Confession of a former christian

You might appreciate the conclusion of a Unitarian Universalist call to prayer:

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... knowing that prayer does not change things, but rather prayer changes us and we are the agents of change.

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In my case, our family didn't attend church so I grew up going to church with our next-door neighbors. Around the age of 10 after a Billy Graham revival I was baptized and after a year I decided that I should take a more active role, buckle down, and learn what I was supposed to be believing. So I started reading the Bible from beginning to end. Didn't make it very far (I don't remember, but I'm sure I didn't reach Genesis 19). I was applying a nave literalist approach and the more incredible I found it. And so I finally had to decide that since I couldn't believe any of what I thought I was supposed to believe, I would have to leave. Which I did.That was about 45 years ago and I've been an atheist ever since. In high school I started to learn more of the history of Christianity, which made me more thankful for my decision. Going into college, the Jesus Freak movement broke out and, since a number of friends converted, I became something of a "fellow traveller" (McCarthy-era reference to those non-Communists who nevertheless associated with Communists). In that status, I was exposed to a lot of their teachings, most all of which made me ever more thankful that I was an atheist.I was first exposed to "creation science" at that time (circa 1970) in the form of two claims (the living mollusk carbon-dated to thousands of years old and the story of the NASA computer finding Joshua's Lost Day) and immediately saw them both to be ridiculous and rejected the whole idea. The next time I encountered "creation science" was in 1981 at which time I was surprised that it was still around and, thinking that there might be something to it after all, I started studying it. It didn't take very long to discover that all it had going for it was lies and deception. After more study, I entered into creation/evolution discussion and ended up being very active on CompuServe (some of the essays on my web site I had originally posted on CompuServe). At first I thought that creationists just didn't realize the truth about their claims and that, once educated, their Christian values of seeking and serving the truth would kick in. Instead, they fought fiercely against the truth, resorting to conduct that one would navely call "un-Christian". And, from these fruits, we see that their Christian theology fails the Matthew 7:20 test.So I see my decision of 45 years ago confirmed almost daily. Even though it was arrived at for the wrong reasons, it was the right decision.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR

An excellent course for a parent-to-be is developmental psychology. Early in our marriage, my much-later-ex-wife had taken it for her elementary-education degree and recommended I do the same, which I did.One chapter of the textbook covered moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is eventually to reach the stage where the person considers the consequences of one's actions. But a much earlier stage is reached at a very young age: "rules-based morality". Where an authority sets arbitrary rules and the right-or-wrong is determined by whether or not the rules are followed and all responsibility for the consequences belong to the authority who sets the rules. As infamous experiments show (where adult subjects were instructed by an authority figure to administer potentially lethal electrical shocks to other subjects, even after said subjects no longer responded (ie, were probably dead or near death -- ie, after having informed the subject administering the shocks of a heart condition), this kind of morality allows the followers to commit unconscionable acts so long as the authority figure takes the resposibility for the consequences.So if God made the rules and somebody dies, or worse, because of it, then it's not my responsibility but rather God's. He made the rules, after all. Ich befolgte bloss meine Befehle (the classic Nrnberg defense: "I was only following orders." Which is an inadmissible defense). And which is sadly where too many Christians are trapped, at the moral level of a five-year-old.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

Bimbo!!!
(I had one CO, a software consultant and conservative Christian, who had no inkling at all of that software cultural reference (the Hindi software geek in Short Circuit) and responded to me with "What did you just call me?" Also, after a consulting stint in New England, he kept going on and on about how many National Public Radio stations there were in New England and I kept thinking how totally cool that was, until I finally realized that he was complaining about it.)That is precisely the study I was referring to.

There's an acronym you're going to encounter very soon: PRATT. It stands for "point refuted a thousand times". It is applied to the typical proven-to-be-false claims that are posted ad nauseum on countless creationist sites and that newly arrived creationist gather and post here, often verbatim (ie, they just copy-and-paste that garbage).The truth of the matter is that those creationist claims have been around for decades and were exposed as false very shortly thereafter. And yet creationists continue to circulate and regurgitate those false claims despite the truth. This is because the older falsified writings continue to be published unchanged, such that newer writers just lift the false claims from them and spread the lies further, and new creationists arrive all the time (as in "a new sucker is born every minute") and gobble that garbage up as if it's the newest thing, even though it had been refuted before they were even born.From my links page (No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/links.html) where I recommend the Talk.Origins Archive site (TalkOrigins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy):

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This web-site is an excellent source of information of specific "creation science" claims and why they are wrong. It is somehow connected -- I don't know precisely how -- with the talk.origins newsgroup. Just about everything that there is on the subject can be found there, including a list of messages. Includes a search engine.

