Whenever some believer wants to have a protracted discussion in private, it’s frustrating for me because they expect me to go through all this trouble to re-educate that one person alone, only to then see them stick their fingers in their ears, and then I can’t use that discussion as evidence against them. This is precisely why such discussions should be held in a public forum. For example, below is one of the most recent messages I’ve received from a wanna-believer–who’s only connection to rationality is that he wishes to remain anonymous. I’ll blend my reply with his indented original message.
1.
(a) Noah never existed. He is an exagguration of the earlier legend of Ziusudra who survived a localized flood of the city of Shuruppak and Kish in 2900 BCE.
(b) There is no such thing as a “kind”. If you want to argue otherwise, you’ll have to take the Phylogeny Challenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0zpk0lPFU
(a) Grizzlies were never on the ark because grizzlies, raccoons, weasels, wolverines, and badgers lived in North America 5000 years ago; not Iraq. In the original story of Ziusudra, he only saved some of his own livestock and that’s it.
(b) There was never a global flood. This is matter of absolute certainty. Here is a playlist to prove it. After you have watched every episode, we can talk about the flood again; not before.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMJP95iZJqEjmc5oxY5r6BzP
(a) No one knows anything about the creation mechanism other than that it’s magic, and creationists don’t even realize that much.
(b) Evolution is not “encoded”; it’s a matter of population genetics.
(c) When you state the properties of God, you’re asserting baseless speculation about unsupported assumptions of the evidently imaginary and which is not even physically possible.
(d) The first penguins emerged in the early Paleocene, about 60 million years before the time of your flood legend.
(e) God is not possible. He is a character adapted from Canaanite mythology blended with Mesopotamian mythology.
(f) There is no “programmer”. Genetics shows incidental design through the properties of emergence. This is bottom-up natural pattern rather than a top-down administration.
Desert deities and demons were often depicted like djinni (genies). Early Islamic literature depicts the djinn as devious air elementals. They weren’t usually confined to bottles or lamps, but were more often described as freeroaming nomadic spirits. That’s why wandering whirlwinds are called “dust devils.” There are also strong similarities between the medieval vision of the djinni and our modern impressions of God. Remember how Elijah was taken up to heaven? In a whirlwind.
Such a transition was easy for YHWH, because we supposedly say his name whenever we breathe through our mouths. That’s perfect for an air god. Since the earliest creation myths, the gods would “breathe the breath of life” into their clay golems to animate them, and that too is an apparent precedent to Genesis 2. Throughout the time when the Bible was being composed, its authors commonly believed that the first breath of a child was the moment when its body became “infused with the spirit” as a living being. And of course, the flood in Genesis 6 was meant to drown everything that had “the breath of life.” In fact, the single wisest comment I could find in the entirety of the Bible again shows better than any other passage how our notions of spirituality actually stem from a misunderstanding of the natural aspects of air.
“I said to myself concerning the sons of men, God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth? I have seen that nothing is better than that man should be happy in his activities, for that is his lot. For who will bring him to see what will occur after him?”
This is Ecclesiastes 3:18–22 according to the New American Standard Bible. The New Revised Standard Version, the American Standard Version, and the King James Version all replace the word “breath” with “spirit.”
Likewise, if you compare Luke 23:46 in the New American Standard or the New Revised Standard versions of the Bible with the King James or the American Standard Version, you’ll see again that “breathed his last” means the same as “gave up the ghost.” When the story says that Jesus commits his “spirit” to God, and gives up “the ghost,” or “breathed his last,” in each case they’re talking about the “breath of life” as if that is his “spirit.” This translation eloquently illustrates the gaseous origin of man’s belief in his own soul. Another example, Ezekiel 37:5–10, has a necromancer going into a bone yard to revive an army of the dead, wherein YHWH commands that these bodies be reanimated by the spirit/breath of life.
(b) There is no such thing as angels. That idea actually came from the Zoroastrian religion.
(c) There is no such thing as demigods either, though that idea was common across the whole region at that time, from Hindus to Hellenists.
(d) I used to study Bhakti. I’ve read the works of Sri Probupad and I’ve been to the Hindu temples many times. Vishnu and Krishna are shown blue because that’s how they traditionally represented black-skinned people. It had nothing to do with anyone poisoning themselves.
(e) The nephilim are irrelevant to anything, since they weren’t from the sky and they weren’t “high ones” meaning tall either. They were known only as an exalted group, possibly nobles from Babylon. That’s it, that’s all.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Romans 8:22
(b) Turtles did have both beaks and teeth once. So did birds and some non-avian dinosaurs. But the bladed nature of beaks often overrides or replaces the necessity of teeth. So beaked animals tend not to keep their teeth. Instead they’re lost and in some species, the beak builds teeth-like serrations into it.
(c) We do NOT know that “that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”. If you can’t show it, you don’t know it.
(d) Cosmos refers to everything. Calling it creation is a question-begging fallacy which assumes an unnecessary imaginary invisible man behind everything.
(e) God never decreed anything. The differences in Biblical ages came from a mistranslation of the Mesopotamian sexigemsimal number system.
(f) There is no such things as demons either, just like there is no such thing as angelic or demonic DNA. If there was, we’d know it. Because we have already found and identified Neanderthal DNA, Denisovan DNA, and the DNA of a fourth human subspecies for which we haven’t found any fossils yet. This last group is only evident in the genes of Melanesian.
(g) There is no such thing as the “supernatural” (ie magical). Neanderthals bad bigger hind brains than we do but not as much forebrain. That may be way they couldn’t compete. Interbreeding was also extremely limited, indicating a natural speciation.
7. Everything you think you know is wrong. You’re absolutely wrong about absolutely everything. I could fill your cup with nectar, but it is already full of shit and we’ll have to dump that out first.
This conversation has already exhausted so much of my time that it would only be worth it if I could show it to others for the common good. Otherwise this is much too much just to do a favor for a stranger when I know no one else can get anything out of it.
[end quote]
Since the faithful will never accept any correction, then every post gets longer and longer as they get wronger and wronger. So he wrote another lengthy reply, mostly full of irrelevant citations of passages from his favorite fables. The only important thing he said that he was going to stick by “the truth” [of his lies] and that even if he did allow me to prove evolution to his satisfaction, he still wouldn’t believe it. Why didn’t he just tell me he was completely dishonestly unreasonable and irrational in the first place? I could have saved so much time.
