"Despicable Christian Bigotry"

Yes it's a lost cause though it takes time for that to sink in. That is, the Biblical creationist position out there in "the world" is a lost cause. Unless God decides to intervene.

One of the admins at EvC decided to give a Post of the Month nomination to a creationist there, which got the backing of one member but less than cheers from others.

Including Boss Admin Percy and at least five members who gave him a thumbs-up for the following:

This post has received a POTM nomination from Minnemooseus and a 2nd from NoNukes, but what I see is a message where almost every sentence contains something that is either wrong or misunderstood, much of it about things that Marc has been wrong about in the past and already been corrected multiple times, and the comments about Bryan Rehm are just the same despicable Christian bigotry Marc has been spouting since he joined. Perhaps Moose and NN, who haven't yet participated in this thread, can chime in here and help Marc defend that post.
--Percy

Standard Biblical belief is now "hate speech" all over Christendom, a development that's taken place only within the last few decades, unheard of before, thanks to what I'm coming to believe must be a tireless machinery of stealth and shrewdness operating behind the scenes to bring down the West. A version of "hate speech" is the expression in the post quoted above, "despicable Christian bigotry." This needs to be recognized as an accusation against the same standard Biblical belief that brought civilization to the western world, that was the foundation of the government of England and in some sense America too, despite the anti-Christian beliefs of the biggest names of the Constitutional generation, and many European nations that embraced the Protestant Reformation.

Anybody who SAYS he is a Christian these days MUST be regarded as a Christian, that's the Politically Correct position, and it's "bigotry" to question it, just as it's "hate speech" to apply Biblical principles to sins such as homosexuality.

PC dictates that we can't call people atheists unless they profess to be atheists, although according to our Biblical standards that's what they are if they deny the Biblical revelation, especially its gospel center but also Genesis 1 to 11. Jesus affirmed it, so must we. Or perhaps a better appellation than "atheists" would be "antichrists" -- becuase that is basically the denial that Jesus Christ is Jehovah God come in the flesh (and yes He does say He is, in many many ways apparently obscured to the view of the naysayers). Again, what used to be the pretty standard understanding. Now it's "bigotry."

I would agree that we should use more specific designations for the sake of communication these days even if "atheist" is correct enough within the Christian frame of reference, especially in the context of Biblical creationism. As a practical matter just about all belief systems other than Biblical Christianity either deny or compromise Genesis 1-11, but since there are different flavors of this denial that people take seriously we should recognize them. Reading through that thread you'll find that Marc calls everybody an atheist basically because they reject the Christian frame of reference so they're all up in arms about his failure to know those of whom he is speaking. They ARE atheists within his frame of reference though. For instance Percy makes a big deal out of Marc's notion that as a believer in God to any extent at all he should show an interest in Intelligent Design. Percy says he DOES show an interest, but his interest does turn out to amount to rejecting everything about it. Which is what Marc is calling atheism. Marc simply meant a believer should have a POSITIVE interest in ID, entertain it seriously. Just a communication problem in the end, or a semantic problem, but it apparently can't be solved in that context. (I don't agree with any of this by the way. I think ID is just inadequate creationism and inadequate science.)

Our "fruit" is attacked as unChristian because we say such truths, it's attacked as not in the spirit of Christ. Christ who called the Pharisees "blind guides" and "whited sepulchres" and held Hell up to them as their lot. John the Baptist who called them "vipers." But we, the Christians, are unChristian if we call an atheist an atheist, if we call sin sin, if we connect evolution to atheism (because there are "religious" evolutionists. "Religious," yes, false religion. The only true religion rejects evolution).

And they quote the false Christians and ignore the true ones, letting the false ones stand for "Christianity." (See Dr. A's choice of a racist "Christian" tract that suits his anti-Christian bigotry. Is he unaware of the Christian protests against slavery and racism from the very beginning or has he simply "overlooked" that reality?)

Again, this is all going down in the very Christendom that was built on Biblical revelation. "I was wounded in the house of My friends."

The truth has become "hate speech," the truth has become "bigotry" and "despicable" by the morally superior enemies of Christ. The world is well and truly upside down.

From here it can only go one of two directions. God could intervene with a great revival and turn the tide back, or He could let the God-rejecting world have its own way for a while before the end, its own beliefs, its own religion, its own rules, its world government, its false idea of peace and so on. Let's see how well human rule without God REALLY does.

At least I think that's something like what's most likely going to happen as the end comes near, but then the outpouring of God's wrath, if humanity running things isn't already enough of God's wrath.

Guaranteed to sink it all, never to rise again.

Or He could do both, at least a limited or temporary version of the revival and then abandon ship and let humanity sink it to bloody oblivion (of course we know He'll intervene before that final point. He says so).

Just a little tour of evolutionist anti-Flood speculations they treat as fact

http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=652616

there's absolutely no geological evidence that water simultaneously covered all of continental Australia within the last 10 000 years. This negates the claims of a global flood within the last 10 000.

As the creationists have said on that thread there's plenty of evidence that all parts of the earth have been under water. How can you claim to know the time frame for this lack of something?

Creationist: 95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates.

Evolutionist: That's because fossils form best in aquatic sediments, not because of any spurious flood.

OK, aquatic sediments. Just what you'd find a whole bunch of from the worldwide Flood. Amazing how they can give what is merely an alternative explanation that fits their own theory and treat it as fact in such tones of certainty and get nasty with the creationists who continue to maintain their own explanation.

In fact, it gives the lie to your flood geology; if fossils exist as a result of the great flood, we would see far more terrestrial animals in the sediments than we do. We ought to see many land-based animals mixed in with the marine. The fact that we generally see marine creatures in marine sediments and freshwater fossils in freshwater sediments ought to tell you that those sediments record a living ecosystem, that layed down its fossils over a period of years, not in a single catastrophic event.

But this is all speculation and he doesn't seem to recognize it. They have no idea what the Flood would have done, they just prefer their own scenarios.

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states! What kind of streams are we talking about?

And fossils are buried in discrete layers that place the most ancient species at the bottom and the most recent at the top. Can you tell me how a flood would do that? Can you tell me how a flood could put all the trilobites toward the borttom of the pile, but leave all the whales close to the top?

Since it's all speculation you can dream up whatever you like. There is no evidence to prove you wrong. Or right. The very idea of a "most ancient" species is a product of theory, pure conjecture. On the Flood model all the fossils are from the same time period, none is more ancient than another. Why whales near the top? I don't know and neither do they.

The fossil record shows us a clear story of living things changing and diverging. It does not opresent the jumble that we might reasonably expect from a flood. That's just a fantasy.

Odd. What he "might reasonably expect" is pure conjecture his own fantasy. Again, they just make up what a Flood would and wouldn't have done to suit their own expectations. THAT's "fantasy." Sorry but since we KNOW there was a worldwide Flood some 4300 years ago, naturally we simply know your conjectures must be wrong. It may not be what you'd expect but obviously the Flood DID layer the sediments and sort the fossils.

And here comes somebody else's set of conjectures to explain away the same observation:

95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates.

This is because land, being higher, tends to erode at the hands of the elements. The products of erosion from the land are carried by wind, rain, streams and rivers to the lowest points where they are deposited, which is usually, but not always, in quiet streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, seas and oceans.

Does this fit with the "aquatic sediments" conjecture or not? I can't tell. In fact I don't think I even know what this conjecture is trying to say. But anyway, whose conjecture shall we accept?

Simply on the face of it, the fact that 95% of the fossil record are marine invertebrates is excellent evidence for a worldwide Flood no matter how many scenarios they can conjure up to explain it away.

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states!

You're not specific, but if you're referring to the states in the Colorado area, much of this region lay beneath a quiet sea for millions of years. It also spent some millions of years above sea level. The Grand Canyon contains a record of much of the geologic history of this region, showing when it was beneath a sea, and even when parts of it were coastal regions and how those coastal regions moved back and forth across the landscape as the region rose and fell. It also shows when an area was under a quiet sea, or was only some miles off a coast. And it shows when the region was above sea level, though these layers are more rare and typically not complete since land is often an area of net erosion.

Wonderful how they can go on and on with their completely made-up scenarios as if they were fact, all in the service of explaining away the Flood, call it all "evidence" and bully and insult the creationists who continue to see the same phenomena as better evidence for the worldwide Flood.

What kind of streams are we talking about? Sounds like a catastrophic extinction with lots of water.

Sediments would remain suspended in active flood waters. A flood would jumble everything up instead of producing a progression of gradual change

.

See it's all what WOULD have happened according to their own presuppositions. They like their scenariom, they can't prove it, but they can enforce it with ridicule and arrogant certainty.

Another offering to explain the creationist's statement:

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states! What kind of streams are we talking about?

In answer we are now given the picture of North America's supposedly long-lived "interior seaway:"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway

The Western Interior Seaway, also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, and the North American Inland Sea, was a huge inland sea that split the continent of North America into two halves, Laramidia and Appalachia, during most of the mid- and late-Cretaceous Period. It was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long.

The Seaway was created as the Farallon tectonic plate subducted under the North American Plate during Cretaceous time. As plate convergence proceeded, younger and more buoyant lithosphere of the Farallon Plate started to become subducted. This caused it to subduct at a much more shallow angle, in what is known as a "flat slab". This shallowly-subducting slab exerted a traction on the base of the lithosphere, pulling it down and producing "dynamic topography" at the surface that caused the opening of the Western Interior Seaway.[1] This depression and the high eustatic sea levels existing during the Cretaceous allowed waters from the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Gulf of Mexico in the south to meet and flood the central lowlands, forming a sea that transgressed (grew) and regressed (receded) over the course of the Cretaceous.

Yes, but of course a creationist will look at that picture and see a phase of the Flood before it all drained away. And please note the only facts given here are some dimensions, but otherwise it is all interpretation and there is no evidence given for that. It's remarkable how they can talk so glibly about the unwitnessed past. All interpretation, all conjecture. Based on what? What leads them to identify it as "cretaceous" for instance? They don't say. They merely give their interpretive scenario and we're supposed to accept it uncritically. Probably the actual evidence is sound enough as description of this water formation except for the timing, but since it isn't given -- SO rare they ever give actual facts -- who can say?

One of the more spectacular dinosaur fossil finds of recent years was of a Late Cretaceous specimen of Oviraptor that was found in a sitting position directly over its nest. This find, a wonderful combination of trace fossils and a body fossil, represents one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for brooding behavior in dinosaurs. This fossil find is currently on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and was illustrated in a National Geographic article.

Nests that would have washed away in a flood.

Except that they didn't and therefore they wouldn't. And how might that have been? Probably because they were instantly buried as opposed to being subjected to rushing water. That's my reasonable guess. Well, guessing is all you do too. You guys can guess and make pontifical pronouncements about how thus and so would or wouldn't have occurred in the flood of your own imagination, and so can we and with far more justification.

Next guy wants to know why the creationist thinks the fact that 95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates supports the great flood.

Surely under the flood scenario, in which (nearly) every living thing is killed we would expect to see a much greater proportion of other animals in the fossil record?

Just a minor quibble really given that none of the other scientific evidence supports the flood, but your use of that particular factoid piqued my interest as to your thought processes.

1) What he is calling "scientific evidence" that supposedly doesn't support the flood is what I've been showing here as nothing but their own assumptions and speculations and fanciful scenarios reified into Fact.

2) Why don't we see what you expect to see? Because we don't, that's all. I might expect to see other things that didn't happen myself, but what happened is what happened and all you or we can do is speculate about why, neither of us can prove anything definitively. It's a war of plausibilities. Too bad you guys won't acknowledge that but have to carry on as if you are in possession of Truth.

I KNOW the Flood occurred and the evidence for it out there is awfully obvious it seems to me no matter how many made-up scenarios you can invent to explain it away.

As for speculation the most obvious explanation why 95% marine fossils fits the Flood is that the Flood was the OCEANS covering the land for months on end. You know, MARINE stuff.

Why so relatively few fossilized land animals? I don't know.