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This site is an invaluable resource for both sides of the issue -- especially for those who want to use creation science claims, eg for proselytizing or for winning arguments. Pro-creation-science resources are notorious for recycling old dead claims and notoriously remiss in informing you of the history of a claim, of what objections and criticisms and refutations have been raised against it, or even whether the claim had been retracted by its originator. Instead of charging in over-confidently with "brand-new evidence" that you think will blow your opponent away, you'd be better off knowing what your opponents know, that that "brand-new evidence" is actually several years old and was found to be utterly bogus. I have seen it happen and it is not a pretty sight [1]. Knowing what your weaknesses are is part of Sun Tzu's advice to "know yourself."

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[1] Here is a true story to illustrate that point. About twelve years ago at The City mall (now completely rebuilt as The Block) in Orange, California, creationist Scott Alexander was hosting a series of amateur-night creation/evolution debates in which the members of the audience were invited to get up and make presentations. One young creationist (I would judge him to have been about 18 to 21 years old) got up and announced that he had some new hard science that would blow the evolutionists away: the speed of light has been slowing down! The pro-evolution half of the audience immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter. That claim of Setterfield's had already been known to them for a decade, it had been refuted many times, and they started to explain to the poor hapless creationist exactly why that claim was false. He didn't know what had hit him.

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Another link is to an article written Answers in Genesis which warns of the dangers of using false claims to proselytize: What About Carl Baugh? No webpage found at provided URL: http://paleo.cc/paluxy/whatbau.htm
BTW, I contacted Answers in Genesis directly about this article and they verified that it's exactly what Glen Kuban says it is.

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Which also explains the placement of plant fossils as well? As soon as those more advanced plants saw the Flood coming, they just pulled up their roots and ran for high ground, right? Huh? What makes you think that "all that" had to have developed at the same time?Would that be something like the fact that amphibians and reptiles have three-chambered hearts while mammals, which evolved from reptiles, have four-chambered hearts? Would you claim that with such a big change everything would have had to have fallen precisely into place within one generation? Would you want to bite on that one? Please disregard the trip wire set to spring the trap.
(HINT: the crocodile) The same basic claim. Please explain just what your claim is and what your assumptions are. Explain your claim, please. Are you trying to say that something spectacular will happen when you mix hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone together without a chemical inhibitor? Like, that they would spontaneously explode? Do please tell us.Really, do tell us. Because I have a great story to tell.OBTW, it's called a "bombardier beetle". Knowing the correct name will help you to seek the truth. Well, at least you got one thing right.Edited by dwise1, : added HR tag within quote to separate the footnoteEdited by dwise1, : correcting his misnaming of the bombardier beetle

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR

Go right ahead and open another topic for that purpose. But I would request that you try to write an intelligible OP for it? So far you've been writing jumbled messes. Though once you seemed to actually be writing in English, but it was still somewhat of a mess.I informed you about PRATTs because those claims that you were dropping were PRATTs. At least now when our response is "PRATT!", then you'll know what we're saying.To read up on "Bomby", start here and follow the links: CB310.1: Bombardier Beetles and Explosions.
It's part of an index of PRATTs (though I have only seen that acronym used on this forum). You should peruse it and start to discover the truth about the creationist claims you've been fed.It started with Gish's claim in the 1970's that the bombardier beetle couldn't have evolved because everything had to have been in place -- kind of like Behe's equally false "irreducible complexity" claims -- because hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone will explode spontaneously when mixed together. Circa 1980 in their two-model class at San Diego State University, Thwaites and Awbrey demonstrated before Gish and the class that that was not true. Gish responded by saying that he had been misled by his source, and yet he and the ICR continued to use the claim, just very slightly modified.I had started studying creation science around 1981 and first started discussing it around 1985 with a creationist, Charles, at work. I started with the question about whether lying was condoned by Christian teachings and he told me that it's not and why did I ask. So I told him the story about Gish and Bomby and he was shocked, because Gish was his hero. Later, we both went to a big debate featuring Gish & H. Morris vs Thwaites & Awbrey. And on just about table there they were selling books about "Bomby", all of which contained the same false claims that even Gish himself had had to admit were false. Charles dearly did not want to see that those books were there, but it was unavoidable. Though he was far more shaken at end of the debate: all this time his religious leaders and the creationist had been telling him about their having mountains of evidence for creation -- evidence that would just literally blow the "evolutionists" away -- , and yet with his very own eyes and ears he saw the top-most creationists in the world ducking and dodging and doing everything they could to avoid presenting any of that evidence. We lost track of each other shortly after that (the project ended), but then I bumped into him 5 years later. He had gone on to study creation science more completely and to check their claims. He had ended up thoroughly disgusted with creationists and wanted nothing more to do with them.As I had described earlier in this topic, I stopped being a Christian when I started reading the Bible in a navely literalist manner and very quickly found that I couldn't believe any of it, so I simply left.But one thing that guarantees that I will never return to the fold -- especially the fold of those who so zealously proselytize -- is "creation science". Not just because they would require me to believe something that is so false, but also because of their witness that I have been the recipient of for decades on numerable independent occasions. Their determined opposition to truthfulness and their open hatred of the truth. Their "un-Christian" conduct (though many would deem such conduct to be quite Christian) and open hypocrisy. They prove to be the evil fruit described in the Matthew 7:20 test, through which they proved that their religion is a false one.PS
The thing about the reptilian 3-chamber heart, the mammalian 4-chamber heart, and the crocodile. I've encountered a creationist arguing that the reptile-mammal transition is impossible because none of the transitional forms could have survived while the 3-chamber heart was slowly turning into a 4-chambered heart.And yet the crodocile does it within its own life-time. It's born with a three-chamber heart and as it grow to full size the single ventricle divides into two chambers, quite literally without skipping a beat.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR

