Atheism exposed - I should have known better
This may seem to be a ramble, but it has a very pertinent point. Once you go on this journey of reminiscence with me and see where it leads and why I asked you to take it with me you will understand...
From the age of about five until the age of nineteen, when the US Army was nice enough to draft me right out of college (A green Army bus sat in front of the building where I was taking my finals) I spent countless hours exploring the hills of Southeastern Indiana. We (usually one of my cousins partnered with me) went looking for interesting things both living and long-dead, as well as artifacts associated with the Indians who had hunted there and the settlers who had come and then gone. In retrospect, my belief in Darwinism should have been nipped in the bud by the very discoveries I made in my youth, had I even had the slightest inclination or reason to think critically about the things I found. But back then I was quite propagandized.
At the age of five I was usually just walking along with my dad and uncle and grandpa and a cousin or two while we looked for arrowheads and geodes and shot things with various weapons. I had my own BB gun long before most kids would be trusted with one. It was an old-fashioned Daisy if I remember correctly. Long gone now. I do have my first single-shot bolt-action .22 and also the first shotgun I ever fired, which had been my grandpa's since before the Great Depression and might have belonged to my great-grandfather first.
By the age of eight, my older cousin decided I was old enough to go "tromping" with him. Lonnie was a bit older than me. He was the guy who introduced me to rock and roll before the Beatles were known to exist. He was the guy who filled me in about girls long before my dad decided to have "the talk" with me. He was also exceedingly curious about what could be found in the hills and was glad when I was around to share that curiosity and desire to find things out. My other guy cousin was sports oriented, so when I hung out with Steve we were usually talking about sports or playing sports or maybe playing Strat-O-Matic baseball. But with Lonnie we were usually either going to the town pool so he could flirt with girls while the younger me just dived and swam, or, we were "tromping."
Tromping
I do not need a website to describe the rock formations of the area. I was thoroughly aware of them, knew them intimately, had explored so many square miles of the hills on foot with eyes out for everything. We caught probably thousands of "crawdads" and we carried special sticks that could pin a crayfish and, fortunately, a snake down to the bottom of a limestone-bed creek. I was saved from being bit by a very aggressive Cottonmouth (aka Water Moccasin) because I had become adept at using the stick, a normal thinner branch from a tree with a fork on the end that we would use our pocket knives on to make the fork just long enough to pin crawdads or snakes down without damaging them. We almost always let the crawdads loose after we caught them, although Lonnie thought it was hilarious to toss one into the family water tank from time to time.
So we came to know the local wildlife intimately. We found river otters (which the Zim Golden Book said did not live in Indiana - WRONG) and salamanders and frogs and toads and various kinds of turtles and snakes. We had to go skinny dipping without taking off our shorts because of the possibility of snapping turtles and we didn't wish to become human lures. 'Nuff said there. While we chased and loved catching most snakes we avoided rattlers and had to keep an eye out for Cottonmouths because they are mean and territorial and very poisonous. Oddly enough, if we found a Copperhead we could just admire it and move on because they were either going to ignore us or escape from us. We also found muskrats and beavers, which are pretty obvious as their dams and pools and rounded main houses are their signatures. Watching a beaver swim is pretty cool, actually.
We found the freshwater clams/mussels and we would occasionally fish for bass and gar but frankly suckers and carp were the most common fish and nobody ate them, as they are carrion-eaters. We came to understand how to find salamanders (usually under a rock near the creek or river or a freshwater spring) and on occasion actually found some morel mushrooms, which was always popular with my dad and uncle. Giving the morels to the adults always earned us kid points!
