Pardon me.
It’s a bit unChristian of me to do so, but…
I don’t get a whole lot of opportunity, in Great Debates, to do this.
Bill, over on the Pizza Parlor when you mentioned opening this thread, I said that I didn’t believe anybody rejected God on account of evolution, contrary to what you believe.
Note the page-and-a-half of responses above, where atheists and other non-Christians are saying exactly that.
I rest my case.
<sigh> I’ve been resisting posting this, but temptation is too great, the flesh is weak and the spirit falters.
So. My confession.
Friends, I was once a heroic figure of a man, as opposed to the twisted mockery I am now. What changed me? Where did I go wrong? One word. darwin.
I was once a devout bible literalist. I mocked those who didn’t believe that God had a physical finger that he could point at people. I sneered at those who disbelieved the flood and I mocked…I openly mocked…people who believed in evolution. But one day, SATAN himself appeared before me in a flash of red, sulphury smoke and said “Mah frey-end! Yew have been looking at thee-ings th’ wrohang way! Yew be-leahf in th’ Bible, but thar is an-other boohk! A boohk that will seht yew free to dew any-thiang! No mo-aher ru-les!”
He handed me a book . It was The Voyage of the Beagle. Suddenly, I felt different! I knew that if we evolved, I was free to throw everything I learned, knew, and believed out the window. I could be…[sub]an athiest![/sub] And that meant I was free to have late-night cocaine orgies with nubile stewardesses who would give me Swedish foot-massages afterwards! How could I resist? I became wicked because everyone knows athiests have no morals or character, right? Even your initial question presupposes that! (To restate your question: Are you only an athiest because evolution allows you to distance yourself from God?)
I couldn’t help myself. I began reading and Darwin’s Godless view started me down this dark path. But Darwin wasn’t enough; oh no, not for me. I graduated to Sagan, Gardner, Houdini (yes, that Houdini), Randi, Dawkins and more. I even read Gould! I couldn’t stop! This is what caused me to become the monster you now see.
Fellow Dopers: warn your children! Beware! This could happen to you!
Fenris
(footnote: I’m not actually an athiest. But I sometimes play on on the SDMB)
Sorry to hijack but does anyone know why Satan has been banned? He was one of my favourite posters.
There’s a thread about it over in ATMB.
Fenris
here is the story…
Daphina comment about Save Scooby was priceless. 
He was funny well I guess he still is. Sorry about his job though that sux.
Yes Poly,
You were right and you are entitled to beat your chest a few time but not too many.
I still think I should have approached the question better. Because after all evolution is here and they have to “imagine” it not being here. So there will be a bias.
I should have phrased the question were there more atheists percentage wise before the advent of evolution or after? That would have been a better question.
Umm…I hate to be a bitch by pointing out the obvious. But the “advent of evolution” was…well…millions of years before anyone got to decide whether they were an atheist or not. So this is another moot question.
Why not just admit you’re wrong. You won’t find any evidence to the contrary.
-L
Wildest Bill wrote:
This is totally off topic, but we are dedicated to eradicating ignorance here at the SDMB. So here’s your answer: http://www.awitness.org/contrabib/torah/calf.html
If you don’t want to read the whole article (not all of which is on topic), I’ll give you my brief summary of the Golden Calf story:
The Golden Calf incident:
By far the strongest evidence for post-Mosaic authorship can be found in this story. There are over a dozen aspects in common between Aaron’s creation of the Golden Calf in the Sinai desert, and king Jeroboam’s creation of the Golden Calf religious centers at Dan and Bethel. Here are some:
There are also some peculiarities in the stories that defy explanation. Why is Aaron not punished for committed the ultimate act of disobedience, at a time when the people needed his unswerving devotion to YHWH the most? Why is Joshua disassociated from this heresy? Why does Moses smash the Ten Commandments? Why do the Levites bloodily purge the idolators from the camp?