In response to your (yes, that was the entire post)
I wrote: What part of that do you not understand?I certainly cannot open the other topic because I have absolutely no idea what your post meant. "Wrong" about what? I asked you for more information about your PRATT claims. I also informed you of what a PRATT is.Only you can say what you meant by your short and cryptic post. And now this: makes even less sense.You create a new topic with an OP that actually says something. Then we'll have something to talk about.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR

Bullshit! As already demonstrated by bluegenes.Furthermore: Greek alphabet - Wikipedia:

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The Greek alphabet (Greek: ‘ ) is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was the first alphabet in the narrow sense, that is a writing system that uses a separate symbol for each vowel and consonant.[2] It is the oldest alphabetic script in continuous use today. The letters were also used to represent Greek numerals, beginning in the 2nd century BC.

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The Greek alphabet is descended from the Phoenician alphabet, and unrelated to Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, earlier writing systems for Greek.

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Time period ~800 BC to the present[1]

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Phoenician alphabet - Wikipedia:

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The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. The Phoenician alphabet is classified as an abjad in that it records only consonant sounds (with the addition of matres lectionis). However, the Greek alphabet, a descendant of Phoenician, modified the script to represent vowel phonemes as well.

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Phoenician became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was assimilated by many other cultures and evolved. Many modern writing systems thought to have descended from Phoenician cover much of the world. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts, as well as the Brhm script, the parent writing system of most modern abugidas in India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.

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History of the alphabet {Refer to the page for proper indentation and "tree structure" of descent}
Middle Bronze Age 19 c. BCE

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Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
Phoenician 14-11 c. BCE
Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
Samaritan 6 c. BCE
Aramaic 8 c. BCE
Brhm & Indic 6 c. BCE
Tibetan 7 c. CE
Khmer/Javanese 9 c. CE
Hebrew 3 c. BCE
Syriac 2 c. BCE
Arabic 4 c. CE
Pahlavi 3 c. BCE
Avestan 4 c. CE
Greek 9 c. BCE
Etruscan 8 c. BCE
Latin 7 c. BCE
Runic 2 c. CE
Gothic 3 c. CE
Armenian 405 CE
Glagolitic 862 CE
Cyrillic 10 c. CE
Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE
Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE
Ge'ez 5-6 c. BCE

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Meroitic 3 c. BCE
Ogham 4 c. CE
Hangul 1443 CE
Canadian syllabics 1840 CE
Zhuyin 1913 CE

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So you see, the Greek alphabet did indeed pre-date 300 BCE ... by at least 500 yearsIronically, it's the Hebrew alphabet that only dates back to 300 BCE.We all see how incredibly wrong you are about those things you claim that we are able to check. Guess what that tells us about those things you would claim that we cannot check.In case you are incapable of guessing, the answer is "Bullshit!"Nice witness you provide. It is a great help in the spread of atheism.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR

Bullshit!Did you even bother to look at the photo of that inscription? That is not in the Hebrew alphabet. Hello? What kind of deception are you trying to perform?We have samples of the Greek alphabet being used hundreds of years before the 300 BCE that you claim. Now we've found a source that places the origin of the Hebrew alphabet at 300 BCE. Can you produce any samples of the Hebrew alphabet that precedes that date appreciably? Your sole attempt so far failed spectacularly miserably.Remember, we're not talking about the representation of the languages by other earlier alphabets, but rather the alphabets themselves.PS
You are doing an incredibly effective job of bringing this back on-topic. The OP describes how examination of the bullshit that one's religious leaders have fed the OP all his life had led to him realizing for the bullshit that it is and thus to the decision to turn his back on it.A friend at church described how he had used to be a fervent fundamentalist Christian. And how he'd see things everyday that contradicted his beliefs, so he just turned a blind eye to them. Day after day, more and ever more. Until he no longer had the strength to continue the self-deception. So he examined his religion and applied the Matthew 7:20 test, which his religion failed. So now he describes himself as a complete atheist and thorough humanist and is much more fulfilled as such.PPS
Since I strongly feel that you will still miss the obvious and blatant truth:
If you are going to make claims to support your beliefs, then make the utmost effort to ensure that those claims are truthful.Using such transparently false claims only damages your position. Unless, of course, your purpose is to discredit those beliefs.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.Edited by dwise1, : PSEdited by dwise1, : PPS

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR