Summations Only

What I remember in another thread is the absolutely stellar job Faith did in arguing for and demonstrating that the accumulation of microevolution results in macroevolution (AKA speciation). Until we pointed out what she had done at which point she started redefining the world.It is what it is.

Unfortunately, Faith did not actually say that. I would be very curious about what a creationist would expect by "actual evolution between kinds." Dogs giving birth to kittens? We did recently have a creationist here making exactly that kind of argument.I recently pointed out to a local creationist that that old argument he had taught his young daughter to throw at Dr. Ayala, "but they're STILL MOTHS!!!!", rates right next to "evolution is just a theory" and "why are there still monkeys?" as the surest way to state that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.

Thank you so very much. You have just demonstrated that your understanding of evolution is virtually zero. That renders all your other mindless mauderings completely and totally moot.IOW, you have demonstrated that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.If you disagree, then do please respond.

Here is my Message 151 that Faith needed to repost here. That last sentence had gotten cut off, so I completed it, which is the only change I've made to this post:

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I started studying "creation science" circa 1981/1982. In the late 1980's on CompuServe, I was actively discussing and contributing.
Circa 1990, there was that most rare of rarities: an honest creationist. Merle Hertzler was a dedicated creationist, but he was an honest one. Most creationists have been converted, so they are aware of the inherent problems of their position. IOW, most creationists know full well where their weaknesses lie and to keep well away from them.

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Instead, Merle would fearlessly research all leads. Which lead to this (http://www.oocities.org/questioningpage/Evolve2.html):

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An evolutionist disagreed with me. He told me that in the past there had been many intermediates. He said that there were animals that, for instance, had jaw and ear bones that were intermediate between reptiles and mammals. How did he know this? He gave a reference to an essay in Stephen Gould's Ten Little Piggies . I wrote back that since the local library had a large collection of children's book, I should be able to find that book. (I thought I was so funny). I borrowed the book, and found an interesting account of how bones in the reptile jaw evolved and changed through millions of years to become the mammals' ear. That sounded like such a clever tale. How could Gould believe it? Perhaps he made it up. But there was one little footnote, a footnote that would change my life. It said simply, "Allin, E. F. 1975. Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear. Journal of Morphology 147:403-38." That's it. That's all it said. But it was soon to have a huge impact on me. You see, I had developed this habit of looking things up, and had been making regular trips to the University of Pennsylvania library. I was getting involved in some serious discussions on the Internet, and was finding the scientific journals to be a reliable source of information. Well, I couldn't believe that a real scientific journal would take such a tale seriously, but, before I would declare victory, I needed to check it out.

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On my next trip to the university, I found my way to the biomedical library and located the journal archives. I retrieved the specified journal, and started to read. I could not believe my eyes. There were detailed descriptions of many intermediate fossils. The article described in detail how the bones evolved from reptiles to mammals through a long series of mammal-like reptiles. I paged through the volume in my hand. There were hundreds of pages, all loaded with information. I looked at other journals. I found page after page describing transitional fossils. More significantly, there were all of those troublesome dates. If one arranged the fossils according to date, he could see how the bones changed with time. Each fossil species was dated at a specific time range. It all fit together. I didn't know what to think. Could all of these fossil drawings be fakes? Could all of these dates be pulled out of a hat? Did these articles consist of thousands of lies? All seemed to indicate that life evolved over many millions of years. Were all of these thousands of "facts" actually guesses? I looked around me. The room was filled with many bookshelves; each was filled with hundreds of bound journals. Were all of these journals drenched with lies? Several medical students were doing research there. Perhaps some day they would need to operate on my heart or fight some disease. Was I to believe that these medical students were in this room filled with misinformation, and that they were diligently sorting out the evolutionist lies while learning medical knowledge? How could so much error have entered this room? It made no sense.

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Within a year, Merle Hertzler was a dedicated opponent of "creation science." Strictly from the evidence.

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Edited by dwise1, : added msg ID and quote tags

With all due respect ... and with far more respect than is due you ... , it is impossible for anybody to have any idea what you are talking about.For years here, you have a proven history of abandoning accepted terminology and of insisting upon your own highly unorthodox redefinitions of any and all terms. Your arbitrary redefinitions have rendered virtually all meaningful communication with you impossible.Don't complain to us. You are the one who has poisoned your own well. Too bad, too. You sound almost coherent here.

