AronRa
Administrator
Time is increasingly an issue for me. I often can't check the comments to my videos more than once per week at most, sometimes only once in a fortnight. And it is an all day event to try and get through the hundred or so emails that I've been getting every day lately. Whenever I do not give priority to the trolls on my boards, they often accuse me of having "run away" from the very challenges that brought me into these forums in the first place. Well, I do not run away.
At the moment, I have a handful of people attacking me at once criticizing my credibility. These are the sort who demand the kind of response which cannot be adequately done in 500 character blocs which also prohibit the inclusion of links. And whenever I answer one of their challenges they only post the next day that I still haven't answered them, or that they're still waiting to see what I have already posted. So I have decided to consolidate their challenges in a forum more appropriate as a public record of my defense.
Recently a YouTuber named Equestions posted a video titled Why Doesn't Anyone Question AronRa? (Part 1). In it he accuses me of lying and tells quite a few lies of his own in the process. Perhaps that is why -at this moment- his video has only 26 likes compared to more than 100 dislikes.
He accused me of ignoring evidence I have never seen, but I do not 'ignore' anything, nor would I ever want to. My 'worldview' is actually a quest to improve understanding. His is to defend the faith. So he has every motivation to lie, but any dishonesty on my part would defeat my own purpose. So in an all-too-common example of a creationist trying to project his own faults onto others, Equestions accuses me of lying, of trying to use some sort of subconscious psychology to "destroy religion" in order to then be able to "tell people whatever I want to". This is obviously not the case. What I did -at the moment in question- was pointing out some of the things Kirk Cameron said which Cameron obviously had to know were not true. Hence Cameron was lying but I was not.
It is true that creationism really does rely entirely on frauds, falsehoods, and fakery, and this is very easily proven. I would remind Equestions that creationism only makes two kinds of claims; those which are neither indicated nor vindicated by evidence of any sort, but also cannot be disproved, and testable claims which have already been disproved both scientifically and in a court of law. So if intends to defend the honesty of creationism, then he should look to another of my videos, How could creationism not be dishonest?. Therein I challenge all creationists to name one scientist who lied when promoting evolution over creationism, and one religious apologist who doesn't lie and hasn't lied when trying to promote creationism instead. I would also challenge him to provide a single verifiably accurate argument of evidence positively indicative of supernatural creationism over biological evolution or any other avenue of actual science.
Past experience has shown that no creationist can meet any of these challenges. In fact Equestions launches his attack against my honesty only with a host of lies beginning with the one wherein he claims that "headlines 'sreamed' that the Urey-Miller experiment created life from non-life". Equestions says I will not talk at all about that, but actually I insist that we do talk about that. I demand that he name a single publication that ever posted that claim in their headlines. Otherwise it is safe to say that he is lying about that.
He also lied about tiktaalik being claimed as the "final" transition in the evolution from aquatic to terrestrial tetrapods. Let's see that headline too, or else you're guilty of misrepresenting that as well.
Not surprisingly he also lied about the Piltdown hoax. He says that was perpetrated by the scientific community for the purpose of forwarding the "evolutionary worldview". However I would ask Equestions four questions about that: (1) Can you positively identify any of the hoaxters involved? (2) Can you also show an indication of their motives? Because if you can't answer either of these questions, then you're presenting blind speculation as fact, and that is dishonest. (3) Who were the victims of this fraud? And (4) who was it who exposed the fraud? Because if the scientific community were the victims of the fraud, and they were the ones who exposed it as a fraud, then they can't have been the perpetrators also. I'll give you a hint: The victims of this fraud were the paleontologists at the British Museum of Natural History, and possibly the entire British paleontological society. The rest of the scientific community, particularly French and American paleontologists were skeptical of the find right from the start and we have ample documentation to prove that. What we do not have is conclusive proof of who actually did it or what the motivation was.
Again, Equestions says that I don't want to talk about those, but of course he is wrong again, as I have already posted videos addressing these things. See the 13th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism for details.
