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Author Topic:   Well this is awkward... Used to be a YEC
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 12 of 358 (645181)
12-24-2011 4:41 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by agent_509
12-23-2011 9:30 PM


My own personal history:
Raised nominally Protestant. My own family did not attend church (didn't find out until my college years that my father had grown up disgusted with the rampant hypocrisy he observed, but attended until he was 21 for his mother's sake), but I attended with the neighbors. To this day, I don't even know what denomination we were a part of; the church has since disbanded.
Baptized into that church around the age of 11 or 12, hence circa 1962.
A year later, I decided that I needed to get serious, so I started to read the Bible from the beginning. Apparently before I had gotten to Lot's daughters getting him drunk and incestually raping him, I came to realize that I just could not believe what I was reading. And since I could not believe it, I decided that I had no choice but to leave.
In high school I read and learned more about Christian history. Very unsavory, very bloody.
Starting into college in 1969, which is when the hippies started "turning onto Jesus", I witnessed the "Jesus Freak" movement that swelled the ranks of fundamentalist churches. Many friends and even family members (albeit much later) converted and I served as a kind of "fellow traveller" (to borrow from McCarthyism), observing and learning about the movement while not actually converting myself. Mainly, everything I learned about fundamentalism only confirmed my skepticism. It was also during this time that I first encountered creationist claims. First there was the claim about living molluscs that were carbon-dated to be thousands of years old. I didn't know why (at the time), but that didn't seem right. But then there was the story of the NASA computer that "revealed Joshua's Lost Day". Mind you, this was in 1970. Home computers didn't start coming out until the late 70's. A few years earlier, Woody Allen had a really funny joke in his movie "Take the Money and Run", in which he was an escaped convict on the run with a family to support, so he applied for a job claiming experience with a high-speed electronic computer. During his interview: "And where did you get this experience with a high-speed electronic computer?" "My aunt owns one." At a time when a computer costed millions of dollars. Circa 1976 when engineers were being interviewed about the new microprocessor chips, the interviewer asked what happened when one of those chips broke. The answer was that you would replace it, but the paradigm of the time was that a computer costed millions of dollars. My point here is that at a time when the workings of a computer was considered near magical, even I, a then-non-computer person, could tell that that claim was thoroughly bogus, that it ascribed to computers abilities that they just plain did not possess.
Circa 1980. Out of college and a few years in the Air Force, a creationist speaker, I think it was Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research, had a presentation at the local university, but I could not attend since I was on duty at that time. Thinking that since even a decade later they were still around, maybe they really had something. So I started looking into their claims. Immediately, I realized that they had absolutely nothing.
Mid to late 80's, I became active on CompuServe and the rest is history.
It has always been my position that there really is no conflict between believing in God and evolution, nor is there really any conflict between science and religion. Except when religion makes claims that are contrary to fact.
In my experience, "creation science" makes claims that are contrary-to-fact and which it claims must be true or else "Scripture has no meaning." Science makes no such claims, only "creation science" and the churches that subscribe to that false theology make that claim. Ironically, while science could never produce any proof against God, "creation science" does produce that proof against God. And since the claims of "creation science" are guarantied to be false, they also guarantee disproof of God.
My point is that rejecting the false claims of "creation science" do not necessitate atheism, but the false theological claims of fundamentalism do. If they're lying to you about some things, why not realize that they're also lying to you about everything else?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by agent_509, posted 12-23-2011 9:30 PM agent_509 has not replied

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


Message 14 of 358 (645183)
12-24-2011 5:00 AM
Reply to: Message 7 by hooah212002
12-23-2011 10:49 PM


Do please refer to that venerable source, Jonathan Swift's 1729 treatise A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick for the best and most tasty methods of cooking babies.
In Swift's own time, I have read, some English (AKA "sassanach", AKA "Saxon") took his recommendations seriously.
In further Star Trek episodes, "The New Voyages", is an episode in which the Enterprise must cooperate with a Klingon vessel. When the Klingon commander makes his proposal, Scotty replies, "Are ye gonna take the word of that sassanach?" What worse insult could a Scotsman possibly deliver?
In an IFC history of Monty Python, they show an earlier sketch with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in which four blokes are sitting at a table in a restaurant that serves child.
Somebody: Just look at these prices! They must be frozen. Nobody could serve fresh child at these prices!
Moore: I wonder how they're prepared.
Cook: I suppose they suddenly spring it on them.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 7 by hooah212002, posted 12-23-2011 10:49 PM hooah212002 has seen this message but not replied

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


Message 15 of 358 (645184)
12-24-2011 5:07 AM
Reply to: Message 13 by Chuck77
12-24-2011 4:49 AM


Chuck, you are just playing the same old tired creationist game of "explain that which we cannot currently explain, and do so completely and with every single step and bit completely documented and supplied with supporting evidence." Immensely more than has ever been provided for the support of the New Testament narrative.
He used to be a YEC. He has since learned that that position is untenable. Shouldn't that be the issue that you should concern yourself with?
At the very least, evolution is not equivalent with "random chance." And to attempt to make them equivalent is a case of serious equivocation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 13 by Chuck77, posted 12-24-2011 4:49 AM Chuck77 has replied

