Re: We need a new reformation

On 9/24/2024 9:35 AM, RonO wrote:

In my last post about the ID perps at the Discovery Institute running a bait and switch scam on the creationist rubes for over 22 years I noted that the Top Six best evidences for IDiocy were all used by the scientific creationists that preceded them in trying to teach Biblical creationism in the public schools.  You can find all of them in the Answers in Genesis (AIG) creation museum.  Even though the Big Bang has been a science subject that the YEC and IDiotic creationists have tried to get removed from the the public school science standards along with biological evolution in several states, and they succeeded in Kansas, the Big Bang is featured prominently in the AIG's planetarium exibit. Like the other Top Six god-of-the-gaps denial arguments the ID perps and the AIG only use them as independent bits of denial.  They never try to develop any creation model out of them.  They are only used for denial purposes and the rubes are supposed to forget one as they move onto the others.
 I went to the AIG web site to see if they were still lying to the rubes about the junk, and found them calling for a new reformation.
 https://answersingenesis.org/
 QUOTE:
We need a new reformation today—a reformation where God’s people, particularly Christian leaders, repent of compromising God’s Word (particularly in Genesis 1–11), and stand boldly on God’s infallible Word.
END QUOTE:
 They can't deal with the fact that Biblical creationists are beginning to realize that the Bible has been wrong about nature for a very long time, and the AIG doesn't like the accommodations that have had to be made by any religious organization led by competent and rational human beings.  After the IDiotic creationist loss in Dover YEC Biblical literalist Christian denominations like the Assembly of God Church have been trying to convert their followers to old earth creationism.  The AIG has come out against these changes and the accommodations that many Christians are making for biological evolution.
 The first protestant reformation also wanted the Catholic church to get tougher on notions that conflicted with Biblical interpretation of nature.  TO had a thread on the heliocentric heresy, and we learned that when Bruno was burned at the stake his heliocentric heresy was only a lesser heresy at that time and was not punishable by death.  The Church fathers were all geocentrists, but Saint Augustine had cautioned Christians that they should not use the Bible to deny what we could figure out about nature for ourselves.  Augustine went unheeded and heliocentrism became a heresy.  After Bruno was burned at the stake, being also found guilty of other charges, the protestant reformers wanted the Catholic church to stop allowing the heliocentric heresy to fester, and it was elevated to being a heresy punishable by death. Galileo faced the death penalty. Heliocentrism is still a heresy, but it was demoted to being a lesser heresy again in the 19th century.  Newton was born the year Galileo died under house arrest (1642) and geocentrism hasn't been a serious notion since Newton.  Kepler was likely the last one to try to support the existence of the firmament with his crystal spheres, but he had to give that up when he figured out elliptical orbits.
 My guess is that the AIG does not want heliocentrism to be elevated to a capital heresy again because there are not very many Christians that continue to believe in geocentrism or the standard Biblical cosmology. The Hebrew acquired their cosmology from their neighbors that had been civilized for a longer period of time.  The earth was flat with a firmament above holding the sun, moon, planets, and stars.  The earth was the center of the universe and God would open the firmament every once in a while to let the water fall to the earth as rain.  The church fathers were likely not flat earthers, and Augustine was likely fighting flat earth literalists when he made his recommendation to not use the Bible as a source for understanding nature.  The Greeks had estimated the circumference of the earth a couple of centuries before Christ was born, and the church fathers were likely all geocentrists, and were likely not flat earthers.
 At the time that the Christian Church was forming the geocentric cosmology excluded the flat earth of the Bible, so the early church had already relegated the flat earth claims in the Bible as symbolic or metaphorical.  They already understood that the Bible could not be taken literally.  The reason for Saint Augustine's admonishment about denial of nature was not mentioned by Augustine, but it was likely flat-earth Christians that had not yet accepted the Greek cosmology.  Even though the Greeks had estimated the circumference of the earth by physcial geometric measurement a couple of centuries before Christ was born, there were early Christian flat earthers.
 My guess is that Ham isn't a geocentrist nor flat earther, but he is still calling for his reformation.  Ham's reformation is needed because most of the ID perps are old earth creationists.  When I started calling the Discovery Institute's intelligent design scam artists "ID perps" just before Dover hit the fan.  I noted that most of their victims in the bait and switch scam that they had been running for around 2 years likely wanted to tar and feather the ID perp scam artists (most of them had dropped the issue instead of bend over for the switch scam).  I also noted that if they ever were successful in recreating their imagined Christian theocracy that they were likely to be the first up against the wall after the establishment of the new order.  The AIG's call for a reformation supports that notion.  When Dembski was forced to apologize to his students in order to keep his job, after he told them that the earth was likely older than indicated in the Bible and that the flood may have been local, that was a warning that the ID perps would be the first up against the wall in any theocracy that they might have been able to create.  Most of their support has always been YEC, but most of the ID perps were OEC and they were all stupid enough to think that they could ride that tiger.  We are all lucky that the ID perps were all too incompetent and dishonest to have succeeded with the mission that they signed up for.
 Ron Okimoto
 

It should be noted that the reformation started the 30 years war with all it's religious abuses.  It spawned the type of theocracies that the founding fathers of the US were trying to prevent, and the ID perps wanted such a renewal (recall Behe's claims that ID was equivalent science to astrology as practiced during that period).  They would have been the first up against the wall in the theocracy that they claimed to want to recreate.  Like Dembski they may have been offered a chance to recant, but my guess is that the option would not have been offered to the ID perps that had been involved in running the bait and switch scam on the YEC true believers.  Nearly all the creationist rube victims of the bait and switch have dropped the issue instead of bending over for the ID perp's switch scam.  Those victims likely have no love for the scam artists that sold them the ID scam.
Ron Okimoto