Two weeks at "Evolution Fairytale Forum"

I have just been banned after 2 weeks and 69 posts at the Evolution Fairytale Forum, posting under the name "BeesKnees". The reason appears to be because I misrepresented people (I got warning saying that anyway). I did, I admit, but only because I misunderstood, never deliberately. Here is a good example:

Me: The implication of the rainbow myth is that prior to the flood there were no rainbows. Why would that be? Clearly there was rain - enough to cause a flood. Was light not refracted prior to the flood? If not, then how did eyes work?

Uppsala: If you are going to make assertions about what the Bible says concerning whether or not there was rain before the flood then I suggest you use the Bible itself to support your claim. There is NO mention of rain before the flood. Instead we read:
 
 "no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground,  but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground" (Gen 2:5,6)

Me: Okay, that gets even more weird. So in fact, God created rainfall, as well as the rainbow, as part of his covenant.

Uppsala: God did NOT create rainfall as part of his covenant and neither did I claim that he did.

Now please stop misrepresenting my arguments. you have done this several times now and doing so is a breach of the forum rules. I will leave  you with a warning for now, but please try to respect the rules in the future.

Now okay, I misunderstood his position, but from what he posted that certainly seemed like his position.

And this guy was one of the more reasonable ones. We also have Ron, who claimed:

Since the ministry of Jesus was eye-witnessed by numerous people (Peter, John, Jude, Matthew, James, etc...) and those eyewitnesses wrote down their first-hand eyewitness testimonies (accounts), the life, ministry, miracles, death, burial, resurrection, continued ministry and ascension are beyond repute. Therefore your misgivings with that is not based upon substance, but rather personal faith-statements.

Personal faith-statements? Oh, the irony. Anyone who dares to suggest there is some doubt that Jesus was resurrected is obliged to prove it never happened, to prove Matthew was not the author of the Gospel of Matthew, etc. In his view, these things are facts. Heaven forbid Ron should have to support his claim himself.

And then there is gilbo12345, who said, with regards to the scientific method:

Yes the hypothesis is a prediction, I already told you this before. Its what you assume is the conclusion of the experiment... In my plant example, it is assumed that plant growth will be increased. However this doesn't allow you to assume it is true, or false or anything you cannot know until you do the experiment.

Now every web page I quoted has hypothesis and prediction as two distinct steps, but not to this guy. To him they are one and the same - and he claims to be a scientist. The mind boggles.

But the real bone of contention is his claim that you assume the hypothesis, but you do not assume the hypothesis is true. I have no idea what that even means - and I strong suspect neing does. I got banned for misrepresenting people, but this guy was happy to fight straw men all day long despite being repeated told there were straw men. My suspicion is that after several posts about this he realised he was wrong, but was too prideful to admit it to an atheist. To cover his error, he set about the repeated straw man attacks. It is just possible my banned was connected to this - cannot let the Christian lose face, can we?

In fact, his last post is basically railing against wthose straw men. He can do that safely because I have been banned. I specifically said in the OP "Just to be clear here, we all agree that verifying experiments are done," and reiterated that sevetral times during the thread. And yet his argument in his last post is:

 This is why you NEED experiments to verify your hypothesis!

In bold, underlined, big text, just like that. That is the thrust of his argument. And it is against a straw man. No attempt to justify his position that a prediction is the same as a hypothesis, something we disagree on, just ranting about an issue we do agree on. He has lost the argument, and he knows it, and is just trying to save his pride.

And that is the problem with sites like that. Dissenters inevitably get banned because they respond in kind or just get misunderstood, and the site becomes an echo chamber of creationist ideas. They can pat themselves of the back for being so great, and set up challenges that no one will answer. In their world, no one answers because they are right. In reality no one answers because everyone who might gets banned after a couple of weeks.

Oh, well. It was quite fun while it lasted, but the arguments were getting stale. It may well prompt a post of Ezekeil's prophesy about Tyre, which was interesting.