Recently, an Evangelical man by the name of Steve left the following comment on the post titled, An Atheist Thanksgiving:
You went from being unsaved to a flat out reprobate buddy. You rejected the God of the Bible to believe you evolved from a rock which came from and explosion 13.8586.678 billion years ago. I agree that these old IFB pastors you pick on all the time have no spine and are just in it for the money but to believe you came from a monkey which nobody has ever seen a monkey turn into a human! Never! You just traded one religion for another. You traded Paul the apostle for that Pedo Richard Dawkins! Have fun in hell buddy
I will leave it to Brian — a former Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preacher’s son — to answer Steve’s comment:
I read Steve P’s post sentence by sentence and tried to find even one sentence that approaches an accurate statement. I was unable to see even one in the lot. Accuracy/truth seems very unimportant to Steve P. Is this true belief in God, this parrot-dull squawking? (with apologies to parrots, who at least make their dull repetitions entertaining!)
Some day, perhaps, Evangelicals will realize that threatening me with their God’s judgment and Hell has no effect on me. The only God I fear is Polly and the only Hell I know is Trump’s America.
Dear Steve: Not a rock. Nobody evolved from a rock. Not a monkey, either. Monkeys still exist. So do apes. It would make more sense to talk about apes, though, which are more closely related to us than monkeys. They’re our cousins, not our forefathers. Apes and humans evolved from the same pre-ape and pre-human creatures. If you’re going to condemn evolution, you need to find evidence against the facts, not just make stuff up.
Well, if you assume that abiogenesis happened naturally without the assistance of deities, alien biological forms or such as I do, we did ultimately evolve from a rock (our young, meteor-bombarded planet). I, for one, am delighted with the idea, but then I’m a geologist by training.
Karen, I was reading about the structures that scientists are building that act a lot like cells. Maybe even in our lifetime scientists will figure out exactly how life came about, and create what they call a living cell. That would be amazing!
Steve would benefit from reading some books that accurately explain evolution before spouting off ignorant twaddle.
Actually I wish there would be one fundy who could leave a comment on Bruce’s blog that didn’t insult him, didn’t refer to hell/judgment/damnation, that could show understanding of evolution, and that has read anything by Dawkins, Ehrman, Hitchens, or any other author that runs counter to fundamentalism. That may be like finding a unicorn though…..
ObstacleChick, I’ve never yet encountered a creationist who’s actually studied evolution. The problem then is that it’s impossible to have an intelligible conversation with them, because they have no conception of the tiered structure of evolutionary theory, instead concentrating on long debunked supposed flaws of the type conjured up by the likes of Michael Behe, failed real scientists who achieve the attention they so crave via fakery and quackery. I cringe when I see written by a creationist ‘there aren’t any transitional fossils’. What planet do these people live on.
The reality is that anybody who’s taken the trouble to read even the simplest book on evolution (amongst those who haven’t received a proper education in the first place) will accept it. To understand it is to accept it. It’s actually a fantastically logical and, once understood, obvious explanation for life as we see it.
GeoffT, I have yet to meet a fundamentalist evangelical who has studied evolution either. I started studying it while I was leaving fundamentalism. My classmates from the YEC teaching school who are still fundamentalist post memes showing their ignorance of evolution, and those who left fundamentalism no longer believe YEC. I recall being SHOCKED at the transitional fossils after being taught they didn’t exist – such blatant lies that were easily investigated and refuted. They are taught to limit their exposure to outside conflicting information. So sad.
Have fun in hell?
The answer to that one, for me at least, is, “I have already spent an eternity with a bunch of Christians. I sure don’t want to be stuck with them when I die.”