I kind of think it has something to do with their having been on higher ground. Looks to me like the upper layers laid down in the Flood in the Grand Canyon area all washed away as part of the canyon-cutting event. Perhaps the land animals were exposed in the tumbling and rotted away, or got washed into the sea. Where the strata remained in place the fossils were preserved. Just my reasonable guess.

Fossils are found in sedimentary rock which is formed by flowing water ...

... with just a few exceptions, such as glacial till, aeolian sediment, volcanic ash, nearshore sediments, coal, siliceous ooze, calcareous ooze, pelagic clay, evaporites ...

Since you don't explain what you mean but require me to go look it up, forget it. Question: 1) How much of the fossil record is found in these forms of sediment? Question 2) Are they all formed in still water? Well, hey, there was no doubt plenty of that during the Flood year too.

Tell me something. It is clear that you have never studied geology. And you must know that you have never studied geology. In which case why do you not draw the obvious corrolaries that (a) you don't know anything about it and (b) you should therefore not presume to go around lecturing other people on it?

Because he has studied the Bible and that trumps Geology any day. I'm serious. He knows there was a flood and the geological evidence he IS aware of supports it: the abundance of marine fossils, in fact the abundance of fossils, period. All your theories are wholly inadequate to explain this abundance, plus the original horizontality of the sedimentary layers known as the Geo Time Scale. Your explanations are in fact idiotic to the max -- talk about ad hoc! -- while a worldwide Flood suffices quite nicely.

95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates

.You figure that these sea-creatures drowned in a flood? Is that the usual effect floods have?

No, it's the effect a worldwide Flood would have.

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states! What kind of streams are we talking about?

Obviously when a kind of sediment covers several American states, we're not talking about streams. We're talking either about deserts, seas, or major volcanic eruptions, depending on the type of the sediment. The Navajo sandstone, for example, extends over 400,000 square kilometers of northern Arizona, northwest Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. Analysis of its sedimentary structure shows that it's a former desert.

Yeah, well this is typical geological nonsense. I sometimes have a hard time believing that normally intelligent people believe this sort of thing --this sort of explanation for such a huge extent of horizontally laid down sediment, quite markedly and abruptly separated from sediments above and below it, which is simply not how anything happens in the real world especially over millions of years, but that doesn't bother you does it? It should but it doesn't.

Enough is enough. It just gets personal after this.

Dr. A's course in Geology arrives at Continental Drift

In the Geology Course Dr. A has been presenting at EvC for some months now, he's arrived at a history of the concept of Continental Drift, which will lead next to a discussion of Plate Tectonics as the means by which the continents do their drifting.

He does a very good job on the history of the thinking in the field that led up to and finally accepted the proposition that the continents are in fact moving apart. In my opinion this is maybe the best post he's done in this series, showing with much clarity how science works.

But of course there's always something a mainstream scientific treatise has to say that a creationist must disagree with, and as is often the case, it has to do with timing:

First there is the fact that the continents are moving right now, as can be measured by GPS (the Global Positioning System), by SLR (Satelite Laser Ranging), and by VLBI (Very Long Baseline Inferometry).

Moreover, the continents are moving at the right rate. That is, if we apply geological dating methods to see how long ago the Americas parted from the Old World, if we measure the distance across the Atlantic, and if we measure the rate of drift using GPS, SLR, and VLBI, we find the numbers to be consistent.

If this in itself is not conclusive evidence that the continents have been moving for millions of years, it is at least highly consistent with that proposition.

In this part of his discussion he hasn't actually said (a flaw in his presentation) that "the right rate" is a constant rate, but given that the rate is known to be extremely slow (he doesn't give the figure -- another flaw -- but 2-4 inches per year is I believe the recognized rate), and that the rate as he says is "consistent with" millions of years of continental drift, we can assume that this very very slow rate which is observed to be occurring now is what they have in mind for the rate of travel over all of those entire millions of years. A uniformitarian assumption.

I don't know, I haven't done the calculations and it could be that it isn't really all that consistent with their assumptions, but I'll accept that it is for the moment.