Here is a case history of such a claim, Ed Babinski's Men Over Ten Feet Tall, Winter/Spring 1996. It's part of what looks like a newsletter that he was writing at the time, Cretinism or Evilution?. The main article, which you can read by clicking on the "Previous" arrow, was titled Creationist Folk Science. In it he characterized most creationist presentations as collections of tall tales. In this multi-page article, he discusses three such tall tales: Men Over Ten Feet Tall?, A Frozen Ninety Foot Tall Plum Tree
with Ripe Fruit and Green Leaves Found North of the Arctic Circle?, and Remains of Warm Weather Hippos Have Been Found in the Tundra's Frozen Muck?.Myself, I characterize creationist claims more as a form of urban legend. Nobody knows who actually created them, but they circulate continuously through the community, changing over time to fit the current culture (eg, the story of a boy saving Nixon from drowning and begs the President from telling his father -- that one has been retold for other presidents (Clinton and "Dubya" Bush, though the latter by the North Koreans) and Hitler; it appears to date as far back as 1924 (http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/nixon.asp)). One of the characteristics of urban legends is that amplifying details get added as they spread. For example, even though Carl Baugh is the main source of the following giant-men claim, when Kent Hovind picked it up he added a specific date to the "find" which Baugh did not have.In Men Over Ten Feet Tall?, creationist Carl Baugh had given Babinski a "photograph" of an "11' 6" skeleton" of a man that had been found in an Italian mine. I place "photograph" in quotation marks, because while Carl Baugh claimed it to be a photograph it is quite obviously a drawing. In addition, an artist who saw the drawing pointed out that the light sources it depicts are entirely wrong.Babinski investigated that "photo" in order to find the actual evidence that it depicted. A curious thing is that even though he was working to provide creationists with the hard irrefutable evidence that they needed to prove their claims, the creationists were completely disinterested. Kind of like they knew in advance that Babinski would never find any evidence because their claims are bogus to begin with.Also, Al, as others have suggested, you really do need to review biomechanics and what the real-life consequences of enlarging a person would be. I don't care how many low-budget 1950's sci-fi atom-bomb movies you've seen; it wouldn't work like that.

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"I'm the least scientific person you'd ever meet. I wouldn't know a cosmic ray if it came up and bit me. But I thought "cosmic rays ... yeah, that sounds good. Let's use that!"
(Stan Lee in The Never-ending Battle about his creation of the Fantastic Four, from memory)"Those who are refuse to learn the lessons of science fiction are doomed to live them."

?His skull is longer, but also narrower -- after all, the elongation is caused by the narrowing of the width through binding.Refer to the experiments in developmental psychology in which young children are presented with the same amount of something in different containers and until a certain point in their development they think that the amount has changed. Same quantity of juice is poured from a short wide glass into a tall narrow glass and they think the tall glass contains more. Take some ricecake (or clay) in a ball and roll it into a longer narrow shape and they think there's more rice (or clay). It's been a few decades, but I recall that being called "conservation", the ability to realize that changing two dimensions does not change the actual amount.

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Over?The appleation, "higher animal", dates back to around the turn of the century, which is to say around 1900. Like, with Mark Twain.Are you fucking kidding us???

You creationists are always niggling about over the language.Do you really believe that you can redefine reality out of existence like a fucking lawyer?Scientists create definitions in order to describe what they observe and to describe differences that they see and which they think to be important.Creationists play stupid lawyer games of redefining reality into whatever lie they want to propagate.We need to figure out just what we are talking about. The exact opposite of what any creationist would want.

Stasis is also a fundamental prediction of evolution. The same process that cause change also cause stasis. The variable there is how well adapted the population already is. Think of negative feedback loops as an analogy.And Darwin did know and state that the rate of evolutionary change would vary. He overemphasized gradualism in response to the saltationists who called for sudden changes, such as a new organ appearing in a single generation. Saltationism is basically just another form of creationism.

What? You replied with a complete non-sentence?What? You literally had nothing to say?And your pathetic attempt to tie punctuated equilibrium with SPONTANEOUS GENERATION? Just what kind of krack are you smoking?Here is a bit of advice for you:If you want to oppose evolution, THEN LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT EVOLUTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!If you want to use punctuated equilibrium, THEN LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!As long as you do nothing but regurgitate stupid creationist lies, you are telling us more unmistakably that you are an idiotic creationist drone incapable of any actual thought. And that their statements are completely and utterly false.And just what is that complete and utter bullshit about "spontaneous generation", which everybody knows has absolutely nothing to do with punctuated equilibria.

You are actually onto something there, says the half-century-long confirmed atheist ("confirmed" since I became an atheist around the traditional age of confirmation, but also because the vast majority of encounters with creationists and "true Christians" confirm my choice way back then to have been the correct one).A few days ago a friend posted a meme on Facebook (which I now transcribe -- it's all in caps, so pardon me if I'm not theologically correct here):

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We worshipped Jesus instead of following him on his same path.

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We made Jesus into a mere religion instead of a journey toward union with God and everything else.

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This shift made us into a religion of "belonging and believing" instead of a religion of transformation.

