I am constantly bothered by christian Youtubers who post ignorant videos claiming to have proof that their mythical slave masters exist? So, I looked up the word "evolution" and asked them what it meant. The definition I read online says that evolution is the gradual change of an organism over a long period of time through stimuli. The christians I asked were instantly offended stating that evolution is a false idea that says we decended from monkeys. I'm obviously not very educated on the subject and have a few questions on the matter.
#1 Is the definition I stated correct
#2 If evolution is gradual change from stimuli, could domesticated animals prove this
#3 If evolution is not fact, how can all of the early man fossils possibly be explained
Also, if you have time you should look at the anti-atheist videos posted on Youtube by VERICASTNETWORK. This guy is a real piece of work. He really reminds me of Ray Comfort.
The definition you gave is only part of the process. Evolution is more complex. Read the following.
What is it, Ronnie, is that they are, for all intents and purposes, MARRIED to their beliefs. They might as well BE their beliefs, particularly in the cases of the fundamentalists and pentacostals. To them, the bible is IT, the true, indisputable, revealed word of their god, and anything which speaks against their precious magic holy book gets the usual treatment, to wit:
As for a good source to gain a better understanding of evolution, may I recommend the following:
It's worthy of note, too, that even the RC church has acknowledged that evolution as a theory is the most likely description of how life developed on this planet. Granted, they still cling to their god-crap, but at least their that much further down the road.
I have definitely heard of Dawkins. Maybe I can find some of his books. Thanks for the suggestion!
Those are excellent sources, but I would add the book What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist. It is a very clear statement of the fundamentals and beyond in a quite readable form. The amazing thing is that he was 97 when he wrote it.
As I see it, the problem they have is that evolution and Genesis are entirely at odds with each other. Either the Bible is wrong, or evolution is. Never the twain shall meet. When I was growing up, I sometimes heard such statements as, "Well, how do we know that a day in biblical terminology wasn't a billion years in length," &c. The problem with that is that the books of the O.T. have been dated to approximately no earlier than 4-5,000 B.C.E. Man could mark a day by the continuing rising and setting of the sun, and even if he did not divide the day into 24 hours of 60 minutes each, &c., a day would have been the same then as now. A European theologian is generally regarded as the leading authority on Biblical dating and he was the one who suggested the dates the books of the O.T. were written.
Now, obviously, if the Bible says that the earth and everything in it were created in six days, and that God rested on the seventh, and if scientists date the birth of our planet to roughly 4.5 billion years ago, one or the other is just plain wrong. In order to accept evolution, the believers must deny the very origin of God's creation. Of course, as science teaches, dinosaurs disappeared as far back as 160 million years ago, which is kind of at odds with Adam and Eve appearing 4,500 years back. The whole house of cards collapses. Noah could not possibly have packed seven pairs of 10,000 species of dinosaurs onto an ark -- and those were the birds alone. And how did he round them all up in the first place. The absurdities abound and are entirely explained by science. Evolution simply makes a lot more sense than Creationism. But convincing a religious nut of that is what Schiller meant when he threw up his hands and uttered, "against stupidity, even the angels fight in vain."
The God of Genesis also states that the sky's purpose is to separate the waters above the sky from the waters below it. Air just won't get the job done; ergo, God thought the sky was a solid dome. (This was a commonly held belief in the ancient world.) The writers of Genesis also thought light was created before the sun, that the moon was a "great light," and that the earth was created before the sun or the stars. Obviously, if a "days" in Genesis is really a billion years, why is the phrase "and there was evening, and there was morning" repeated only six times? All in the first chapter of an "inerrant" book. You have to read all the way to Chapter 2 before finding out that God created animals in order to find a mate for the first man. That's some omniscient God. And about 99.9% of True Believers do not know that in Genesis 6, God tells Noah to take two of every kind of animal and bird on the Ark, but in Genesis 2 tells him to take seven pairs of each kind of bird, seven pairs of each kind of clean animal, and one pair of each kind of unclean animal--without telling Noah what "clean" and "unclean" mean. I teach them this contradiction in my world lit classes, but if I ask them on an exam how many animals Noah took on the Ark, they always say two of each. It's like throwing tennis balls at a battleship.
I would like to see some evidence that angels have ever fought against stupidity.
While I'm not certain, my guess is that the concept of stupidity is NEVER mentioned in the bible ... probably out of total embarrassment!
There's something in the New Testament saying the uneducated are more likely to accept Jesus. Christians probably see this as part of Jesus' identifying with the downtrodden - but, I had a sensation of ... thunk ... reading that.
Jesus also says in the bible something to the effect that unless you turn and become as little children [uneducated and naive], you shall not enter the kingdom of god. I used to think of that statement as beautiful.
Now I find it frightening.
Yes, if someone tells you to be like a child, be wary of exploitation.
Jesus was a cult leader, similar to Jim Jones in his early years. Jim Jones started out very idealistic, anti-racist, and his People's Temple did a lot of good with its social programs. Then later he became paranoid, his cult became abusive and ended up with a suicide/murder of 900 people.
Cult leaders are trying to surround themselves with love to make up for what they didn't have as children. At first they are very idealistic, then on some level they realize the cult is never going to quite satisfy their needs or soothe their pain; and gradually they become corrupt, paranoid and violent as Jim Jones did. Jesus was crucified in his idealistic stage, and that was what "made" the career of this poor person. If the Romans hadn't had this practice of suppressing dissent via torture-murder, there probably would be no Christianity today.
In my experience personal evolutions tend to follow this pattern - they start out high and idealistic, and over time become more psychological. But cult leaders don't typically have much insight into themselves, and when the underlying anger and disappointment surfaces in a context of religious idealism, it gets perverted into ugliness like paranoia, violent control and murder. Jesus might have had a problem with his mother for example, but he didn't understand himself this way.
Various kinds of therapy ask people to "be like little children" to some extent, hopefully in a helpful rather than exploitative way.
They are scared of evolution. If they accept that it is true, then the entire foundation they built their belief system upon crumbles. They live in the straw house, and evolution is the big bad wolf ready to blow on it.