Another interest was looking for artifacts and abandoned dwellings. We treasured arrowheads and axe heads and spear heads. The Indians who had been native to the area could find flint (as could we) and so very often made their weapons and tools from flint, a very hard and durable rock. I wish I still had the big pile of arrowheads, spear heads and even the axe head I had collected (When I was drafted I gave many of my most treasured possessions to my brother just in case I was killed). But of course after I was drafted I was offered a job in the military that was too good to pass up (with bonus money) and wound up enlisting after having first been drafted. What a long strange trip that was and with a top secret clearance to boot, so there are some things I will never discuss even if there was really nothing all that dramatic. Honor is honor and I seek to be honorable now. I received my honorable discharge eventually and later enlisted in God's Army so I am a soldier for the King now.
But the ultimate prizes were good fossils. The area had lots of limestone and clay and coal and slate and shale and mudstone and sandstone and marble and flint - a veritable treasure trove of fossil rocks included amongst them. We found thousands of shellfish all found together almost in formations. We found corals and crinoids in quantity as well. We would on occasion find an entire colony of trilobites that spanned several feet of rock. In face we sometimes found huge formations of bottom-dwelling hard bodied creatures which had been exposed and appeared to continue on either side of the river or creek we were tromping. Such things we so common we gave them little thought. In fact, finding shellfish was like finding trash by the side of the road, they were so common in one area of the Whitewater River area. We were only interested in such things if we could find a whole fossil, for instance, a trilobite that could be carefully chipped out and separated from its rock tomb. We didn't wonder why it was possible in some cases to separate out a whole trilobite from the rock.
The most prized fossils were the unusual ones, like finding a fish skeleton or a fern or a coprolite, that kind of thing. We didn't wonder why there were places where maybe three differing layers supposedly millions of years apart would all be accessible within the reach of a boy in certain locations. Nor did we think much about how some formations would disappear then reappear or why they were not always in the same order. We didn't even wonder why it seemed almost every kind of fossil rock we ever heard of were all found nearby. We just accepted what teachers and books and media told us.
Finally, we found the reminders that once that area had been "the frontier" to Europeans and discovered that some caves had obviously served as dwellings of a sort (due to the carvings or markings on the cave walls). We could read the giant Birch trees and the carvings upon them. The highest marks would be Indian signs and messages and markers. Then farther down messages from French and English explorers/fur traders mixing in with Indian signs, then farther down it became all English and then at around eye level there was an occasional heart with initials. People would carve dates as well. 1800's were common, 1700's were spotted now and then. For some reason by the time we made it to the 1900's dates became less popular.
One of the most amazing things we found was a full two-story farmhouse on the banks of a spring-fed creek and surrounded by high hills. If you scaled the hills, behind them were flat lands perfect for farming and in fact most of that land was being farmed. But to build that house they must have had to bring most of the materials by the river and then up the creek, which at location at that time could have been navigable by canoe or flat-bottom boat but not anything else as it was pretty shallow at places. The house had quite obviously been abandoned for many years and probably many decades. It had been painted and fitted with glass windows but the paint was all but gone, the exposed wood grey or green from mold and rotting, the roof amazingly still not caved-in. We wondered why anyone would build that house there rather than behind the hills, where the land was flat and a road to the old highway was easy to make? We'll never know...we asked the old-timers about it and no one knew of it, as if it was a ghost house. Certainly, with the brooding decay of the house itself cloaked in massive willows it would make a wonderful focal point for a horror flick. It is probably now collapsed and pretty well recycled by the elements and organisms so that it may not be recognizable as having been a house at all now. It has been well over 40 years since I last saw it.
One day we determined to follow one river branch/creek far beyond where we had gone before. We took candy bars and full canteens and off we went. We hoped for possibly a box turtle (they are actually tortoises) because Lonnie wanted a new one and we also wanted to see if we could find the headwaters of that stream if we could. It became shallower and became a stair-step creek with the bed becoming mostly limestone but we had walked for miles (mostly walking in the middle of the water straight up the creek near the end) and only getting up on dry land in areas friendly to tortoises or where some kind of anomaly would draw our interest.
Anomalies?
