Is that it then? Did reason triumph?

Seems to be.

No, reason did not triumph. Triumph would be when some argument had gotten across, and any shift in position was not for shifting goal posts but a shift towards reality.

Pressed for an analogy, I'd say discussions with creationists are like arguing to a person who talks in his sleep. You can argue and refute all you want, but it doesn't have any effect. I'm really at a loss why.

As I've argued before, we should reconsider our strategy. I've read some studies where the only way to convince people would be to ask them questions (which I think are basically leading questions) and let them draw conclusions from that themselves. And if the conclusions are wrong (which they obviously are), ask more questions.

Bert

At some point we'll see a new thread from JayJay, which will essentially be a rehash of his assertions from previous threads.

The thread will look like to a totally new clown car of a discussion, but will very swiftly be revealed as the same old clown car with a new lick of paint and the doors reattached with string. As per the other threads, the clown car will collapse hilariously the moment any serious discussion touches it.

Sendraks wrote:At some point we'll see a new thread from JayJay, which will essentially be a rehash of his assertions from previous threads.

The thread will look like to a totally new clown car of a discussion, but will very swiftly be revealed as the same old clown car with a new lick of paint and the doors reattached with string. As per the other threads, the clown car will collapse hilariously the moment any serious discussion touches it.

You're forgetting the obviously hand-drawn fake number plates.

A thread simply wouldn't be a jayjay thread without a large dose of hopeless and transparent dishonesty to go along with the ignorance, pomposity and fake humility of his posts.

I wonder if Mussorgsky ever wrote a piece called '... and the argument you rode in on?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Wish you all well

No you don't. You wish we were all suffering in your imaginary Hell for never falling to our knees and proclaiming your silly fantasies as gospel.

"When faced with the presence of nuchal humps on male Cichlid fishes, invent some specious drivel about them being used to head-butt predators."

Jayjay4547 wrote:This claim is that the human origin story has been presented as one of self-creation, in reactive opposition to the Genesis story in which human beings were made by something greater than themselves- and which is a basic truth about human origins and the human status.

It includes responses to posts in the topic "Dialog on Creationists read this"

You've gone so far down the rabbit hole, you don't even remember that you built the rabbit hole.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I am logging off Ratskep,...

There is a god, after all!

Jayjay4547 wrote: having said about as much as I would like to here and at present, on the topic of how atheist ideology messed up the human origin story.

You mean you've run out of credulous poo to sling. I have to acknowledge your fortitude. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you still managed to contrive a seemingly endless stream of bollocks and regurgitate it for years. It's rare to meet someone who thinks they've got something to say even when all they're doing is proudly producing the lint from their navels.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Wish you all well

I'd wish you a clue, but sadly miracles are yet more supernatural pap that are not concordant with reality.

bert wrote:No, reason did not triumph. Triumph would be when some argument had gotten across, and any shift in position was not for shifting goal posts but a shift towards reality.

Pressed for an analogy, I'd say discussions with creationists are like arguing to a person who talks in his sleep. You can argue and refute all you want, but it doesn't have any effect. I'm really at a loss why.

As I've argued before, we should reconsider our strategy. I've read some studies where the only way to convince people would be to ask them questions (which I think are basically leading questions) and let them draw conclusions from that themselves. And if the conclusions are wrong (which they obviously are), ask more questions.

Bert

There are some people who are open-minded, who want to know the truth, and they are worth spending the time to engage in serious discussion with. We've seen some of those people here, who could not simply ignore the evidence presented to them and ended up publicly changing their minds.

But that's just not the case for far too many people. They're not interested in a discussion, they're just about the poo slinging. Aside from a silent audience, there's no one to persuade in such circumstances. JJ, for example, would never give ground on any point. You could provide dozens of sources contradicting a claim of his and he'd still wriggle around until finally it became part of the narrative he used to avoid dealing with such difficulties. The great chimpanzee fiasco is such an example - no, chimps do not lunge at predators with their gaping maws, here JJ look at these videos of chimpanzee aggression: see? Oh that 0.2 second frame where you can't see the chimpanzee's mouth is where he's lunging with his fangs so you were right all along? Such people don't so much offer arguments as weebles - you can knock them down, but they proudly stand back up again, declaring the fact that they'd fallen a testimony to how they were correct all along. There's no win scenario, only countering lies and contrivances.

The fervent creationist is essentially a breed of conspiracy theorist, reasoning from their conclusion that things are incapable of being explained by the evidence when the evidence does not account for their personal beliefs about things.

I thought one of his funniest moments was when, while desperately trying to pretend that predator defence was essentially the only driving force worth considering for the development of weapon-capable tools, he ended up confabulating generation after generation of Australopithecus ancestors regularly training with their predator-defence weapons while seemingly not using them for anything else, and declared that that was logically what must have happened.

