> GM>>>Let me cite the case of Jim Lippard who was a high school student who
> believed in young-earth creationism. He writes:
>
> "Around 1984 I began using a Phoenix computer bulletin board system called
> Apollo (...), which had a number of active atheists on it. At first I did
> not contribute a lot to the ongoing discussions, but eventually I became
> one
> of the most outspoken people on the BBs. Watching some of the
> Christian=versus-atheist arguments moved me further away from Christianity.
>
> Although I initially defended Christianity, I found that its opponents
> generally had the better arguments." ~Jim Lippard, "Jim Lippard: From
> Fundamentalism to Open-ended Atheism," in Edward T. Babinski, Leaving the
> Fold, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 321<<<
>
> He was welcome to change his beliefs, wasn't he. No one forced him or
> coerced him or belittled him .
>
> Now let me state the story of Danny Phillips -
> Danny Phillips was a 15 year-old high-school junior in the Denver area who
> thought for himself. His class was assigned to watch a NOVA programs,
> produced with government funds for National Public Television, which stated
> the usual evolutionary story as fact. Its story went something like this:
> "the first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan....from
> these one-celled organisms evolved all life on earth."......Danny knew that
> this claim of moleculel-to-man evolution goes far beyond the scientific
> evidence. So he wrote a lengthy paper criticizing the NOVA program as
> propaganda. School administrators at first agreed that Danny had a point,
> and they tentatively decided to withdraw the NOVA program from the
> curriculum. That set off a media firestorm......The fact that
> administrators seriously considered any dissent from evolutionary
> naturalism infuriated the Darwinists, who flooded the DENVER POST newspaper
> with their letters. Some of the letters were so venomous that the
> editorial page editor of the paper admitted that her liberal faith had been
> shaken. She wrote that "these defenders of intellectual freedom behaved,
> in fact, just like a bunch of conservative Christians. Their's was a
> different kind of fundamentalism, but no less dogmatic and no less
> intolerant." I had editorialized the story in the interests of space,
> found in DEFEATING DARWINISM BY OPENING MINDS by Phillip Johnson, pp 34.
>
> Is that fair or not?
No, it's not fair.
But, once again, you're indulging in the tu quoque ("so's your mother")
fallacy. (Remember, I said earlier that you were giving an argument of the
form, "Since my opponent makes mistakes X, Y, and Z, it's all right for me
to make mistakes A, B, and C.")
Lloyd Eby