Why do intelligent people still believe in religion? 5: The Strawman | GinaConspiracy
Strawmaning The art of deciding a person or groups's position on an argument and then defeating that argument to appear as if you won the debate
Creationist do this all the time As a young creationist I was told that evolutionists believed that traits just occurred spontaneously out of random when the need for it arose This is actually a theory thought up by scientist Jean-Baptiste LaMarck during the time period when spontaneous generation was still thought of as a possible explaination For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of Spontaneous generation it was a long standing belief that life came from the decay of other life Decaying hay made mice, decaying meat produced maggots and so on
I was never taught how natural selection works and so I was convinced that Darwinian evolutionists actually just believed LaMarckian Evolution They claimed that Evolutionists claimed we came from nothing and everything was randoms chance Evolution by nature selection is anything but random and we are beginning to discover that abiogenesis is no less random as chemical properties of substances when given enough chances to react seem very likely to naturally move toward becoming more complex chemicals Each stage of Abiogenesis might be no less likely than two exact snowflakes existing Matching snowflakes do exist but the chance of a person finding 2 is ridiculously low
The properties of water produce so much variation when freezing that the crystalline structure of a snowflake has many way in which it could crystallize They claimed that evolution involved the big bang, abiogenesis and natural selection which really have nothing to do with each other and aren't even in the same fields I grew up thinking that biological scientists were pretty much stupid and that god's creation story made so much more sense And when given these two bad ideas who wouldn't go with the divine being over one that made no sense? I saw no reason to study it for myself My pastors and other Christian speakers wouldn't lie to me about science would they? Then I grew up and began studying evolution and other evil theories and realized I had been sorely misinformed
The theory of evolution that I had been taught paled sorely in comparison to Darwin's actual amazing, genius and beautiful theory I had been lied to my entire life about this amazing phenomena, and I was angry Persons like Ray Comfort, Kent Hovid, VenomFangX and gearup still argue against evolution using these horribly undereducated arguments against ideas that scientists discarded at least a century ago However if you read the bible, straw-manning is actually a long standing biblical tradition when arguing against someone who disagreed with you Of course in those days the people who they disagree with were not scientists but polytheists
If you have watched my video “Monotheists are confused Hindus” and idol is actually explained as a device for the spirit of a deity to enter to dwell for a time with humans During the early part of the bible, idol worship was very common in Israel but considered horrible by Yawists, and forbidden by the holy scriptures Everyone in those days knew what idols were and what they were used for They were spiritual tools to better commune with a deity and worship and give libations and offerings to it The King Josiah came through and did the equivalent of ethnic and religious cleansing similar to that of Hitler and Stalin
II Kings 23 illustrates how Josiah completely decimated destroyed and defiled all persons who disagreed with his religion He forcefully moved the nation from a polytheistic nation where people worshiped Yaweh's wife Asherah and his brother Ba'al in the Temple to when they only worshiped Yaweh and anyone who disagreed would be slaughtered The claim is made that they had to be eliminated because they killed children However there is little archeological evidence that child sacrifice existed or was common in ancient Israel at least at that time period and using child sacrifice as an excuse to invade is a common one throughout history as Rome used this form of post-war propaganda when invading the city of Carthage and Bush Senior used the incubator baby scare where Iraqis were dumping Kuwaiti babies on the floor and taking the incubators so they could be used in their own hospitals, to drum up support for the first gulf war which turned out to be a fallacy Interestingly Yaweh had no problem telling his people to slaughter babies when invading the promised land
Josiah violently destroyed all other religions in Israel and generations after the people began forgetting what idol worship even was for In Psalms 115 and 135 they begin to strawman idol worshipers using the same repeating argument against Idol worship Psalms 135: 15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands16
They have mouths, but they can’t speak They have eyes, but they can’t see17 They have ears, but they can’t hear; neither is there any breath in their mouths18
Those who make them will be like them; yes, everyone who trusts in them These poor arguments against Idol worship are used in both Isiah, Daniel, Hosea during a period when the writers were probably somewhat more isolated from other religions After the Greek and Roman invasions these strawman ideas about idols went away as they were forced to interact with actual pagans and learn the truth about idols Only a passage in Revelation 9 does this mention occur and Revelation had weird ideas even for most early Christians This phenomena of isolation shows itself true in areas like homosexuality as homophobia seems more prominent in small towns and rural areas because they never have to interact with gays and less in cities where the chances of having to talk to and work along side someone who is gay becomes much higher
When a person is forced to work or interact with someone who thinks differently from them, they over time have the us-vs-them mindset removed and their misconceptions will be corrected Sadly scientists are even less prevalent than gays and most of them aren't trained to explain the science to a lay person so stawmaning is rampant in the christian religion When your beliefs have to be right and everyone else is wrong strawmanning is the perfect and many times only way to maintain your misinformed beliefs when new and better ideas come about And its a longstanding tradition in the bible to use against people who disagree with you
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