The aforementioned long tromp? We were too ambitious. We had not yet found the source of the creek when we had emptied our canteens and were getting thirsty. It was a hot, humid summer day and we headed back to get a drink and some food. We figured there would be a sign of a freshwater spring that would allow us to get a nice, cold, sweet drink of spring water. But we were in unfamiliar territory, we didn't know where the springs might be and spotted no little trickle tributaries to clue us in. We were parched.
Eventually, the creek water began to look pretty good. I asked Lonnie about taking a drink and he then bent over, caught some water and his hands and began drinking. I figured if he was doing it, I was, too and I got a handful of water and slurped it in. At that point Lonnie began laughing at me, "You didn't really drink it, did you? I was just faking! I wouldn't drink this nasty water!" Well, I had taken one drink of it so I took one more. I was parched. About an eighth of a mile or so later we spotted a dead opossum laying partly in the water and partly on a small island. It had scores of maggots crawling on it. Lonnie managed to convince me that drinking that water might have given me rabies/lockjaw! The final miles home were agonizing. We ran the last few hundred yards to the house and the first thing I could get to that emitted water was the kitchen sink and after a quick rinse of my hands I drank a few handfuls of water before it hit me that I could actually get a drinking glass. The biggest thing I saw in the cabinet was a big old tin cup with a handle and I filled that thing and just kept drinking and drinking until I had a headache. Lonnie was using the outside faucet and he got there first which is why I made it to the sink in the kitchen.
I was still a pretty small boy then, so I battled angst for several days until I admitted to my dad that I might have rabies and I was ready to take the terrible needles plunged into my abdomen. He laughed and gently explained to me that the opossum was downstream from where I drank and that rabies cannot be passed on by a dead animal anyway. All by worries were senseless and just another prank by Lonnie, who loved pranking people of all sorts. Ah, those were the days...
Now my knowledge of wildlife kept developing as I kept on tromping for many years. I discovered that a live clam will close when you approach it and will stubbornly stay closed if threatened. In fact by forcing one open you would wind up killing it. Yet when they died they would open their shells as the life left their soft bodies and soon the two shell halves would separate. So why didn't I wonder about the thousands of fossilized beds of shellfish that were all whole and closed? Those shellfish were not clues to a long period of time and they were not slowly buried by muck after death. The only way entire colonies of the organisms would be preserved closed, on the same plane horizontally and together would have been a fast and massive burial by a flood-caused sediment layer. The same thing with trilobites. Trilobites were often found in big groups, all apparently buried alive and upright with eyes still preserved in place and no sign of having died before burial. Why didn't I notice this? I wasn't thinking critically.
In fact, I have found trilobites in several different types of rock. I have found them in sandstone and mudstone and limestone and even in a limestone bed in far Northeastern Illinois which is used mainly to produce gravel. Trilobites are NOT only found in one or two fossil layers, that is a lie perpetrated by Darwinists. In a giant flood, different sedimentary flows may alternate laying down layers and so trilobites had the sad job of being buried alive all over the world that then was and apparently not one of them survived. I've found them in supposedly very ancient rock in the Southeastern part of the state and also in much "younger" rock layers in the far Northwestern corner of Indiana/NE Illinois. They have been found in deep valleys and up on mountainsides.
During my tromping days I certainly ran across a lot of dead animals. We found lots of dead fish and dead crawdads. Crawdads do NOT remain upright and in place when they die and fish do not get quickly buried and preserved. Dead water creatures get moved randomly by the movement of water and fish especially tend to float to the surface and get munched by various kinds of organisms. Opossums and racoons and other mammals would quickly both rot and provide meals for carrion-eaters. Why didn't it occur to me that fossils of whole fish and land-dwelling vertebrates would be subject to scavengers of all kinds and NOT be preserved as fossils unless they were rapidly both buried and preserved by some anaerobic process such as a world-wide flood?
