The spectacular fall of YEC beliefs

To have a better understanding of establishment of religion you should read Memorial and RemonstranceIt does not have to mean a State Church. You really ought to familiarise yourself with the relevant history - and it doesn’t get much more relevant than this.

Again you simply spout nonsense.It was the States and individual Sects that tried to put Bibles in Schools, pass laws preventing anti-Christian Speech and not the Federal Government.How did the Federal Government violate the Constitution?

I can't read all that but the first part of it doesn't suggest any problem with the government's being run by Christian principles, for basically law-abiding religions anyway. They don't require any adherence by individuals that would affect their conscience, being laws that govern a civilized society. Since I haven't read more than a few paragraphs perhaps you could show me otherwise.However, if their religion tells them to murder Jews and Christians as a service to Allah then Christian laws against murder would be a problem for them, and if they think Protestants and other religionists should be burned at the stake or buried alive or tortured on the rack, that might cramp their freedom of religion too if genuine Christian principles were in force.

Congress itself authorized the printing of Bibles for the schools, and it was a case in the Supreme Court that punished someone for blaspheming God, so if you think the amendments forbade such things it was the federal government that violated them..Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The whole point is to argue against government support for religion.
That is what is meant by establishment.

Since general Christian principles were indeed supported by the federal government and the judicial system and not considered to be violations of the First Amendment, perhaps only the state of Virginia objected.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And the Supreme Court has since then corrected their errors.But you still seem to place your demonic god over Allah and that cannot be allowed in a civilized state.

Of course. A civilized state would of course promote the bombing and shooting-up of churches and malls and places of entertainment, and the hijacking of airplanes to destroy buildings and kill thousands in the name of Allah and so on. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Or maybe your sources are being deceptive - or worse.Or maybe the judicial interference actually went the other way, and the real intent is more properly reflected by current legal thinking.

And, as usual, you do not address what I posted but rather try to move the goal posts, con the rubes, misdirect attention and all the other dishonorable and dishonest tactics that are the norm for you.Please show where I said "A civilized state would of course promote the bombing and shooting-up of churches and malls and places of entertainment, and the hijacking of airplanes to destroy buildings and kill thousands in the name of Allah and so on" or simply admit that you are once again simply telling falsehoods (that means lying).

It was a while ago (months? years?) so I don't consider this memory reliable:But I think I remember someone on this board (jar, maybe?) mentioning their idea that Creationist are returning to the basics... doing what they know works. Basically hunkering down, keeping their "in-person" meetings private, contained and controlled. Very cult-like. Avoiding public ideas because everytime they venture into the public eye... they lose and therefore lose followers.Maybe this is out of necessity. (Burned by fire? Stay away from fire!)
Maybe this is out of excuses on some long-term plan simply to hold onto the control (and funds...) of the group-they-have-left. ("We will defend ourselves while we regroup and then... in the future... we will rise again and no one will be able to stop us!! In the future! Not right now!!")
Maybe other things.I don't think it really matter why it's happening.
Just the fact that it is decreasing... and it has reached this point... and public opinion is open to "other non-Christian or even non-religious" ideas as well as public opinion even beginning to frown upon certain "cult-like" Christian sects... with these facts I don't think it really matters what they're planning. It's reached the 'point-of-no-return' so to speak whether they acknowledge it or not and I highly doubt it will ever recover to what it once was.There's simply too much facts and education out there for any "significantly large" section of the population to push such belief-in-things-without-proper-support and sustain itself. The basic problem:Who watches the watchers?Especially where, in this context, "the watchers" are (and only can be) our own internal thoughts in our own brains.
How to hold onto objectivity when the brain is, inherently on it's basic level, experiencing everything subjectively?My best guess so far is merely: constant reminders of "I could be wrong..." and "nothing is certain..." and attempting to give all ideas their fair (as possible) review.For example, remembering to apply such ideas even to The Scientific Method as being our best method for obtaining facts so far.
Is there a better method? A better method in some situations perhaps if not all?
I don't know. Maybe. I can't all-encompassingly prove that The Scientific Method is fundamentally "best" for everything for all time.
I can't think of one that's better, though.
Can someone else?
I'll leave that open to anyone who thinks they can prove their method is better, and attempt to give it fair review....things like that.

I'm glad to hear it! Thank you. I probably am closer to baritone than tenor, yes. I think I'm an awful singer - but my wife - who regularly sings in front of audiences insists I'm not that bad. She may be trying to make me feel better I don't think so, but I have Scottish great grandparents so maybe its there - I actually used to speak with a very distinctive Caribbean accent as that was where my first school was - so that probably influenced it in peculiar ways. The closest accent to mine I can find online is probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OktDllQvXIYThat is - when I hear her speak, I don't really hear the accent - it just sounds normal. It's not always obvious, but I noticed it in the last sentence I read out: 'it may rally a few times before it becomes irrelevant'. Especially the word 'rally' which I'm guessing sounds odd because of the 'r' and the 'l's close to one another which is why 'irrelevant' also hinted at it. Apparently it's increasingly common to speak this way and as long as you can still hit the sound reasonably well it isn't considered a speech impediment.

