I really don't know why we engage with them anymore, nothing can be achieved, we've heard everything, they don't even provide entertainment, trying to reason with them is just cruel. Never try to teach a pig to sing; it doesn't work and it annoys the pig. You can't reason people out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. etc
I was a religious nutter... Admittedly, it takes time to break down the sting of cognitive dissonance... Its a very painful process. Most people dig in their heels when confronted with something that challenges their worldview, but you might be surprised what is actually getting through.
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I've been reading a few threads on Evolution Fairy Tales, it's an echo chamber for even more of these wing-nuts ruled over by the self-impressed Mike the Wiz. He turns up here from time-to-time to show off his superior knowledge of fallacies. He's a weird one. He knows about logic but he can't apply it. He's a transitional human - the irony. He really thinks that he can think rationally but he can't. Like Faith, he's a motivated thinker, he knows his conclusion is 'therefore God' so everything starts backward and he falls at the first logical fence.
Most people don't like the thought of them disintegrating into nothingness. They can conceive a time when they did not exist, but now that they are here to think of a time where they return to nothing is difficult. Their entire view of life is within their own mind. So what is existence outside of it? This consciousness they are experiencing must therefore go on forever.... through the "soul."
Would we exist if our parents did not have sexual intercourse? What if it was a different spermatazoa that reached the egg faster than the one that fertilized your mother's egg? What if it was the egg that was fertilized the month before her last period? If your mother met a different man, would you still be you, just a different version of you? Would you still be you if your father met another woman and you would be a different version of you? Look how different even siblings can be. Same parents, different gametes. Endless combinations coming from two sources of genetic material. We are all products of chance, lest we believe that god pulls the strings... and if god pulls the strings then there is no freewill. Does Mikey think about things like this?
I find this sort of thing very hard to understand. Neither he nor Faith are stupid, they're both reasonably intelligent it's just that their intelligence has been corrupted by the religious disease that prevents rational thought. They can learn the rules of logic and science but break them all the time, perhaps without knowing. (But increasingly I think it's deliberate.) They then go on to accuse those pointing out their errors of being irrational.
At the end of the day they don't like the thought of being tossed about randomly at the mercy of the waves. Its more palatable to think that there's some grand, master plan. Fortuitousness is too..... fortuitous.
I suppose it has to be because they're all self-taught and uneducated. They've never had anyone with real training to correct them, they impress each other and that's good enough for them.
Faith, ironically by those random gametes merging, likely with a bit of nurturing, is now set in her ways... she will always find a way to wiggle around the obvious. Its easier for her to see you as an impediment placed in her way to prove her Fallen world theory and the hands of the devil steering you her way to test her as Job was tested... ultimately for her it is God telling Abraham to kill his son and having the faith to go through with it... and at the last second god changes the child to a sacrificial lamb. Stubborness is viewed as steadfastness to her... we just see it as willful and deliberate ignorance. What is Faith without her faith? She doesn't know and she's terrified to find out.
A big part of their certainty is that many consider themselves 'saved'. Despite their book telling them that no one can know that. Many/most also think that god talks to them. I suppose that is the ultimate 'evidence' into which everything else must fit regardless of how objectively wrong it is proven to be.
Its a monologue that they choose to think is a dialogue.
But why being born again, saved and having god talk to you means that the earth is 6,000 old is beyond me, and why seeing that incontrovertible error in others, it doesn't make those that god also talks to think 'hang on, how can that be, God's saying different, contradictory, things to him than me?' I really don't know.
Because if portions of the bible are errant then how can you be sure which parts are fables inserted by man and which parts are perfectly preserved by the hand and will of God? I mean, its so obvious.... What does Habbukkuk have to do with anything, historical or spiritual, in the modern age? Isn't super obvious that it was written for 2nd century Jews from the biased perspective of 2nd century Jews? But they will find a way to ensure that its relevant because without that belief they aren't tethered to anything.
So they have to believe its inerrant, and if it is and there are genealogies, they have to subtract backwards and come up with the timeline provided by almighty god. And then you just make the evidence conform to what the book says instead of following the evidence to its logical conclusion without any bias.
But to the question of what point is it if they never seem to change their mind.... some do. Some never do. Either way when we communicate with one another things are imprinted in us. We are learning different perspectives. There's beauty in that.
Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.
"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it" -- Thomas Paine
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