We warned you Calilasseia, now you see his true nature.

Ah, the entirely predictable attempt to hand-wave away inconvenient facts, by pretending that they arise from "bias", whilst hoping no one noticed the rampant biases already exhibited prior to the apologetic fabrication in question.

Well, I decided to do a little checking, and it transpires that it's not just "liberal atheist scholars" who disagree with you, here in the UK, there's a raft of Anglican scholars who disagree with you too, and these include among their number bona fide ordained bishops. Who recognise that when archaeology and its uncovered evidence render various assertions untenable, it is foolish to ignore this.

@Arakish wrote: And why is there absolutely no Egyptian records of any people called "Hebrew" until around 800 BCE? The Exodus is supposedly to have begun circa 1440 BCE. The "Hebrews" were supposedly enslaved in Egypt since circa 1870 BCE. If they had been in Egypt for 430 years, then words from each language would have had words exchange into each others’ language during such a long period of time. In other words, the Hebrew language would be half Egyptian, and vice versa. However, neither language has any words that are even close to the other language in their language. Perhaps the only exception is “Moses” which is a bastardized version of the Egyptian names like Ahmose, Thutmose, Amosis, etc. Most scholars have quietly concluded that the epic of Moses never happened. Others think it combines myth, cultural memories, with very few kernels of truth.

At the supposed time of the exodus, the population of Egypt was estimated to be approximately 10 million. Had the Hebrews really been the slaves of Egypt and had 1 million of them simultaneously departed, there would have been economic collapse and mass starvation. The scale of such a catastrophe would have dictated that it would have been documented on every monument in Egypt, and given their considerable number, it is inconceivable that evidence of such an event would not have been found. Yet, no evidence of exodus has ever been found.

Op utters yet more bat crap.

@aj777

I keep hoping for something intelligent from you but hell, if you were intelligent, you wouldn't be a christard.

Hint: Try beginning with the hypothesis that de lard does NOT exist until proved otherwise rather than with the hypothesis that de lard exists until proven otherwise. In this way, you'll end up looking a lot less of a twat.

@arakish

I've seen the same brand of shit from creationists, I've dealt with these for more than a decade as well, and the willingness of these people to lie for their sad little masturbation fantasy of a doctrine is such, that they'd all be natural choices for key positions in the Trump administration. Indeed, I'm reminded at this juncture, that the father of modern American corporate creationism (which, let's be honest here, is a corporate business), the arch-charlatan and liar for doctrine known as Henry Morris, once wrote an evil little screed that constituted a "how to" manual for quote miners.

It's instructive that the level of mendacity endemic to creationism is such, that even a right-wing conservative commentator, in the form of John Derybshire, was forced to bring this to people's attention when he reviewed the whole "Expelled" fiasco. He wrote an article, A Blood Libel On Our Civilisation, which can be read in full here, covering the "Expelled" fiasco" in some detail, and some of his comments in that article are truly juicy to behold, such as:

It’s pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism.

and:

I turned over some possibilities, but decisively rejected them all. The first thing that came to mind was Saudi money. Half of the evils and absurdities in our society seem to have a Saudi prince behind them somewhere, and the Wahhabists are, like all fundamentalist Muslims, committed creationists. This doesn’t hold water, though. For one thing, Stein is Jewish. For another, he is rich, and doesn’t need the money. And for another, the stills and clips I have seen are from a low-budget production. Saudi financing would surely at least have come up with some decent computer graphics. No, Ben Stein is no crook. He must then be foolish; and that’s sad, because I now think less of a guy I once admired, and whom my friends admire. Life, it’s just one darn bubble bursting after another.

To return to the matter of computer graphics for a moment, it seems that the producers of Expelled, rather than go to the trouble and expense of making their own, may have just stolen some. (The creationists have posted a defense here. There will probably be a lawsuit under way, which I shall report back on. Oh, and as I write this, I see a Reuters report that our defenders of faith and morality may have stolen some music too. How many more shoes will drop, I wonder?) It is at any rate clear that they engaged in much deception with the subjects they interviewed for the movie, many of whom are complaining loudly. This, together with much, much else about the movie, can be read about on the Expelled Exposed website put up by the National Center for Science Education, which I urge all interested readers to explore.

These dishonesties do not surprise me. When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?

He continues in the same vein with:

Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science” engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!

I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles. It’s by no means all of them, but it’s enough to corrupt and poison the creationist enterprise, which might otherwise have added something worthwhile to our national life, if only by way of entertainment value.

then follows that comment with this gem (emphasis mine):

Examples can be multiplied. The witty and mild-mannered federal Judge Jones, who presided over the 2005 Kitzmiller trial in Dover, Pa., felt moved to note that: “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” The response of the Discovery Institute was to launch sneering, slanderous attacks on the professionalism and competence of Judge Jones (a church-going conservative Republican appointed by President George W. Bush).

and winds up with this excoriating headshot:

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It’s a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, dabbled myself) brings to us a feeling for what the scientific endeavor is like, and how painfully its triumphs are won, with what sweat and tears. Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

A decade or more of seeing this shit in action has taught me a lot about the nature of religion, and the sort of people who gravitate toward it. Those trial transcripts of the Dover Trial I provided in another thread, really do bring home the utter sleaziness of the whole fundamentalist operation, which again, is all too frequently a corporate business, aimed at lining the pockets of the founders, and giving them an easy source of income that they don't have to work hard for. I've seen just about every dirty trick in the book being deployed by pedlars of this particular brand of supernaturalist wank fantasy, and if this is where religion leads you, then I want absolutely nothing to do with it. Because, apart from any other issue that might be applicable here, I'm aware that the proper rules of discourse were constructed specifically to ensure integrity in discourse, which pedlars of feculent dreck such as creationism are willing to toss into the bin, if they think it will convince the gullible that their lies are something other than ex recto fabrications and bullshit.

Indeed, that's why I keep asking various supernaturalists that embarrassing question, which none of them address, namely, if their magic man is so fucking magnificent, why does this entity choose so many charlatans and crooks to be its most vocal advocates? By contrast, the advocates for science are resolutely honest, frequently demonstrate a level of genuine, substantive, in-depth knowledge that is breathtaking to behold, and in some cases, also possess a wonderfully lively sense of humour, including instances of genuine wit.

I'm pretty sure if I was a god responsible for bringing a universe into being, I'd make sure it was people of the calibre of scientists who were representing me, not arsewipes like Kent Hovind, Ken Ham or Joel Osteen, or in the case of Islamic creationism, gangsters like Adnan Oktar.

I suspect this embarrassing body of data is something else AJ777 won't dare touch with a barge pole, save to trot out some tired and previously destroyed canard involving that favourite activity of creationists, namely listing dead scientists who purportedly believed in Magic Man, most of whom were alive in an era when failing to make public declarations of conformity to religious doctrine led to you being turned into a bonfire. Let's watch and see how quickly that prediction comes true. :)

I would suggest instead, that they brought a peashooter to the fight, only to discover that the opposition turned up driving M1 Abrams main battle tanks ...

The number of times I've seen this happen, sometimes leaves me doubting the sanity of some of the individuals involved ...