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Richard Rohr

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From the Unitarian Time of Troubles with Boy Scouts of America, Inc, our congregation's president at the time of Paul Trout (1985; our own particular Time of Troubles came six years later when the same BSA leaders decided they could do whatever they wished with no fear of the consequences) quoted Augustine of Hippo:

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God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. For if you understand, you have failed.

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A religion that just tells you "believe this" and "belong to this group" is a very poor religion indeed. Mike Doonesbury put it well decades ago when his daughter asked why she still had to go to church: "Because you need to put in your pew time." Those people are just putting in their pew time and getting no spiritual growth out of it. I have a brochure that quotes a book co-written by a rabbi about the stupid ways to think about God. Part of the book's premise is that most adults' ideas about God are so childish because they formed those ideas in childhood as they were "putting in their pew time" and they never went back to update them.The Unitarians were very active in the civil rights and anti-war movement of the 60's. Out of that time came a catch-phrase for questioning authority: "To answer is to question." However, I find deeper meaning there. Our minister had said that the important part of religion are not answers, but rather moving us to ask the right questions. To question is the answer.When I'm asked whether God exists, I say yes, just as all the gods exist and all the heros and villains. Fundamentalist proselytizers try all kinds of deceptive rhetorical tricks in order to deceive people into converting. One such trick is to ask something like "Well, if you believe God doesn't exist, then why do you talk about Him as if He does?" Well, the same way that we can talk about Luke Skywalker and what he went through. Or Captain Ahab. Or Wotan or Siegfried. Or Tony Stark. We discuss them all and we know their stories because we created them and we wrote their stories.Now, we know nothing about the supernatural, cannot observe it, cannot even detect whether it actually exists. All we know about the supernatural is what other people have thought and felt about it. We cannot even know whether the supernatural exists, let alone whether some supremely powerful supernatural entity exists, let alone what such an entity may think or want.Such a supernatural entity would be outside of our ability to comprehend, to put it extremely simply. So what if someone were to experience Divine Revelation. Thomas Paine pointed out that Revelation is Revelation to that one person and to that one person only. As soon as he relates to a second person, it becomes heresay. And when that second person relates it to a third person, it becomes hearsay upon hearsay. And so on and so on as it becomes hearsay upon hearsay many times over. I would say that to that one person who had received that Revelation, the moment he tried to understand it is the moment it became hearsay. It would be beyond his fallible human ability to understand his own Revelation.We created the gods. We created them in attempts to explain what we could not explain ourselves. In that same sense you have created God. He is very similar to the God that your teachers have created, but different according to how you had misunderstood your teachers. And how they had misunderstood their teachers, etc.To put it simply, everybody creates his own theology and creates his own Image of God within that theology. Everybody is fallible, so every theology is mistaken in some or multiple ways.So then everybody's idea of God is not only their own, but it is flawed. Maybe they got some things right, even a lot of things right, but they also inevitably got a lot of things wrong, especially in the details.I have often seen the mistaken argument that since there are so many different religions, only one can be right and all the rest are wrong. I disagree. They are all wrong, because they all get it wrong somewhere, especially in the details. But they are also all right, because they all get something right (granted, there could be some exceptions to this, but just ride with it here). So it's not a matter of who's right and who's wrong, but rather how do we proceed from here to getting it more right?To question is the answer. When you ask questions about your beliefs, you are not questioning God, but rather you are questioning your own understandings about God, your own misunderstandings. Because only by questioning your own ideas and beliefs could you ever discover flaws and have any chance of trying to correct them.All our ideas about God are wrong in some way. So we must question our ideas and assumptions. If nothing else, it keeps us engaged and thinking about the questions. When we decide that we have the answers, then we stop thinking about the questions. We stop growing. We wither and die. If God is truly Infinite, then we can eternally ask the questions, the right questions, and ever grow spiritually and never wither and die.I don't know whether this US Navy model would help. The Quartermaster (QM) assists the ship's navigator, maintains the navigational charts, and performs navigational duties. Dead reckoning is pure algebra: you hold this course at this speed and after this much time you should end up here. Basically, applying beliefs blindly. But there are other factors such as winds against the superstructure and ocean currents against the hull, factors that could change the results. So then a few times a day, the QM would step outside, shoot whatever astronomical bodies with the sextant, and calculate where they actually were (nowadays, it would normally be done by GPS, but we must keep our skills up, mustn't we?). In Air Force Tech School, a classmate was taking flight lessons. He was intensely engaged with the instruments in order to determine where he was when his instructor told him rather bluntly to pull his head out of his cockpit. You know full well where you should be, but you also need to know where you actually are.Knowing means nothing, because when you think that you know then you don't.Religion needs to be transformative. You need to continue to ask the right questions. You can never possibly know all the answers. But once you think you know all the answers, you start to wither and you die.