He cites a chart that was originally shown in an earlier video, Answering Sesstreets, and challenged me on the accuracy of that chart. When he asked me for my sources for that chart, I initially thought that he would run across that data as easily as I did. So I simply told him to Google it. He responded:
That may actually be where my data came from, and I would be very embarrassed if it was, because the one thing Equestions got right is that the chart I showed does not match the American population, being the most religious of all first world countries, and I was talking about the US at the time. I couldn't remember where I saw that data first, and had to go digging through the email archives of my sent items to find some of the other sources I used at that time, this being at least a couple of years ago. Some of those sites no longer exist, but most still do, and I'm happy to say that all those that do support everything I actually said about the decline of Christianity and the rise of atheism.
"America Is Becoming Less Christian, Less Religious"
-ABCNews.com
"the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all."
Poll: Rise In Americans With No Religion
"From 1972 to 1993, the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center found that Protestants constituted about 63% of the population. This declined to 52% in 2002. Protestants are believed to have slipped to a minority position sometime between 2004 and 2006 for the first time since the year 1776."
ReligiousTolerance.org
"More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether."
http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
The percentage identifying as Protestants has clearly declined in the United States since the late 1940s, but the number of non-Catholic Christians has been stable around 60% since the early 1980s. In that time Catholic identification has fallen off slightly, from the high 20% range to the mid-20s. The number of Americans with no religion has increased steadily,"
http://www.gallup.com/poll/16459/tracking-us-religious-preferences-over-decades.aspx
The rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans, said Mark Silk of Trinity College. "In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting 'religious right' connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way,"</I><i></i>
-CNN.com
<I>"When Gallup began tracking religious identification, the percentage of U.S. adults identifying with some non-Catholic Christian religion was routinely in the high 60%-low 70% range. The percentage fell below 60% for the first time in 1979, and since 2000 has been between 55% and 57%."
http://www.gallup.com/poll/117409/easter-smaller-percentage-americans-christian.aspx
"declines occur for identifying with a religion, attending religious services, and self-rating one's religious attachment as "strong." First, giving "none" as one's religious preference was stable from 1972 to 1991 in the 5-7% range then rose to a peak of 16% in 2006. "¦There have also been changes in the religious composition of those identifying with a religion, but that is not addressed here. "¦Second, weekly attendance of religious services (nearly weekly + every week+) decreased from 41% in 1972 to 30-31% in 2000 and 2006. "¦Conversely, those never attending religious services rose from 9% in 1972 to 22.5% in 2006, an increase at the low end exceeding the decline at the high end (+13.2 points vs. -10.1 points). As with religious identity, the trend is pretty stable until the early 1990s and the drop occurs thereafter. Finally, those giving a religious preference other than "none" were asked if they were a "strong" member of the faith they had just declared. It shows a modest rise in strength of religious identity from 40% in 1974-75 to a peak of 45% in 1984, then a decline to 35-36% in 2000 and 2006. This amounts to a net decline of 4.8 points from 1974 to 2006. While not following strictly parallel courses, these three measures do agree in showing no decline in the 1970s or early 1980s and then a decline starting in either the mid-1990s for having no religious preference and attending church or in the mid-1980s for being a "strong" follower of one's faith."
Religious Change Around the World
What is your religion, (if any)?
http://www.usatoday.com/graphics/news/gra/gnoreligion/flash.htm
In a couple of my videos, I mention the correlations between religion & criminality. Specifically I note the statistical fact that religious denominations are represented in American prisons in roughly the same proportions as they are in the free population, but that atheists are barely represented in prison at all. Equestions chose to challenge me on this too -implying that what the prisoner believed upon arrest would typically be different than what they believed at the time the crime was committed. I explained that these statistics should logically come from the filing done at the time of incarceration, and thus would rarely -if ever- include any post-conviction conversions. Criminals also don't tend to be very philosophical, and rarely ever question whatever religion they were raised in. So that will usually be the religion they were at the time they committed the crime, and when they were arrested and asked to identify which religion they belonged to. Equestions and/or his cohorts chose to ignore that answer and then pretend that I never even gave it.
In looking for my references for the decline of Christianity vs the increase of secularism, I also found these other sources indicating the negative correlations between religion and 'morality'.
"Bibby polled Canadians on the significance they placed on certain key values, and found that believers rated as more important values like forgiveness, patience and trust. But at the same time, he found that teenagers , the demographic group that has witnessed the highest rise in non-belief since 1984, from 12% to 32%, are increasingly less permissive and more mature regarding issues like alcohol and drug use, smoking or sex ."
