she handed him this thick book, a complete history of Christianity. He read it in a month, at the end of which he wasn't sure if God existed, but if He did then he certainly couldn't be Christian.
That was his story and I related it as accurately as I can remember it (30 to 60 years ago is easy to remember; ten minutes ago not so much).
A fellow diner at two monthly skeptics and atheists breakfast gatherings has a similar wake-up story. He was Mormon and on his mission when he got into a conversation with a Jehovah's Witness missionary. He challenge with a "How do you know that you are right?" and got the same answer that he would have given to that same question, "Because I was guided by the Holy Spirit."
That had always seemed odd to me. All these different forms of Christianity (estimated at 45,000 in the world, 200 in the US), each one thinking that they are right and all the others got it wrong (yes, I know that is an oversimplification, but am I wrong?), and the reason they know that they have it right is through the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit does not seem to be very reliable nor consistent, since he gave each of the 45,000 different versions of Christianity a different story.
To quote the concluding punchline from a series of creationist videos: "Kinda makes you think, don't it?"
You need to show some respect to the Creator. ... yet, you refuse to show Him any appreciation.
That's really rich coming from a creationist who denies the Creation and tried to disprove it, hence denying the Creator in favor of your false creationist theology.
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