But I did in an earlier post on this subject make the calculations based on the worldwide Flood as the starting point for continental drift. The idea is that the continents split apart as a result of geological disruption of some sort connected with the Flood, some 4300 years ago, probably volcanic eruptions along the lines where the land mass split into separate continents, a disruption violent enough to set the continents adrift at a much greater rate than that at which they are still continuing to move apart. The starting rate I came up with was 1-1/2 miles per year, or 20 feet per day, which slows to the current 2-4 inches per year in the 4300 years since the Flood.

As part of the evidence for Continental Drift, Dr. A presents a diagram of the distribution of certain fossils that only makes sense if the continents were once joined as the diagram shows they most likely were at one time. Since the vast majority of the world's fossils are a record of life forms that lived before the Flood and died in that catastrophe the diagram probably gives at least a rough picture of how those life forms were distributed in the pre-Flood world --assuming the Flood didn't carry them far from their usual habitat anyway. Second thought -- based on the long narrow shape of the fossil distributions -- is that the distribution might say more about the movement of the Flood waters than the original habitat of the flora and fauna. But either situation does require the land mass to have been united in some such pattern as the diagrim illustrates for the distributions to be coherent.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics contradicts the Theory of Evolution

At EvC they are complaining about creationist arguments concerning the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in a thread titled Infuriating Arguments. This gets into solar energy beyond my abilities.

It seems to me, however, that I've seen creationist arguments about the "closed system" that aren't quite what is being presented here but since I haven't followed them I can't really say anything about them.

But discrediting a particular argument about the Second Law doesn't necessarily discredit the whole creationist claim.

It seems to me to be pretty obvious that the universe IS gradually running down or losing energy or however that should be put. You can always point to factors that demonstrate renewal and growth nevertheless because seeds do sprout and grow to maturity, babies do start from a seed and grow up, the sun does give energy to all life on earth and so on and so forth, and yet, overall, the sun is gradually gradually burning out, living things are subject to disease and death, even extinction of whole species, and that's where we can see the Second Law in operation. Things running down, things running out. Slowly, very slowly. The evidence of the Fall.

The argument of course is that the Theory of Evolution contradicts the Second Law: both can't be true. They solve the problem by tacitly assuming or hallucinating an ever-renewing input of life energy that does not exist.

Oh, and if with much abstruse mathematical conjuring you can "prove" that the Second Law does not describe what I'm describing, then we need another law, that's all, because what I'm talking about IS happening and creationists know it is happening, and anybody with half a brain ought to know it's happening and it doesn't matter one iota whether the Second Law says so to your satisfaction or not.

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Later (Message 17) Trixie says:

Last night someone who was arguing for a 6000 year old earth and a global flood supported their position by linking to information on ice ages dated to 11,000 and 14,700 years ago. Another genius tried to cast doubt on carbon-dating by pointing out problems specific to K/Ar dating then linking to a page which exposed the errors in the usual arguments against carbon-dating, so refuting himself.

I don't know what the argument concerning the ice age(s) was but apparently the creationist failed to make clear that he/she denies the dates assigned by old-earth science, which obviously Trixie accepts as gospel truth. We know there was ONE ice age, but there most likely weren't two, and the one can't be older than the Flood. According to something I read somewhere the ice age was most likely the result of heat released in the Flood period, on the same principle as refrigeration (don't ask, haven't researched this in some time), heat caused probably by tectonic movement.

As for the rest of it, it sounds like the creationist did get confused.

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And in message 46 by Son Goku:

Unfortunately the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a particularly difficult concept to set right to an audience of this kind. This is because a lot of presentations make it appear to be about order and disorder (where as this is only a common, but not universal, consequence of it). Unfortunately an "increase in disorder" fits with all sorts of notions such as the decline of the world after the "fall". I've seen many Creationists using it as scientific proof of their world view, i.e. "Look the world really is decaying!"

I don't think we need the Second Law to know the world "really is decaying," that takes just the minimal knowledge of the fact that the sun IS gradually burning out and life DOES die, and the Second Law seems to reflect this fact. If it doesn't it doesn't, nevertheless the world "really is decaying."