Yeah - I think the strategy for many is simply 'this is what I believe' rather than trying to justify their beliefs with scientific principles. There are still areas in the human experience that science doesn't really work for. Although we can both agree that for trying to understand the way the world operates and explaining the way things are - there are a number of domains where science can't help us.First: Aesthetics. While science can be used to understand what people generally find aesthetically pleasing and even to explain why, there is an subjective/experiential element which remains difficult or even inappropriate for scientific exploration.Morality - although science can be used to understand relevant facts in making moral decisions - it can't really tell us what the correct moral criteria actually are.Meaning - what is the right way to live, what gives us meaning, what should be meaningful, things of this nature - similar to morality.Science - and of course, we run into problems when we try to justify science itself. There's a sort of regression problem.

Considering just the evidence here at EvC Forum, there does seem to have been a crash in YEC beliefs. We currently have Faith and ICANT - am I forgetting someone who's been active recently?But is EvC representative? EvC isn't the whole world, and given my limited time my participation in the debate is limited to EvC, so I don't have any recent experience from other creation/evolution discussion sites. I'll have to rely on others' knowledge of other sites.Another factor is books. In some thread I recently mentioned that at a Barnes & Noble I didn't see a single book written from the creation science perspective (I did see a couple about the creation/evolution debate, but they were written from a science perspective). Ten and twenty years ago the religious section of Barnes & Noble had plenty of creation science books, like Darwin's Black Box and Darwin on Trial and many others (I can only recall the most popular ones). Does the decline in creationism books at Barnes and Noble indicate declining YEC belief? I'm not sure.ICR still exists, but it moved from California to Texas and number of years ago, and in Texas it could not attain accreditation of its college program. I wonder if that had an influence on the popularity of YEC belief.Then there was the Dover trial (also known as Kitzmiller). I noticed a marked decline in participation by informed creationists here shortly after Judge Jones issued his ruling. At least at discussion boards, serious interest in giving the Biblical story a scientific underpinning (by people who actually understood science) seemed to dry up after that.What I've read about the trend of religion here in the US is that increasing numbers of people identify with no religion. Such people are probably mostly Christian and probably mostly believe in God, so they're not exactly non-Christians and certainly not atheists or agnostics, but they are not a member of any church and do not attend church. Perhaps they could be called areligionists? Found this nice graph: The numbers of the strongly affiliated are not declining - they remain roughly constant. But the numbers of their potential allies in the more loosely affiliated are declining. The graph isn't about YECism, but I'll argue as if the YEC numbers are analogous. This data might make it seem that YECism is declining, and while in a sense this is true the strong core of YEC remains unchanged. I don't think they're necessarily dying off - the Bible belt is fertile ground in more than one sense.I do think YEC increasingly lacks advocacy from a scientific perspective. Not that those attempts ever had any legitimacy, but they were successful in that they were able to muddy the waters for school board members and such (both state and local levels), something that seems less the case today, but is that really true? For example, are treatments of evolution in high school biology textbooks expanding now? I couldn't find any summary articles, but my sense is that the battle to keep evolution in and creationism out continues with no clear winner.And how is evolution education faring in various states where it has been an issue? Here's my assessment of those states based on my reading of the Recent developments in state education programs section in the Creation and evolution in public education in the United States article over at Wikipedia (the article may be out of date):

• Alabama: Improving
• California: Improving
• Florida: Improving
• Georgia: Improving
• Kansas: Improving
• Kentucky: Worsening
• Louisiana: Worsening
• Ohio: Improving
• Pennsylvania: Improving
• Tennessee: Worsening
• Texas: Worsening (recently voted to keep creationist-friendly textbooks)
• Virginia: Worsening

Final tally: Improving: 7; Worsening: 5. Not very encouraging.So I guess I'm not ready to conclude that YEC belief is really crashing.--Percy

That has long been my own observation for decades. The evangelical groups that would tend to be YECs proselytize aggressively, so there are constantly new batches of brand-new creationists who are then trained in the "new" "scientific findings" that support YEC and that "no scientist has been able to respond to nor has even tried. Of course, that "new" stuff is decades old and had been soundly refuted decades ago, but those new creationists are never told about any of that. I have personally witnessed young creationists triumphantly present "new scientific evidence that will blow you evolutionists away", only to learn that their
new" claim is older than they are and was refuted before they were even born and here is the a detailed explanation of your claim and why it is wrong. In one particular case in particular which I report about on my site (his "new" claim was Setterfield's old c-decay claim; and, yes, he was the one who proudly proclaimed that it would blow us evolutionists away), the poor creationist just stood there, dumbfounded, in shock, completely blown away himself.As long as new batches of suckers are born every few years and as long as their religious leaders continue to lie to them about YEC, YEC will still be around. Nice graph. There's another situation afoot in which upwards of 80% of the young people raised in fundamentalist/evangelical/YECish/etc churches not only leave their faith but also leave religion behind altogether. I had understood them to be the major source of the growth of the Nones. I wonder how they are factored into that graph.A thought on how the strongly affiliated could be holding steady could well be due to their aggressive proselytizing, such that they try to counter the hemorrhaging of their next generation with new converts. Kind of similar to the Shakers, who practiced strict celibacy and hence literally could not grow a new generation. They only way they could survive was to constantly recruit new converts, mainly out of orphanages from what I've heard.