JaeIsGod

Oh , so true. When im debating a YEC , we both play out some arguments and the YEC arguments get trashed. However , then they start with things like "Well , if we are just animals , whats the point of living" or "So we live for a few years and then rot away in a grave and get forgotten". Thats far harder to deal with then those silly YEC arguments , since I cant say much more then "Yeah , there isnt a higher purpose to our existance" and "Well , yeah , once your dead your dead".

And imho that is what prevents so many from leaving this flawed view.

JaeIsGod

Btw , you guys are like "YEC's are rare in europe" and all , but how many are there exactly in US? Any percentages on that?

scombrid

????don't know the #'s for population as a whole. I think it depends on location.

I was raised Baptist. The vast majority were YEC. Most of my home town is Baptist and YEC.
I dropped YEC belief round about age 10. Even in my Baptist family, YEC was a belief for the fundy fringe. (How my father with a Phd in ichthyology tolerated Baptist services and Sunday school I'll never know. I know he was happy when I started playing travel soccer which prevented church attendance).
I went to Catholic High School. Very few there were YEC. Most believed in some form of theistic evolution. Just a few old timers were still YEC.
Here at a marine science institute I know of 1 YEC student and one faculty member that might be. 5-10% of lab techs are YEC with most of the YEC techs being locals that learned lab work as a trade and weren't university educated. At least 25% of the hourly workers (grounds and building maintenance) are YEC.

I didn't even realize there was a creationist movement in this country until an old family friend showed up on our doorstep with a bunch of Dr. Dino bullshit. Heck, I didn't even realize I was an atheist until then either. I was happy being an inactive fence sitting sort-of believer. After he dumped his garbage on me I boned up on this whole Evo/Creat controversy and got to thinking about my beliefs and realized that I didn't believe much. I was essentially an apatheist and didn't even know it. Not only did creationist proselytizing make me become acutely vigilant of creationist efforts to undermine science curricula, it was the final straw in my belief. Had I not been pestered I'd have probably happily continued to be someone that believed in nothing supernatural in daily life but still believed in a higher power. Man did he screw up.

Taffer

I know the sole YEC family I know here in Bern is in the minority. I count myself lucky that I get along pretty well with their son after all; I was a bit nettled when he tried to convert me, but now we hardly ever touch the subject.

I propose a motto for this thread:
"You don't have to eat the entire turd to know it's not a crab cake."
- Julian "Bean" Delphiki

Milkman Dan

This is the problem: creationists see species as something fixed and not as a human made concept that is used to subdivide a continuum. A consequence of this is a certain fuzziness of its borders.

A similar case is the subdivision of the visible spectrum into colors like red, yellow, green, blue. The transition between these colors is continuous and we can't say for sure where 'red' ends and 'yellow' begins. Of course we can introduce a new designation for the border region (let's call it orange) but with this we haven't solved our problem but now we have two fuzzy transitions.

So what most creationists basically do is look at a band of the spectrum that is only 0.5 nm wide and conclude that there is no change.

However, as long creationists (YEC's in general) cling to this strawman i.e. that a lizard must give birth to a bird for instance or because some animals look pretty much like their ancestors a few hundred or thousand years ago evolution is invalid, I think arguing with them is rather futile because you'll permanently talk past each other.

Rational BAC

Scombrid --------That happens when the only seeming choices are an absurd belief in Genesis (creationism) as compared to the much more logical atheist tenets.

It is a shame that you felt that there were only 2 choices. Mainstream Christianity also considers Genesis to be just a story.---not to be taken seriously in any kind of factual way.

You can be a Christian and not be a fundamentalist. Actually most Christians are very liberal in their thinking. Most Christians wholeheartedly support evolution and think that the fundy position is at best absurd.

DBT

In one way I think that YEC are completely correct, and that is if you start picking and choosing what is true and what is myth in the bible it cannot be considered the word of God.
So it goes into the same basket as Ra, Zeus, Odin,etc

Rational BAC

The Bible is not the word of God. It is the word about God.

One can be a Christian and not believe in the Bible literally. Most Christians are like that. Live with it. I know Fundies are much easier to debate than Cherry Picking Christians. But we are the majority. We are the reality.

The_Unknown_Banana

If the bible is not the word of god, then it was made by humans who wrote about god as they understood him. Correct? So basically, (and in my opinion) you're putting all your faith in the humans who wrote the bible - not God.

TiredJim

Donkeys and horses give birth to... mules?