Generation Tame
"Texas still has the second highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation, and the highest rate of teens with a second pregnancy."
http://blogs.chron.com/texaspolitics/archives/2009/06/democrats_for_g.html
"pregnant teens and twenty-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than peers from public schools."
MSNBC.com
"Religious doctors not more likely to care for poor"
News.Yahoo.com
Support for death penalty is highest among white evangelical Protestants.
The Pew Forum
"the more religiously observant one is, the more likely one is to justify torture."
The American Prospect
"RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today."
-TimesOnline 09/27/2005
"Atheist nations are more peaceful"
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/06/atheist-nations-are-more-peaceful.html
Evangelicals: Why Do We Have the Highest Divorce Rate?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/137829/evangelicals_why_do_we_have_the_highest.html
Equestions posted a single article from Texas A&M as if that could somehow override all the research that lead to every one of the news stories above. He then accused me of not knowing what a peer-reviewed article is. Well of course I know what it is. Here is one below which comes from a much more respected source than yours, and posits the exact opposite of everything yours claims.
"Those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crime, server to deter sexual offending behavior."
PubMed
Since you said you will generally side with the peer-reviewed articles, then you should have plenty above to prove you wrong. I still haven't seen your article because the Aggie site keeps telling me that it can't redirect properly. I'm not at all surprised.
Here is a final thought for you, maybe the reason no one suspects me of lying is because I don't. And maybe the reason people suspect you of lying is because you did, and I included a few of those lies above. What would be the most appropriate way for you to respond to that?
At the moment, I have a handful of people attacking me at once criticizing my credibility. These are the sort who demand the kind of response which cannot be adequately done in 500 character blocs which also prohibit the inclusion of links. And whenever I answer one of their challenges they only post the next day that I still haven't answered them, or that they're still waiting to see what I have already posted. So I have decided to consolidate their challenges in a forum more appropriate as a public record of my defense.
Recently a YouTuber named Equestions posted a video titled Why Doesn't Anyone Question AronRa? (Part 1). In it he accuses me of lying and tells quite a few lies of his own in the process. Perhaps that is why -at this moment- his video has only 26 likes compared to more than 100 dislikes.
He accused me of ignoring evidence I have never seen, but I do not 'ignore' anything, nor would I ever want to. My 'worldview' is actually a quest to improve understanding. His is to defend the faith. So he has every motivation to lie, but any dishonesty on my part would defeat my own purpose. So in an all-too-common example of a creationist trying to project his own faults onto others, Equestions accuses me of lying, of trying to use some sort of subconscious psychology to "destroy religion" in order to then be able to "tell people whatever I want to". This is obviously not the case. What I did -at the moment in question- was pointing out some of the things Kirk Cameron said which Cameron obviously had to know were not true. Hence Cameron was lying but I was not.
It is true that creationism really does rely entirely on frauds, falsehoods, and fakery, and this is very easily proven. I would remind Equestions that creationism only makes two kinds of claims; those which are neither indicated nor vindicated by evidence of any sort, but also cannot be disproved, and testable claims which have already been disproved both scientifically and in a court of law. So if intends to defend the honesty of creationism, then he should look to another of my videos, How could creationism not be dishonest?. Therein I challenge all creationists to name one scientist who lied when promoting evolution over creationism, and one religious apologist who doesn't lie and hasn't lied when trying to promote creationism instead. I would also challenge him to provide a single verifiably accurate argument of evidence positively indicative of supernatural creationism over biological evolution or any other avenue of actual science.
Past experience has shown that no creationist can meet any of these challenges. In fact Equestions launches his attack against my honesty only with a host of lies beginning with the one wherein he claims that "headlines 'sreamed' that the Urey-Miller experiment created life from non-life". Equestions says I will not talk at all about that, but actually I insist that we do talk about that. I demand that he name a single publication that ever posted that claim in their headlines. Otherwise it is safe to say that he is lying about that.
He also lied about tiktaalik being claimed as the "final" transition in the evolution from aquatic to terrestrial tetrapods. Let's see that headline too, or else you're guilty of misrepresenting that as well.