Evolution, racism, conscience-free murder, dehumanization, atheism, all of a piece

This is from Chris Pinto at his Adullam Films site:

Hitler’s concept of the Aryan (exalted or noble) race represented the highest point of the evolutionary pyramid, and all races that fell beneath the Aryan standard were fair game for removal (i.e., extermination). This is why Hitler equated Jews with rats and termites. In fact, the Zyklon-B gas used to murder Jews in the showers of Auschwitz was originally a pesticide developed to kill insects. This is also why the Nazis used Jewish skin, bones and teeth to make lamp shades and brush handles – because killing a Jew was deemed no different than killing a cow, cutting down a tree, or picking cotton from a field – according to Darwinian philosophy. Darwin’s “struggle” for life seems to have been the theme of Hitler’s famous work – Mein Kampf (i.e. My Struggle). His struggle was the preservation of the Aryan race, the favored race according to Hitler.

Some people coming out of Communist countries tell of how the Communists used evolution in schools to remove the consciousness of God from the minds of the people. Evolution removes the authority of God, and makes man his own god – accountable to no one but himself. In Communist countries, Marxist Atheism is the rule and the state is the supreme authority. Yet according to The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (first published in 1997), some 94 million people were mass murdered in the 20th century by this atheist form of government. That’s more than all the people killed through the Crusades and the Inquisitions combined. Keep that in mind the next time your atheist friend tells you about the “evils” of religion in government. Also remember that evolution is the cornerstone of both atheism and the occult.

They can deny it all they want, the evolutionists, such as those at EvC forums, and of course they will deny it and muster all kinds of ridiculous notions of "evidence" against it, but it's well known that evolutionism goes hand in hand with dehumanization and atheism.

More evidence for the Flood

This is a unique geological phenomenon known as Danxia landform. These phenomena can be observed in several places in China. This example is located in Zhangye, Province of Gansu.

The color is the result of an accumulation for millions of years of red sandstone and other rocks. layered deposition of wet separated sediments by the Flood of Noah, distorted by tectonic forces set in motion during the same event, now hardened into red sandstone and other rocks.

The messiness (aka bloodiness, harmfulness, ugliness) challenge to creationism answered again

Just a quick comment on that same thread about novel features I posted on below. Tangle has been bringing it back from time to time, Zaius and WK get off into technical neverland occasionally but even they are doing a better job than I would have expected of keeping the main question in mind, which is whether mutations are the source of new alleles / traits, or they are built in from the beginning. So far they are unable to make a definite call. Of course I'm convinced that any actually useful alleles were there from the beginning and that mutations are ONLY destructive accidents that evolutionists have pounced on as their one vain hope for a mechanism of change that could support the theory.

Be that as it may, what I really wanted to comment on was Tangle's off-the-cuff comment in the post linked above:

ABE - as an irrelevant aside, the sheer messiness and complexity of these systems are evidence against design.

Well, it's true that God's original design doesn't account for it, but since what you really mean is that it's evidence against creationism as such, that's not so, Tangle. This is another favorite evolutionist challenge to creationism that has been answered over and over but keeps being thrown out there again anyway.

It can only be answered by a BIBLICAL creationist, however, who accepts Genesis in its entirety and doesn't try to read extra time between the lines or explain away the traditional understanding of the text:

The messiness of genetics is explained not by the Creation -- that is, God's original design -- but by the Fall, which introduced the processes of death and disease into the Creation. Complexity is one thing, expectable in God's Creation -- that rightly should lead to awe and appreciation -- but the kind of complexity that is really unpredictable chaos and confusion that is difficult to interpret must be attributed to the Fall. Mutations must be attributed to the Fall -- until someone can show that their occurrence obeys a law, which so far hasn't happened and doesn't seem at all likely ever to happen. Mutations are accidents, mistakes in the replication of the genetic material, KNOWN to be the cause of thousands of disease processes and NOT known even once to have produced a viable healthy allele.

Design is not challenged by the messiness, the messiness was introduced by disobedience of God, and evidence for this is everywhere in damage to the original creation -- which still shines through in many ways nevertheless.