lpetrich

It's "Indo-European"; the German name for this language family has the literal translation of"Indo-Germanic".

The existence of this family is inferred from certain similarities of many languages of Europe, the Middle East, and India, and extrapolation from such known history as Latin -> Romance languages.

But a creationist may say something like "Latin-to-Romance is microevolution; ancestral Indo-European to its various family members is macroevolution."

As to where and when ancestral Indo-European was spoken, that has been the source of much controversy, but the favorite candidate spots of the last few decades have been near the Black Sea.

The favorite spot of J.P. Mallory, who has written In Search of the Indo-Europeans is just north of the Black Sea about 4500-3500 BCE -- older than the story of the Tower of Babel would allow (~2000 BCE).

Taffer

Thanks for clearing that up. You know you've found fora that warrant a stay when every other reply makes you feel stupid.

Ab_Normal

My husband, when he puts his fundie hat on (mostly to watch me squirm), would say, "Satan put the fossils here to lead us astray." Yes, his parents went to some darn kooky churches...

Bree

As a child I too was told similar things - that God put the dinosaur bones on earth to confuse the non-believers and to give the True Christians something to giggle at.

mike_decock

It's something I have come to call "exclusive skepticism". They will gladly accept evidence, verified or not, which supports their worldview but will reject anything which contradicts it.

The worst case scenario is when they believe that the evidence which can't be easily refuted is a fraudulent deception. That's a sure sign of cult behavior.

Why don't we just call Christianity what it really is: a big-ass freakish CULT.

-Mike...

christ-on-a-stick

Hi Mike - 'Round these parts, we do

"Exclusive skepticism" - good term!!!

Calzaer

A cult is a religion with no political power. :b

mike_decock

Thanks

I came up with the term during my deconversion process. I was asking a Christian friend of mine what he thought about the Epic of Gilgamesh. I said that it pre-dates the Biblical account and his response was:

"Says who?"

I responded with:

"Respectable archaeologists. The epic is written in cuneiform which pre-dates Hebrew"

He said:

"Well, I think you're just being deceived."

That's cult behavior and exclusive skepticism if I ever saw it. I declared myself an atheist about a week later.

-Mike...

Sabine Grant

I always cringe when generalization takes over a thread which otherwise would be very productive. Christ on a Stick's OP refers to fundamentalists not to the overall currents of christianity.
Some christians such as myself do not feel threatened by evolution. We simply aknowledge it as part of a system created by the divine. We are grateful for the human intelligence. We do not consider intelligence to be a "sin". We differ from the humanists as we attribute human intelligence as part of the same system created by the divine.
Not everything has to be extreme and a threat to anyone. It all depends how much faith in a sovereign god a believer has.
If believers move under the " be still and know that I am" there is no reason to get all out of shape because of evolution.

Illithid

It must take great patience to continually remind everyone that not all theists are looneytunes. There are lots of believers in various religions that I can quite comfortably share a world with, even though each of us has the opinion that the other is mistaken about something.

These aren't the people who get the headlines, of course.