Not surprisingly he also lied about the Piltdown hoax. He says that was perpetrated by the scientific community for the purpose of forwarding the "evolutionary worldview". However I would ask Equestions four questions about that: (1) Can you positively identify any of the hoaxters involved? (2) Can you also show an indication of their motives? Because if you can't answer either of these questions, then you're presenting blind speculation as fact, and that is dishonest. (3) Who were the victims of this fraud? And (4) who was it who exposed the fraud? Because if the scientific community were the victims of the fraud, and they were the ones who exposed it as a fraud, then they can't have been the perpetrators also. I'll give you a hint: The victims of this fraud were the paleontologists at the British Museum of Natural History, and possibly the entire British paleontological society. The rest of the scientific community, particularly French and American paleontologists were skeptical of the find right from the start and we have ample documentation to prove that. What we do not have is conclusive proof of who actually did it or what the motivation was.
Again, Equestions says that I don't want to talk about those, but of course he is wrong again, as I have already posted videos addressing these things. See the 13th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism for details.
He cites a chart that was originally shown in an earlier video, Answering Sesstreets, and challenged me on the accuracy of that chart. When he asked me for my sources for that chart, I initially thought that he would run across that data as easily as I did. So I simply told him to Google it. He responded:
First of all, a rise from 11% in 1990 to 16% in 2006 is already more than twice the rate of change which he said he could not verify. So all I needed to do was find the exact chart I used back then. I thought it should be easy enough to source, but I tried to find the original chart myself, and I couldn't locate it either. I found very similar data being reported for the exact same period, (1990 to 2006) but noticed at the last moment, that they pertained only to Australia or New Zealand. A very similar chart -referring to the UK- is still available on Wikipedia.Equestions said:
That may actually be where my data came from, and I would be very embarrassed if it was, because the one thing Equestions got right is that the chart I showed does not match the American population, being the most religious of all first world countries, and I was talking about the US at the time. I couldn't remember where I saw that data first, and had to go digging through the email archives of my sent items to find some of the other sources I used at that time, this being at least a couple of years ago. Some of those sites no longer exist, but most still do, and I'm happy to say that all those that do support everything I actually said about the decline of Christianity and the rise of atheism.
"America Is Becoming Less Christian, Less Religious"
-ABCNews.com
"the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all."
Poll: Rise In Americans With No Religion
"From 1972 to 1993, the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center found that Protestants constituted about 63% of the population. This declined to 52% in 2002. Protestants are believed to have slipped to a minority position sometime between 2004 and 2006 for the first time since the year 1776."
ReligiousTolerance.org
"More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether."
http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
The percentage identifying as Protestants has clearly declined in the United States since the late 1940s, but the number of non-Catholic Christians has been stable around 60% since the early 1980s. In that time Catholic identification has fallen off slightly, from the high 20% range to the mid-20s. The number of Americans with no religion has increased steadily,"
http://www.gallup.com/poll/16459/tracking-us-religious-preferences-over-decades.aspx
The rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans, said Mark Silk of Trinity College. "In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting 'religious right' connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way,"</I><i></i>
-CNN.com
<I>"When Gallup began tracking religious identification, the percentage of U.S. adults identifying with some non-Catholic Christian religion was routinely in the high 60%-low 70% range. The percentage fell below 60% for the first time in 1979, and since 2000 has been between 55% and 57%."
http://www.gallup.com/poll/117409/easter-smaller-percentage-americans-christian.aspx
"declines occur for identifying with a religion, attending religious services, and self-rating one's religious attachment as "strong." First, giving "none" as one's religious preference was stable from 1972 to 1991 in the 5-7% range then rose to a peak of 16% in 2006. "¦There have also been changes in the religious composition of those identifying with a religion, but that is not addressed here. "¦Second, weekly attendance of religious services (nearly weekly + every week+) decreased from 41% in 1972 to 30-31% in 2000 and 2006. "¦Conversely, those never attending religious services rose from 9% in 1972 to 22.5% in 2006, an increase at the low end exceeding the decline at the high end (+13.2 points vs. -10.1 points). As with religious identity, the trend is pretty stable until the early 1990s and the drop occurs thereafter. Finally, those giving a religious preference other than "none" were asked if they were a "strong" member of the faith they had just declared. It shows a modest rise in strength of religious identity from 40% in 1974-75 to a peak of 45% in 1984, then a decline to 35-36% in 2000 and 2006. This amounts to a net decline of 4.8 points from 1974 to 2006. While not following strictly parallel courses, these three measures do agree in showing no decline in the 1970s or early 1980s and then a decline starting in either the mid-1990s for having no religious preference and attending church or in the mid-1980s for being a "strong" follower of one's faith."