But I know better now. I have been in every part of this country and across the borders to explore North and South. I have been as far West as you can go (Hawaii) and about as far East (Maryland Eastern Shore) and up to Alaska and Washington and the UP of Michigan and on into Canada. I have been far South in Florida and Texas and California. I have explored all the major mountain ranges and stood atop a few mountains. I have gone down into the valleys and canyons. I have seen and explored sedimentary layers and now I know the truth. The fossil rocks are not laid down in the neat order listed in high school textbooks and fossils cannot have been gradually accumulated. The fossils themselves bespeak rapid burial not gradual ages. The rocks are gamed by Darwinists, who will name the exact same layer different names in different places to disguise the scope of the often massive and continent-spanning sedimentary rocks.
Darwinists lie. They try to flat-out lie about the big matters and then concentrate on side issues which demand that someone tell a story. They cannot demonstrate Darwinist evolution actually happening, so they tell stories based on their OPINION of the fossil rocks, or the layers of ice in the Arctic, or the number of tree rings in old trees, or by reliance upon undependable and improperly calibrated dating methods. Why do they concentrate on such dubious matters of opinion? Well, they are short on facts. They have nothing else.
I tell the truth. My philosophy of life, my worldview, tells me to tell the truth. I would not lie to advance the cause of Christ or to make someone doubt Darwinism. That would be shooting myself in the foot. I am not a Jesuit. I do not believe in doing a smaller evil to produce a greater good because I do not believe in doing evil at all. God doesn't work that way. He is all Light and no darkness, He is Truth and not one part lie, He is the Word which means that He is both the source and the embodiment of logic and knowledge.
Darwinists deny God and therefore also deny morality and they will lie with no hesitation. Men like Kenneth Miller and Ernst Haeckel lie and deceive to advance Darwinism. Men like Stalin and Hitler used Darwinism as an excuse to slaughter millions of innocents. Now the Darwinists are committing their crimes against YOU! Darwinism has been, from the very start, an excuse for Atheism and never has been nor can it be supported by the evidence. So they will hide and lie about the evidence and make up evidence and do whatever they can to silence dissent from anyone who believes differently. Darwinism as a religion is now just like the ungodly Catholic Church of ancient Spain, using their Inquisition to question and end the academic and/or scientific careers of dissenters like Guillermo Gonzalez and David Coppedge if they can. Their control over grant money keeps most scientists quiet about any doubts about Darwinism. Since they are Darwinists, they believe they have the right and perhaps to some extent even an obligation to keep their foolish religion from being exposed as utter nonsense so they can pretend to be scientists and pretend to be smart.
I have shown conclusively that Darwinists claim that the Universe came from nothing and suddenly and inexplicably became everything. I have shown how this is a philosophically barren concept. I have revealed that Darwinists pretend that Darwinism doesn't break the Laws of Thermodynamics, which it does. I have proven that Darwinists pretend there is no Law of Biogenesis and have renamed spontaneous generation, now calling it chemical evolution. I have conclusively demonstrated that there is no natural source for information. I have shared with readers that Michael Behe has demonstrated that there are innumerable irreducibly complex systems and structures in nature that defy step-by-step Darwinism and that there is a limit to the number of mutations that can be passed on and that limit is far too small (Behe claims that it is two) for any uphill change in organisms. In fact, DNA has very complex repair mechanisms that work to stop mutations from being passed on at all.
Edward Blyth was right and Charles Darwin was wrong. Natural selection is part of the mechanism to preserve the kind and adjust to environmental changes while NOT changing into any other kind of creature. Darwinists lie to try to fool the public, but since we have found a few vertebrates even in "Cambrian" rocks and so many anomalies in the rock record that the concept of gradualism has been falsified and Darwinists have been reduced to trying to claim a series of big catastrophies rather than one giant flood event. Creationists know better.
The Universe has a First Cause and this is logically satisfying. The Creator God invented time and matter and even the concepts of existence or in fact the concept of a concept. God has no beginning because He invented beginnings. God transcends time because He created time...and life...and information...everything!