Hi Undis
"By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have LOVE for one another" and "no one has love greater than this, that one should die for his friends."Those are the best ways to distinguish the true faith from false religions.
Many other religions also claim to show love for other people within the religion, so I don't see anything that could act as a unique identifier. Likewise, martyrdom is not a particulary efficient method of determining true faith from false religion.
Satan's biggest and best agents are false teachers who are deceived into believing lies (such as the JWs and Mormons and Roman Catholics).
And that's exactly what a Jehovah's Witness or Roman Catholic could say about other religions!
Sorry Undis, you've not shown that your brand of Christianity is any more or less right than the beliefs of an animist from Papua New Guinea.
Now to your 'proofs' of the Flood;
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v25/i2/sisters.asp
The key evidence given by the above URL that is meant to refute the dating accepted by most mainstream sceintists is this;
For these rocks, long-age geologists have assigned an age of around 230 million years based on their fossil content and their relative position in the sequence of rock layers in the region. Recently, a creationist geologist measured the carbon-14 content of a piece of wood found in a quarry in the overlying Hawkesbury Sandstone.7 Long-age geologists wouldn?t bother analyzing for carbon-14 because they believe the rock is 230 million years old. All carbon-14 should have disappeared by 50,000 years, at the most. There should be no carbon-14 left. However, the analysis confirmed a small but significant amount of carbon-14 in the wood?clear evidence that the sandstone is less than 50,000 years old. The small level of carbon-14 does not reflect an age, but rather the low concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere before the Flood (carbon-14 has been building up since the Flood).
Here's the refutaion;
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011_5.html
Claim CD011.5:
A piece of wood is fossilized in the Hawkesbury Sandstone, Australia, which most geologists date to the middle Triassic, about 225 to 230 million years ago. The wood was dated by Geochron (a commercial dating laboratory) using the carbon-14 method. They determined its age to be only 33,720 +/- 430 years before present. Contamination by recent microbes or fungi cannot explain the discrepant age.
Source:
Snelling, Andrew, 1999. Dating Dilemma: Fossil wood in 'ancient' sandstone. Creation Ex Nihilo 21(3): 39-41.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v21n3_date-dilemma.asp Response:
It is doubtful that the sample (number GX-23644) was even wood. Snelling was not even sure what the sample was. Nor could the staff at Geochron tell what the sample was [Reesman 2000]. If it was Triassic, it probably contained no original carbon (there are no known cases of any 225-mya wood retaining any of their original carbon). Using carbon dating to date it was pointless from the start, since it would inevitably give meaningless results.
The sample was porous, making it likely that it would have absorbed organic carbon from the groundwater. It was probably this contaminating carbon which produced the date.
Another possibility is that some C14 was created in situ by natural radioactivity in the surrounding rocks [Hunt 2002].
33,720 years is still significantly older than the age which many creationists, Snelling included, ascribe to the earth, and there are no plausible sources of error to make the age younger than 33,000 years.
Links:
Meert, Joe, 2003. Andrew Snelling and the iron concretion?
http://gondwanaresearch.com/hp/crefaqs.htm#who (Includes a letter from GeoChron labs saying that the "wood" looked like an iron concretion)
Highlights are mine.
Distressingly, I find the Answers in Genesis site falls short of good scientific practise; they fail to point out the date for the wood (as pointed out above) ALSO falsifies the theory THEY are trying to prove, nor do they point out that there is no equivalent evidence on a worldwide scale, as one would expect following a worldwide flood, which ALSO falsifies the theory THEY are trying to prove. They take one piece of dodgy evidence, and present it in a way which obscures they haven't actually got proof of a global flood anyway.
Your next URL http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/geology.asp is a list; I'll answer specific points with specific refutations, and lists with lists; http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
The next URL http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/fossils.asp is about Archaeopteryx. Here's a set of FAQ's on the subject http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx.html. If you feel any of the arguments advanced by the Answer in Genesis site are not answered by those I provide, please let me know what they are.
The next is a little absurd; it tries to associate the recovery of an open system after a cataclysm (Mount St. Helens) with a closed system (post-Flood Earth, and again fails to point out that there is no proof for the Flood itself. You are free to provide whatever evidence you wish to rebutt that last statement in italics.
This one http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4127.asp is another classic;
Here's them discredting someone's scientific argument;
"For example, the author Alan Hayward claims to be a ?Bible-believing Christian?. However, he is a unitarian, which means he denies the tri-unity of God."
I can explain why this is a ridulcous argument for the AiG site to use, but am pretty sure you will see it too; iof not, let me know, and I'll let you know.
Mostly, this is a list of 'proofs' which gets you a list of refutations; http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood.html
This URL http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.asp makes much of the book that is disected here;
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodmorappe-review.html. If there are any unanswered questions after studying this matyerial, let me know.
The final URL again does the standard Creationist trick (I can provide huge numbers of examples) of using an argument supposedly refuting one small part of a set of data used to reach a conclusion without indicating that the alternative explanation being offered is still impossible given other parts of the data set used to reach the conclusion. I doubt you'll find many Creationist sites with information like;
Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter [Bignot, 1985]. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. [Twenhofel, 1961] In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter.
As this would refute many Floodist claims.
Undis, you're obviously a genuine person. Remember, your arguments are used by others with different beliefs to justify those different beliefs.
Think about why, if Creationists and Floodists are right, the information on their web sites is so bad and often twisted. Think about the fact that we are not talking about god's existence, but about whether the litralistic interpretation of a book written in the late Bronze Age/ early Iron age is correct.
I'm trying to make sure you realise there is not one thing (other than your internal validation, which people who believe contrary to you also have) that marks your set of beliefs in particular of Christianity in general as any more right than most other religions.
I'm trying to make you realise that claims that the Bible is an infallable literal history and guide are totally unfounded.
Without incoporating these two facts into your beliefs (or refuting them in a satisfactory way), you are risking decieiving yourself by simply selecting arguments which confirm your beliefs rather than arguments which stand on their own two feet.
All the best