Religious Change Around the World
What is your religion, (if any)?
http://www.usatoday.com/graphics/news/gra/gnoreligion/flash.htm
You really should repeat that question to yourself a few times until you figure out the answer: I don't have any reason to lie about that. So I didn't. I said that atheism is growing, and it is. I said it was one of the fastest-growing demographics in this country, and even evangelical Christian sources agree that it is. At the same time, I said that Christianity is in a state of decline, and that's true too. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Catholics, Protestants, or the collective of all denominations inclusively, I was correct, and correcting the figures in that chart does not change that, even if the rates of both changes are both halved.Equestions said:
In a couple of my videos, I mention the correlations between religion & criminality. Specifically I note the statistical fact that religious denominations are represented in American prisons in roughly the same proportions as they are in the free population, but that atheists are barely represented in prison at all. Equestions chose to challenge me on this too -implying that what the prisoner believed upon arrest would typically be different than what they believed at the time the crime was committed. I explained that these statistics should logically come from the filing done at the time of incarceration, and thus would rarely -if ever- include any post-conviction conversions. Criminals also don't tend to be very philosophical, and rarely ever question whatever religion they were raised in. So that will usually be the religion they were at the time they committed the crime, and when they were arrested and asked to identify which religion they belonged to. Equestions and/or his cohorts chose to ignore that answer and then pretend that I never even gave it.
In looking for my references for the decline of Christianity vs the increase of secularism, I also found these other sources indicating the negative correlations between religion and 'morality'.
"Bibby polled Canadians on the significance they placed on certain key values, and found that believers rated as more important values like forgiveness, patience and trust. But at the same time, he found that teenagers , the demographic group that has witnessed the highest rise in non-belief since 1984, from 12% to 32%, are increasingly less permissive and more mature regarding issues like alcohol and drug use, smoking or sex ."
Generation Tame
"Texas still has the second highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation, and the highest rate of teens with a second pregnancy."
http://blogs.chron.com/texaspolitics/archives/2009/06/democrats_for_g.html
"pregnant teens and twenty-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than peers from public schools."
MSNBC.com
"Religious doctors not more likely to care for poor"
News.Yahoo.com
Support for death penalty is highest among white evangelical Protestants.
The Pew Forum
"the more religiously observant one is, the more likely one is to justify torture."
The American Prospect
"RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today."
-TimesOnline 09/27/2005
"Atheist nations are more peaceful"
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/06/atheist-nations-are-more-peaceful.html
Evangelicals: Why Do We Have the Highest Divorce Rate?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/137829/evangelicals_why_do_we_have_the_highest.html
Equestions posted a single article from Texas A&M as if that could somehow override all the research that lead to every one of the news stories above. He then accused me of not knowing what a peer-reviewed article is. Well of course I know what it is. Here is one below which comes from a much more respected source than yours, and posits the exact opposite of everything yours claims.
"Those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crime, server to deter sexual offending behavior."
PubMed
Since you said you will generally side with the peer-reviewed articles, then you should have plenty above to prove you wrong. I still haven't seen your article because the Aggie site keeps telling me that it can't redirect properly. I'm not at all surprised.
Here is a final thought for you, maybe the reason no one suspects me of lying is because I don't. And maybe the reason people suspect you of lying is because you did, and I included a few of those lies above. What would be the most appropriate way for you to respond to that?
. When its pointed out and conceded, with complete honesty, that the original data cannot be found, and therefore, cannot be verified he still takes it to be intentional lie. Either he's not interested in evaluating whether what Aron did was intentionally dishonest, personally I don't think so, or he has no understanding of what actual intellectual honesty looks like. Once again, not awfully surprised about that.