Not just YEC leaders. Personally, I think it’s long past time to recognize that a huge swath of evangelicals and their leadership (Al Mohler comes to mind) have taken the same path.
Yep. Once you’ve swallowed a whopper of a lie, all the rest go down easy.
Of course. Once the snowball started rolling downhill in the 70s, it picked up momentum and grew bigger and bigger. Christians were the first to dive into information siloes (books, radio, music, cable news, websites, etc.). Remember the slogan “Garbage In, Garbage Out”? All that did was make Christians culturally isolated and scientifically illiterate in the name of cultivating holiness.
Long story short, I’ve given up trying to persuade people who have lost touch with reality. Might as well try to reason with someone suffering a psychotic break. I concentrate on those who are waking out of that slumber and trying to make sense of things as reality comes back into focus.
I recall a number of times in my university days trying to get that idea through the heads of liberal types who couldn’t see past the idea that everyone has “their own truth”. It alternately baffles and amuses me that so-called conservative YECists seem to operate fairly often with that same notion.
Absolutely. And the practice by some here of dismissing actual scholars and scholarship as useless or boneheaded because it doesn’t fit the YEC talking points is part of such “wrong and bad” thinking.
And if interpreting ancient literature, one should listen to actual scholars of ancient literature.
Yet YEC depends on covering eyes and ears to the reality that the scriptures are ancient literature and nowhere make any claim to be making scientifically accurate statements. The idea that the scriptures give us anything scientific at all is alien to the scriptures; it comes from the philosophy of scientific materialism. So merely the idea of “biblically consistent science” comes from forcing the scriptures to fit what is at root an atheistic human philosophy.
Unless you are fluent in ancient Hebrew and have a serious grasp of the ancient worldviews within which the various Old Testament writers operated, there is no such thing as “biblical statements that are self-evident” – and even if you are, the various ancient types of literature and their worldviews are sufficiently alien that it’s necessary to remind one’s self of how those literary types and worldviews work and differ from the modern materialistic worldview.
Keeping in mind that the ability of a conspiracy to be maintained is inversely proportional to the product of the number of participants and the days over which it is being maintained.
Keeping in mind here that if we take the book of Job seriously, Satan has to get permission from God to do anything in the physical world at all.
And the most potent lies are the ones you don’t even recognize as even possibly being lies. That’s what makes YEC so deadly: it doesn’t allow any room for people to stop and ask if the worldview of scientific materialism that it relies on could possibly be anything but correct. It’s the same error made repeatedly down the centuries, Christians assuming that the worldview they grew up with is the one absolutely correct worldview that God Himself had to conform to when He inspired the ancient writers.
@moderators perhaps someone could update the FAQ. I made a single post on a topic, which the rules absolutely appear to allow, and it wasn’t on abortion, or homosexuality, or transgender rights. It was about a scientific conference.
That sounds like a political discussion to me.
And the links I posted were about science, not politics. And they were directly related to the subject of your OP, why people distrust “settled science” these days.
Furthermore, recent polling shows:
If seems that it is quite far-fetched to blame all those who are not going to take the new vaccine on their being Christian or young earth creationist.
Precisely. This is the one point that conspiracy theorists overlook time and time and time again.
Even small conspiracies are hard to keep under wraps for long. That was a point that Charles Colson made in his book Born Again as his takeaway from the Watergate scandal when he wrote this:
I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world — and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.
The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” Mat 8:27
I’m not sure Satan is able to do a mass reconstruction of nature - in other words, he cannot control the wind and the waves as Jesus does. Rather, I think he mostly works in deception and illusion (ex. the inability to recreate the plague of flies in Egypt). His primary method is lying, murdering (threatening too), casting doubt upon Gods goodness, and confusing the words of scripture.
So, I don’t think Satan needs to do a lot of reworking of nature in order to deceive us - we are quite willing to follow his lead by looking at one side of the evidence but not the other as it suits our desires.
We are quite capable of deceiving ourselves without any outside influence, but I certainly agree.
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44
Both Walter Martin and Billy Graham at different times noted that of the trio “the flesh, the world, and the devil” the devil was appropriately in third place as the first two are more than enough to keep us wandering from God.
The new vaccine is just a modification of the existing ones to more precisely match the most common variants. I plan on taking it, but will probably wait until November as I had Covid in early August and am probably “boosted” fairly well at present.
I went to look at my vaccination card to see what the last one I got was and it isn’t where it’s supposed to be! IIRC I’ve gotten five shots; I hope the clinic has a record of them all!
I’d need to look more closely at the polling question(s). I found it somewhat amusing that the article focused on the “almost half” for rather than the “over half” against. Spin?
Observing that a particular political group may have more people who reject the vaccines is a bit of scientific data just as would be if there was a geographical or educational correlation.
Maybe spin, maybe not. It brings to mind a unit in statistics regarding sociology and polls with a discussion about how perspective can be mistaken for spin; in this case it may just be that someone prefers to start with positives rather than negatives. The point was that no matter how hard one tries, someone else will always make accusations of spin.
Of course, politics affects many aspects of life, including health care, creation care, genetic engineering etc. and we do not ban the discussion of those topics, but do try to limit it when it gets into partisan politics directly, as that is just too much drama. And limiting the drama is also the motivation for avoiding discussion of abortion and gender issues. All those issues just seem to bring out the worst in people, and are emotionally charged. Other forums exist for those discussions.
Agreed. But relevance? The OP makes no distinction with regard to political orientation. The OP lacks any scientific data. When I tried to introduce actual science my post was deleted. My conclusion is that this is not at all about the science.