the_ignored
Posts: 50
Joined: Mar. 2009
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Seems I can't start a new topic, so I'll just post this here if that's ok
I had a run-in with Sarfati some time ago: I went to the Creationist meeting (the Tuesday October 26, 2010, 7:00pm, Grace Point Church of God, 720 62nd St SW, Edmonton. (AB) one).
Right after work I took off to the church where Sarfati was speaking. I missed the initial lecture but he had a book-signing then another short speech/Q&A combo.
My first question had to do with this.
I pointed out that several people, right off the get-go defined vestigial organs as not necessarily meaning having "NO" function. His response? He basically kept repeating the accusation. I told him he was acting like he was ignoring the answer. We got back and forth; he mentioned the "guttersite" Talk Origins, probably because he saw me reading from a paper the references (you can see some in my comment here that I was making.
I asked him where he got off on calling them "guttersnipes" or something like that; he said that he called them a "guttersite". I said that was worse.
He said that Talk Origins was an "antichristian" site, I told him that it wasn't true: Christians like Glen Morton post there. He insulted him, belittled their "christianity" or something like that..
Anyway, he kept to saying that scientists have been trying to change the definition of "vestigial" because uses kept getting found for them while I had said that they were consistent all along, the dictionary buggered up or something.
My second question:
After listening him do the "Expelled" routine of blaming all sorts of anti-semitic crap on Darwin and showing some Nazi footage (that he said was in the "Expelled" movie), I asked him if he knew that Martin Luther (the guy he praised earlier) wrote On the Jews and Their Lies.
He said he did, but that he had virtually nothing to do with the nazis: Luther was only anti-semitic as the end of his life when they refused his arguments.
I asked him: What did Darwin ever say about the Jews? He went on about how it was "darwinist" scientists or something who went for that; you'll notice that he didn't actually answer that question. I (think) I pointed out that it was Luther that Hitler admired, etc.
I said that there's a lot of stuff here; and mentioned a Christian site: Ray Comfort's Atheist Central site and if he'd heard of him. He said he hadn't, I said that maybe it was because Comfort was from New Zealand, some in the audience liked that.
Anyway, I mentioned this post where Comfort reviewed the "Expelled" movie, and that it said all the things Sarfati said. I said: Read down the comments and you'll see the commentators refuted that (or something like that)...fortunately I got cut off before I could mention that my name is where one would find all that.
If anyone there actually remembers and gives a shit, they can go to that site and just read through and see for themselves what I wanted them to see anyway. I really didn't want those berks to know my name anyhow!
We got into another argument and the church people finally got pissed off enough (I should consider myself lucky they let me go on this long, really) muttering "Next, next".
It had no effect on me other than to make me duck my head and say something that I'm damned glad the mike didn't pick up, but Sarfati and the "light" guy did eventually end it and go on to the next questioner.
**This is how stupid I am...I rembered, way afterwards, the perfect question to have asked him during that argument. Sod it! What would it have been?
Pointing out what Sarfati once called a fellow Jew:
secular misochristic Jew
With all his talk of "darwinists" leading to nazism, it'd have been great to throw that ancient, xian anti-jewish curse back at him. Sigh...damnit.
Unlike a previous guy who took off after some @@@hole in the audience went nuts on him (Sarfati actually had to hold that guy back), I figured: I'm staying till the end. The last thing I want is for these clowns to clap while I'm leaving or something. So, I sat until the end.
I had a nice talk with a sympathetic guy afterwards. I told him
-more detail about what I had posted on Comfort's site and which name to look for it
-how the various posters on Comfort's site keep pasting him, especially some guy named Steven J. The example I gave was the evolution of genders "problem", etc.
-how some xians like Roger C. Weins (yes, I spelled the guy's name wrong when I spelled it out to this fellow) has an article called Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective that he could Google to see how Sarfati's talk of radiometric dating gets dealt with
-how if actual historians and scientists were in the crowd that the questions would have been a lot more hostile to Sarfati, etc.
He did say that Sarfati had a sympathetic audience at the church.
He, his wife, and some other guy hung around us while we talked. Kind of sad though: Only me and him talked and we never introduced ourselves to each other or to the other people, really.
Oh well: Those other people didn't speak up themselves, they just listened.
So, other than those two problems I mentioned, how could I have handled that better?
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