The answer is that this entire story is a polemical fiction. After the kingdom split, the high priests of the northern kingdom were left jobless, as the city of Jerusalem was in the southern kingdom, with the all-important central Temple. Then, king Jeroboam decided to establish new religious centers and Dan and Bethel. This should have been a good thing for Abiathar and his cohorts. But it was not. Instead of choosing the exiled Shiloh priests to serve at these new centers, he chose the existing priesthood at Dan and Bethel. Thus, an exiled Shiloh priest decided to write a polemical text condemning Jeroboam and the new golden calf religious centers.
The Shiloh priests were Mushites; descendents of Moses. The priests who remained in Jerusalem were Zadokites, descendents of Aaron through Zadok. Thus there was great antipathy toward Aaron from the Mushite priests. So when E wrote this story, he depicts Aaron as the idolator, in order to condemn the current class of Aaronite priests in Jerusalem. Aaron’s heresy is worshipping a golden calf. This is a condemnation of the new golden calf centers at Dan and Bethel. Suddenly, everything falls into place.
Aaron cannot be punished as he deserved, because any mark would disqualify him and his descendants from the priesthood. Since everyone knew that there were many Aaronite priests, this would make the story unbelievable, and consequently worthless. Aaron could not be punished no matter how great his sin.
Joshua does not participate in the heresy because he is a northern hero, from the tribe of Ephraim, whose reputation the northern author wishes to save.
Moses smashes the Ten Commandments because the Ark of the Covenant–which allegedly contained the Decalogue–was in the Jerusalem Temple! If the commandments were actually smashed, then the Ark of the Covenant could have no more than a copy of them. The story diminishes the importance of a major southern kingdom artifact.
The Levites are praised for their actions because the author was a non-Aaronical Levite. Thus, while Aaron is the bad guy, all the rest of the Levites are good. This story accepts the exclusive Levitical claim to priesthood, while dismissing the Aaronide claim.
So there’s your answer!
Opus1, I like that website till I noticed this: http://www.awitness.org/essays/ufonav.html He believes some UFOs are alien spacecraft.
He’s probably right about the biblical discrepencies he’s found, but his belief in UFOs hurts his credibility. He isn’t skeptical enough for my tastes.
**
You heard it right, folks. WB starts a thread expecting to prove that evolution turns people away from Jesus. People overwhelmingly report that no, evolution didn’t turn them away from Jesus, and a number of people WAG that creationism turns more people away from Jesus than evolution does.
Obviously it can’t be the case that evolution doesn’t really turn people away from Jesus. It must be that the question was phrased in a way that overtaxed the imagination of the people being polled, and that skewed things so heavily that it looked like WB was completely and utterly wrong, when in reality he is, of course, completely right. So…
… just rephrase the question! Just fish and fish and fish until your fishing expedition turns up the answer you’re looking for, eh, WB?
Anyway, your rephrasing of the question is simply awful. If you want to know if evolution turns people away from Jesus, you have to ask people what you asked in the first place: did evolution turn them away from Jesus? And the answer is quite plainly that no, it did not, and furthermore there are plenty of evolutionists who are Christians.
If you ask whether there are more atheists before or after “the advent of evolution” (sic) then you’re going to come up with a misleading answer because correlation doesn’t imply causation. For example, around the time of Darwin, Cantor proved that some infinities are larger than others. Does Cantor’s proof turn people away from Jesus? Well, were there more atheists before Cantor, or after? What about the Civil War? How many atheists before and after? The number of atheists in America seems to have risen sharply since the moon landing. Can we blame this on the fact that the Apollo missions overwhelmingly vindicated round-earthism?
-Ben
jab1 wrote:
Now jab1, as a good skeptic you should know a logical fallacy when you see one. The evidence presented on this website stands or falls on its own accord. The fact that the author also believes in UFO’s is irrelevant. If pressed, I can show you numerous instances of famous and brilliant scientists who made remarkable discoveries, but believed all kinds of other nonsense. Newton, Watson & Crick, Hoyle, and some Indian physicist whose name I can’t remember right now come to mind.
Ahhh… JEDP.
A brief note about the Documentary Hypothesis…
It’s not as ‘rock solid’ a theory as you may believe.
