Ex-Christian: My Faith Shifted After Seeing Ken Ham Get "Destroyed" by Bill Nye

[NeoGreen]

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/10/27/ex-christian-my-faith-shifted-after-seeing-ken-ham-get-destroyed-by-bill-nye/

Ex-Christian: My Faith Shifted After Seeing Ken Ham Get “Destroyed” by Bill Nye
By Hemant Mehta, October 27, 2019

Kudos to the Christian Post: The publication just posted the first of eight (!) personal essays written by people who walked away from Christianity, even if they later returned. This one’s from Luke Douglas, the executive director of the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix and board member for the Secular Coalition for Arizona. In other words, a legit atheist activist.

Douglas was in law school — and taking seminary classes on his own over the summer because he was still a devout believer — when Creationist Ken Ham debated Bill Nye in 2014. That debate shifted his thinking.

… When [Ham] debated Bill Nye the Science Guy on the scientific legitimacy of creationism, I was about halfway through law school and organized a debate watch party, ordered pizza, and gathered my evangelical colleagues to root for Ham together. So imagine how devastating it was to watch my childhood icon be so embarrassingly destroyed before my very eyes. Ken Ham brought faith to an evidence fight, and even my fundamentalist creationist eyes could see it. I resolved in that moment to learn more about evolution, astronomy, and geology so that, when it was my turn to debate the Bill Nyes of the world, I would do better than Ken Ham had.

We know what happens when fundamentalists “learn more.” They stop being fundamentalists. (“The more I tried to investigate, the more problems I ran into.”)

The quote is a keeper: Ken Ham brought faith to an evidence fight.

[MineralMan]

1. Education and logic work wonders against superstition and fables.

However, that only works with people able to understand the evidence and who are curious enough to continue learning. Sadly, many believers refuse to listen to anything but what is familiar and comfortable to them. They reject being educated, because it frightens them to think that what they have believed might be wrong. So, they shut anything else out.

Our hope is with the young, who don't have fixed ideas already beaten into their brains. They can learn, and we can teach them.

[Cartoonist]

2. Ken Ham

That idiot would be destroyed in any debate. So would any Republican who wants to argue climate change with Bill Nye.

[guillaumeb]

3. Did you read the excerpt?

Where it said:

The publication just posted the first of eight (!) personal essays written by people who walked away from Christianity, even if they later returned.

Good one.