Summations Only

over a year ago I registered on this forum, a fundamentalist christian young-earth creationist. I started participating in a topic all ready to "prove to some evil evolutionists that creationism was right!" and got utterly destroyed. I was so embarrassed I left the forum and didn't come back. Some time later, thanks in part to seeing what an idiot I was, I am now actually an atheist who accepts the theory of evolution. Should be interesting debating from this new perspective.

What were the things that caused you to change your mind?

A number of things. It pretty much started with one of my whacko extreme fundamentalist christian teachers spouting absolute nonsense. In the process of sorting through all the crap she was spouting, i ended up questioning my own beliefs, and actually reading the bible for myself. I found pretty surprising things. After seeing that I had absolutely no reason to believe what I believed I opened my mind to all possibilities looking at facts. That made me look at evolution without a bias and I realized how much sense it made and how many facts backed it up. Here i am today. I'm currently a physics major hoping to one day obtain a doctorate in theoretical physics. Seeing everything with an open mind cosmology and theoretical physics are just so fascinating.

Just keep questioning and all will be okay.

Welcome back and just a thought. The fundamentalist YEC version of Christianity is not really mainstream. It is interesting for instance that YEC types like to quote CS Lewis and then they find that Lewis has no problem with evoultion or any branch of science.If you want a different take on Christianity you might look at some other threads on this forum. Here is one that is current. A Problem With the Literal Interpretation of ScriptureWe're all just searching for truth or as close as we can get to it eh? (Yes I am Canadian. ) You have sure picked interesting fields of study. Congrats.Have a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays if you prefer.

haha thanks yeah I've done a lot of reading and research over the last year so I've had a lot of different takes. You have a merry Christmas too. Christmas, holidays, whatever we're all talking about the same time of the year, different names don't really matter.

Welcome to the dark side, brother (provided this is a legit thread). The babies taste best with a light garlic seasoning, sprinkled with rosemary and thyme. Christian babies are best because Jew and Muslim babies are denied the wonders of bacon. Babies that have eaten bacon are all the more tasty.

Ah yes, good ole GDR: "oh, you used to be a christian and now you're an atheist? You must not have been the right kind of christian. Let me peddle MY christianity so's you can hopefully hear the trvth".Pssst: "christians" who become atheist and make a fucking post on a public forum admitting it (coming out, if you will) have already done some serious thinking for themselves. "Christians" who become atheists are the best kind of atheists.

definitely legit, and yes there was lots of thinking and studying done

Not a YEC due to this forum!, both you and this forum are to be congratulated.A conversion to Atheism is not necessarily required, religion has a place for some.However when any given religion requires a denial of reality, then that religion is not only worthless but also damaging to oneself and others.May your ongoing journey bring you both peace and wisdom.

Now that yore an atheist, I need to brief you on our rituals. First of all, you need to go get a cat, some gasoline, a bag, and some matches.

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?

So now, you believe life can arise from non-matter? Show the evidence supporting this. So now, it is possible? Show the evidence that supports this. So now, it's not? So now, you believe it arose by random chance without a creator? Show the evidence that supports this.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.

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.

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.