I wonder, is his 'logging off' meant to suggest he's buggered off for good, or is he hoping people will say what they really think of him so he can come back and complain and end up getting them sanctioned?

tolman wrote:I thought one of his funniest moments was when, while desperately trying to pretend that predator defence was essentially the only driving force worth considering for the development of weapon-capable tools, he ended up confabulating generation after generation of Australopithecus ancestors regularly training with their predator-defence weapons while seemingly not using them for anything else, and declared that that was logically what must have happened.

JJ only uses the labels, he thinks in the labels - that's the problem! Sometime he heard or read the term 'predator defense' and somehow came to the conclusion that knowing a label alone provides all the insight he needs to pontificate foreverafter!

What matters is training those labels towards a precanned diatribe. If you go back through JJ's wandering Russian Doll etiology, you find that underlying all his wide and multi-disciplinary contentions is a single position: evidence can be interpreted differently, and the evil oppressive rush of the last century and a half's secularisation of society has meant that all our interpretations are skewed away from the otherwise obvious manifest Creation by his particular loving Sky Papa.

As a consequence of this, he believes that we are all either acting in concert against him - the beleaguered yet mighty theist warrior - to advance our anti-God agendas, or that we're too dumb to understand that we're the gullible sheep of a terrible and oppressive system - as someone mentioned before; Creationists are just a religious form of conspiracy theorist.

As a consequence of this, he feels he needs to provide a contending explanation for every single piece of evidence raised, because he cannot give ground at all. This leads him to make nearly endless deceptive, misrepresentative, mendacious accounts either in support of his own position, or reporting on what actually occurred in another thread of conversation he'd pontificated on, result in him losing all respect from the other members engaging him, being called a 'liar', and then using that as support for his notion that we're all acting in concert against him. Self-fulfilling martyrdom: he's a Christian, alright!

tolman wrote:I wonder, is his 'logging off' meant to suggest he's buggered off for good, or is he hoping people will say what they really think of him so he can come back and complain and end up getting them sanctioned?

Couldn't care either way, but I guess he's not yet finished flogging his dead horse.

I'm on-and-off writing a document that I'd like to distribute to get religious people to keep their religion to themselves.

I'm trying (!) to make it such that it isn't too much of a personal attack. One line of reasoning is one I used in this thread before, where I told JJ that he could well be wrong, statistically speaking, as no religion has a majority, so even if there is a religion that is correct, most of the religious people would be wrong.

Here's a guy who did this very eloquently and smoothly:

www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_artic ... ung-person

I hope this planted the seed of doubt.

Bert

One would hope so Berty, but I think when one gets to the point of advocating creationism 'scientifically' on the internet in a 'viper's nest' of rational thinkers one is probably pretty convinced that there are no possible or plausible alternatives to the self-proclaimed truth of one's faith.

Calilasseia wrote:But of course, faith is the whole problem. It's nothing more than uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions, usually leavened with a specious pseudo-hyper-scepticism of any science that doesn't genuflect before said unsupported assertions, based upon duplicitous misrepresentations and outright fabrications.

I don't think much progress can be made until religion and faith are regarded as forms of mental dysfunction.

Not enough is being done to research how these faith habituations set up addictive behaviors and delusions. Once established, anything to do with what is believed becomes sealed off. This prohibition of critical thinking and evidence that may challenge the belief is really interesting in that it is usually specific.

The disease called faith or religion generally does not affect cognition in other, unrelated subjects, and perhaps for this reason, psychologists /psychiatrists will dismiss any claim that faith based thinking is dysfunctional.

I presume this is also a naturalistic fallacy. Because belief is a natural part of being human, they do not want to treat it as a dysfunction or disease.

What we need to do is force creationists to read the Bible, verse by verse, and then explain how the can possibly believe that Noah and his sons and daughters-in-law all getting busy with multiplying straight after the flood that killed everyone else on earth, could possibly have filled the earth with their incestuous offspring in less than a thousand years. I challenge a creationist to come up with an explanation for this. The Bible explains how each of the sons bred a city of people within two generations, down from Noah to Abraham, but what they don't reason into this is that within two generations of inbreeding, i.e. cousins with cousins and the offspring of cousins with cousins, would have resulted in serious inherited issues causing them to die out within at the least three generations. Maybe someone who knows more about how this would work, could explain this before a creationist arrives to defend it. The improbability of this being successful kills the idea that we're all descended from a single pair of ancestors whose offspring mated with women who were also descended from the same pair of ancestors i.e. Adam and Eve, whose son Seth had to have mated with his sister.

I'm not even going to go into how Jacob put coloured sticks into the drinking water to cause Laban's ewes to change the skin colours of their offspring, or the stupid idea that planted separate crops in the same field would cause hybridised plants as a result.