Tonight Lilandra and I will be talking about the Religious Right’s corruption of Texas textbooks.
Tonight on Age of Reason
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Check out Darryl Youngblood’s rational Defense of Faith video on YouTube! It is an interesting look at a Christian’s attempt at proving the validity of his belief with a minimum of appeal to faith-type cop outs http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iytH3nyJTss
@jdubs
Youngblood starts off with cinematic butthurt (“if you go after the mind of my child, you better be ready for war”), which doesn’t bode well. Reminds me of Josh McDowell’s admonishment against using the internet.
Youngblood then whips out a very tired straw man. He says that scientists claim that science has proven that there is no god. What a load of crap. If his entire presentation is addressed towards this straw man, then I don’t need to waste my time. But let’s see where this goes.
And we start in with a Lee Strobel-esque “I used to be a skeptic” nonsense. Again, red flags everywhere. The dumb abiogenesis straw man (and lies, since you’ll rarely find anything about abiogenesis in a textbook before college, and Youngblood is not college-educated) follows, which has absolutely nothing to do with a deity. And then he lies again when he says “no real answers” (there’s a decent amount of work on abiogenesis) and throws in some “assumptions and theories” nonsense in Ray Comfort style. It’s probably going to go all downhill from hill.
During this “theories” talk, he lies about the stances of Dawkins and Hitchens, which is unsurprising. Then he goes into more evolution babble. Are we just supposed to take this dude’s word that he looked for “answers?” Because his story sounds incredibly contrived. It’s virtually identical to the “background” of Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel.
Ah, the DNA talk. “Information,” “binary code,” etc. Plus a few random genetic-flavored words to impress his woefully uneducated audience.
Oh, this guy can screw himself. “I was always criticized as a Christian for believing in fairy tales and magical creations…” Really, dude? Because most likely, no one gave a shit or even cared you were a christian. This isn’t anything that happens in reality. The Christian persecution complex is maddening and dishonest. I’m done with this tool.
No, jdubs, this is not a “rational defense of faith.” This is an amalgamation of lies and red herrings with common creationist talking points, an appalling victim complex, and sad, pathetic arguments from ignorance. That’s it.
Meh, I can see that as fairly accurate description on the state of abiogenesis. The difference between you two can be described as one of subtleties and nuance.
Your mention of the Christians who say “If you make sense, it’s the Devil talking”, got me thinking of a way you could turn this attitude around on them: If the Devil is the king of lies, then nothing he says should make any sense and anything which doesn’t make sense is from the Devil. If you make sense, then it’s not because the Devil is talking through you, but because God is talking through you. After all, God supposedly can’t lie, so everything God says should make sense, and everything which makes sense comes from God.
This probably doesn’t make sense to any atheist, but it’s the same sort of convoluted mess that seems to make sense to the religious, so maybe they might buy it.