His God is not our "God".It is the journey (AKA "the process"), not the destination.We all personify, imagine, what we seek all in our own way.We invent our gods. What we seek is far greater than mere gods.

So many Unitarian-Universalists tend to be Jewish, that the old joke is that when someone hears that someone was buried in the Unitarian cemetery, the response is, "Funny, he didn't look Jewish." Another joke is that Unitarians are atheists and agnostics (and both) who have children. The joke that we actually do worship the coffee pot applies to other groups as well.Those jokes do have bases in fact. So why would any Unitarian ever want to masquerade as a Christian (eeww!)? Atheists and many agnostics reject Christianity and Christians for good cause, so why would they ever want to masquerade as one? Christians have so much Jewish blood on their hands from literally millennia of persecution and pogroms and just plain murder, that I can only marvel at any Jew's ability to be in the same room as a Christian.And you think that they would want to masquerade as Christians? What an ignorant fool you are!Of course you are ignorant of this simple fact as well: ignorance can be cured very easily, by learning something. Everybody is ignorant about something and everybody can be cured by learning about what they are ignorant of. Stupidity is a different matter altogether, since it is stubbornly and willfully clinging to one's ignorance. How hilarious! Creationists and most "true Christians" are not only completely divorced from reality, but they actually fear reality as does their puny god, the "God of the Gaps". You have created a false theology in which you believe things that are contrary to fact, but then you take it to an entirely different level altogether with the belief that your god can only exist if those contrary-to-fact beliefs are true. IOW, if the world truly is as it actually is, then God does not exist. You idiots achieve what even the most anti-God atheist never possibly could: you have succeeded in disproving God. Of course that only works if one accepts your blatantly false premises. And the only one who accept those blatantly false premises are you yourself.Think about it (admittedly a huge stretch in your case). Young "true Christians" raise their entire lives in The Faith are abandoning it in droves, running away from it as fast as they can. 65% to 80% of them are leaving Christianity, many of them abandoning any kind of religion altogether. They are the fast-growing segment of the population called "nones", as in "none of the above". Many become atheists, but more just want to have nothing whatsoever to do with that fracking stupid religion.Ever hear of the Shakers? Mostly known now for their simple and elegant furniture and other household implements, they were a religious sect that practiced celibacy. Since they could not produce any offspring, they could not produce any new generations of Shakers. The only way to recruit new Shakers was through proselytizing and conversion. And by adopting children from orphanages. Needless to say, they are dying out. At this point, I'm not even sure whether there are any left of them.That is the situation of "true Christians" now. Their own children, the next generation, are fleeing that aberrant theology like the plague. Their only hope is to deceive and convert new converts. With whatever lies and deceptions they can muster, since that is their way, after all."True Christianity" crumbling under the weight of reality. Good riddance!

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As for the Unitarians and Universalists (who finally joined together in 1961), we have been at the forefront of nearly every social advance. Public education. The Red Cross. Birth control.The history of Universalism is interesting. The Christian theology up to that time emphasized God's wrath and fire and brimstone, etc. Universalism was the Gospel of Universal Salvation which instead emphasized God's Love. Out of that comes a standard joke that Universalists believe that God is too good to damn us while Unitarians believe that they are too good to be damned. The big problem for Universalism is that their message was too successful. Mainstream religions started adopting the idea and suddenly there was nothing to differentiate them from any other church. After that is when they found common ground with the Unitarians.

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We know you "true Christians" for the blatant hypocrites that you are. Christian doctrine would immediately identify Trump and Pence as the Beast and the Anti-Christ, yet all the "true Christians" lust so much after secular political power that they are all lining up to kiss both their asses. I'm sure many of them are adding some extra tonguing in order to gain extra favor, especially the more extremely homophobic of them.You "true Christians" have already demonstrated to the world how utterly and pathetically evil you are.

What theory? You present us with no theory, just some confused dogmatic mumblings.Where's you evidence? Where are your hypotheses with which you had built that theory? Where are your tests of those hypotheses?Do you even have any inkling of a clue of what a theory actually is? Of course not! As you persist in demonstrating, you are a complete and utter fool!Yes, I do know and understand about "fools for Christ". That you will be called fools for believing what you do. During the Jesus Freak Movement of 1970 there was even a proselytizing troupe of clowns called "Fools for Christ." That is not what this is about. They were talking about outsiders who ridicule Christian teachings.What you are doing is to ridicule Christ and Christian doctrine yourself. You are claiming that Christians must believe absolutely ridiculous and false things. You are demonstrating that Christianity is completely and utterly false. No, it is complete and utterly false nonsense that will result in even more people foresaking such a pathetically false religion.Thank you very much for your zealous contributions to the continuing growth and spread of atheism.