Burn,
An excellent idea for a thread.
It bought to mind a line from a Smiths song, 'When your biology catches up with your mentality'. This Board over the years has been a good proving ground for the dynamics that shape the literalist mind, as we have had, and have a number of posters of that ilk.
My own experience is that it is not possible to argue with an agenda with any practical outcome. The fundamental religionist has a conclusion set in visceral concrete by that most illogical and unassailable abstract - faith. It is to this conclusion that all science, sociological and otherwise, must be bent in order to serve the needs of that faith. Ask a simple question which would seek to move them to uncomfortable areas, such as 'why do humans get goosebumps', and it is ignored.
In order to maintain such a position, it is essential that disturbing issues, such as dendrocronology for example, be ignored, or more usually that some minor blemish be found in its science and then a mountain of criticism of the whole science can be built on this blemish, while of course ignoring the big picture.
What really is needed is for the biology to catch up with the mentality and this takes intellectual honesty, non-partisan reasoning of facts and fancies and above all a desire to know what is true. The personality dicates this process, not neccessarily the information. I have found the more insecure a person, the more virulent their adhesion to their fundamentalist ideologies. One of the reasons that the WTS was so easily able to imprison us in a fundamentalist prison, is that it cleverly played on our personal insecurities. A desire for the world to be a giant Cuddly Club, the desire to live for ever, the need to feel purpose or being, the need to belong. Once we shed, or at least dealt with those insecurities, the real world opened up to us like Jungle Gardenia.
So like Narkissos, I believe for example, that trying to get such a person to study the history of religious thought, the evolution of language, the history of ritual, is more effective than banging heads about evolution.
I recall a brave attempt on by JGnat on this Board to introduce one Calvanist Crackpot to a more gentle Christianity a few years ago. The end product of a very long thread was that he concluded that she was not a 'true' Christian and that she was damned to the fires of Hell for watering down the message of the avenging Christ. soaked her in a tsunami of evangelical spittle, then moved on to other less Godless places. It is par for the course with such people.
HS