AHEM I am an atheist because of the Bible.
Navigator:
What, I’m supposed to be impressed because you post a link from a Christian apologetic website claiming that the Documentary Hypothesis is a doomed theory? Hmmm. What other famous theory has been attacked similarly by people with similar theological/political motivations?
If you want to convince me, show me evidence. Don’t point me to a list of famous people and say “Look! They all disagree with you, so there!” especially when I can provide a list ten times as long of people who support my position.
If you’re interested in having an actual discussion about the unity and date of the Torah, I would be happy to oblige. You may begin by presented evidence that the story of the Golden Calf is an historical event, not a theopolitical polemical text, like Miller’s “The Crucible.” After that, I would suggest you look at this article next.
Ummm… no you don’t have to be impressed. Thought you might be interested in seeing an alternative perspective than the one you espoused… in the intrest of increasing knowledge. I guess I was wrong.
Fair enough, I’ll remember that in the future.
Fixed the link. Preview is your friend. 
(Oh, so you’re a moderator on another board, huh? 
I’m still uncomfortable accepting the conclusions of someone who thinks UFOs are driven by ETs, but you’re right, each person’s claim must be examined independently of any other claim they may make. F’r instance, Jack Chick has published some damning (and ACCURATE) evidence against the validity of Mormonism. Nearly everything else JTC has written is full of errors, if not outright lies (Hitler was a Catholic?!?! The Vatican is responsible for the Holocaust?!?!), but with Mormonism, he got much of it right.
OK, I’m a biologist in training, so I may have an ascertainment bias but:
I do believe quite honestly that learning more science (and especially the molecular genetics which I study every day) has made me see the absurdity of the first chapter of Genesis. That, and the whole Noah’s Ark thing. Before graduate school, I would have defined myself as a practicing conservative Jew. I now define myself either as a reformed Reform Jew or a optimistic agnostic.
I have had numerous debates about this with the orthodox Jew in my lab (he considers it a life crusade to recruit non-practicing Jews back into the fold). Everytime he comes back to me with a slightly more sophisticated argument, which to me is no more convincing. First, he argued allegory argument (a “day” is several million years). I pointed out that in Genesis, the plants come before the sun. He next came back to me with the whole weak vs. strong anthropic principle thing. He argued that the universe was “molded for life” while I retorted that we are who we are only because the universe is as it is. Back and forth, etc.
Why do I call myself an optimistic agnostic?
I do find avenues of science which spark my curiosity about “design.” These are not in biology however – the more I study life, the more non-designed it looks. I have a penchant for reading physics books, and theories which contradict locality arguments (Bell’s theorem, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) and supersymmetry are two which stand out. While I don’t understand these fully yet (I have to get a PhD in something else at the moment), it sure appears to me that if you are looking for a scientific argument for divinity, this is where you would look, and not at the quagmire that we call molecular genetics and evolution.
And that to me is a source of optimism, because I think it is rather gratifying to be able to cling to the idea of a non-observable realm beyond human experience where all is good and at peace.
Actually, as an aside, Jab, Hitler, being Austrian, probably was Catholic. Whether or not he was a GOOD or practicing Catholic is what’s up for debate.
Opus, JFTR, I hold to a variant on the Documentary Hypothesis – while I think that the Torah derives mostly from pre-monarchy days, and is in part Mosaic, I do accept four strands of tradition emphasizing the specific aspects of particular interest to the people preserving that strand. (That’s my personal hypothesis, subject to proof or disproof by experts in the field.)
However, it’s worth pointing out that a computer-based analysis of word use of the four strands, which was not a conservative effort to prove their point but was intended to sort out precisely what passages could be ascribed to what source and whether any were not from one of the four, did give some statistical evidence suggesting that the entire text was from the same author. I apologize for not having a link to this – I read about it about four years ago, offline, I think in a review in BAR.
The implications of this are, I think, obvious.
edwino wrote:
[hijack]
You might like reading Greg Bear’s novel Moving Mars. He turns Bell’s Theorem into a weapon of mass destruction.
[/hijack]