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


(4)
Message 322 of 358 (648059)
01-13-2012 2:14 AM


Summary
The OP played out the scenario that I have been warning against for decades, ever since the end of the 1980's when I read Robert Schadewald's report on the 1986 International Conference on Creationism, where former YEC geologist had given his presentation in which he had found through actual examination of actual geological facts (rock-hard geological facts that he and other creationist geologists had to face and work with daily) that the rock-hard geological facts did not at all support creationist geology (AKA "Flood Geology"). In the question-and-answer session, the entire geology department of the Institute for Creation Research (all three of them) immediately attacked him. In response:
quote:
[Glenn R. Morton, practicing petroleum geologist and staunch creationist, asked John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR)], "How old is the earth?" "If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning." Morton then said that he had hired several graduates of Christian Heritage College [which formerly housed the ICR], and that all of them suffered severe crises of faith. They were utterly unprepared to face the geological facts every petroleum geologist deals with on a daily basis.
It was that incident that had first alerted me to the problem that "creation science" creates for its followers. That problem is greatly exasperated by creationism's teaching that the truth of Christianity depends on the truth of "creation science" and that if "creation science" is not true, then Christianity is not true and the only alternative is atheism.
Of course, "creation science" is a demonstrably false theology -- not the idea of divine creation itself, but rather that pack of lies and deceptions that is "creation science". But does Christianity really depend on that pack of lies and deceptions? Sure, "creation science" says that it does, but if they lied to you about everything else, what makes you think that you need to believe them about this too?
That is the problem I saw with the OP, the inherent assumption that the realization that the creationists had been lying to him all along necessitated becoming an atheist. Of course, becoming an atheist is the right choice -- it most certainly was for me nearly 50 years ago -- , but that choice really should be made for the right reasons. Becoming an atheist just because that is what your church had told you you must do is perhaps not the best reason. Especially since they had also taught you so many pernicious lies about atheism -- eg, in Paul, when life-long fundamentalist Ruth Buggs finally learns some of the truth and that everything she had been taught was false, she immediately wants eagerly to sin and curse and fornicate, etc; when you have been taught all your life that atheists do certain evil things, then when you find yourself forced to become an atheist then you would immediately want to play out those tortured fantasies, those false scripts you had been fed for so many years, if not our entire life. Indeed, one local creationist activist claims to have been an atheist, whereas in truth he had only been pretending to himself that he was an atheist so that he could give vent to his adolescent hormones and seek to sin guilt-free -- his own admission that he had prayed to God every night, something that no actual atheist would have done, reveals that he was only deluding himself.
And, of course, Dawn moved in and spewed his bullshit all over the place, hijacking the thread away from its topic. So sadly typical.

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


(3)
Message 326 of 358 (648074)
01-13-2012 4:24 AM
Reply to: Message 324 by Chuck77
01-13-2012 3:47 AM


Re: summary
Once you truly question evolution (for instance) you will see no one can answer it's many flaws.
Huh? What flaws, exactly? Do you mean the "questions" that the Question Evolution movement poses? As we all know already too well, those "questions" are pure nonsense. How is that "truly question[ing] evolution"? Such complete and utter nonsensical "questions" do not, in fact, question anything at all.
Some don't question it the way it should be questioned and end up believing it.
And just exactly how do you propose that it should be questioned? And is that the way that it actually should be questioned?
To the author I say give The Bible and Creationism another try and truly question evolution.
Err? Just exactly who is this mysterious "the author" of whom you speak?
And just what exactly do you mean by "giv[ing] The Bible and Creationism another try"? The Bible says many varied things ... it was directly because of reading what the Bible actually said that I became an atheist in the first place, more than four decades ago. And just exactly what is it that Creationism has to say that needs to be given another try? What Creationism has been saying for the past four to five decades is exactly what most of us are condemning as demonstrable and damnable lies and deception.
As for questioning evolution, I do agree with that. I also agree with questioning creationism, and republicanism, and being a democrat, and everything else. A catch-phrase of my religion, Unitarian-Universalism, is "To Question is the Answer." And that is most definitely true. By questioning what you believe, you are not "questioning God", but rather you are questioning your own personal fallible human misunderstanding of what you need to believe.
And, yes, I have indeed questioned evolution. When I read Richard Dawkins' third chapter of his "The Blind Watchmaker", I quite simply could not believe his WEASEL program. So I wrote my own, based solely on his description (obviously, from the speed, his was a BASIC program, since it had to run through their lunch time). Even when I could see how rapidly it converged on a solution, I still could not believe it, so I performed an analysis of the mathematics that were involved. As a result, I could see, unequivocably, that an evolutionary solution is much less likely to fail than a random one would be. http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/monkey.html
To Question is the Answer. Are you ready to actually Question?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 324 by Chuck77, posted 01-13-2012 3:47 AM Chuck77 has not replied

  
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