Yes, including a number of FReepers like that, too ... LOL ...
I’ve found that to be the case on several issues. The issues where there are FReepers who want to DOMINATE and not “live and let live” ... are on these issues that I’ve found out about personally ...
(1) About the Bible (it’s inerracy and authority), about Jesus and Him being the ONLY way to Salvation.
(2) About God having created everything, per the Six Days of Creation and not according to the Theory of Evolution.
(3) AND ... even on the subject area of Apple Products, and INSISTING that those who pick and use those products are IDIOTS and then, they go on those threads and HARANGUE all those other FReepers who use those products. It’s so amazing that I call them APPLE-HATER TROLLS (and there is a specific group of them).
THIS seems to be some sort of SICKNESS on the part of some FReepers ... :-) ...
Well it constitutes shaking your fist in others’ face when something the Chicago Statement in fact accepts as a valid hypothesis (old earth creationism) is denied with a whole raft of question begging rhetoric.
As the author rightly observed, moderns want a god that can give them humanistic power and wisdom. This "god" is the god of scientism (magic science) and evolution. According to man, this god supposedly created a Cosmic Egg (Big Bang) which upon exploding produced the matter and psychic energy that when acted upon by evolution over billions of years eventuated in hominids and then finally man.
In this account can be seen the devastating effects of man's worldly wisdom which has either rejected Him completely, subsumed Him into the time/space dimension (pantheism/ quantum physics) or redefined Him as a deistic deity that performs at the behest of sovereign man issuing in an inverted anti-creation account wherein power is not from Above but from below.
Benjamin Wiker observes that the modern 'scientific' worldview cosmogony is a secularized, mathematical formula, "..entirely stripped of the supernatural (grounded in the new) understandings of nature, science and philosophy that laid down the presuppositions on which Scripture scholarship came to rest...Little (can be) understood about the rise of modern biblical criticism if close attention is not paid to the great cosmological shift that occurs in the seventeenth century...The two occur as part of one revolution because the shift in the meaning of nature includes human nature as well." ( Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300-1700, Wiker & Hahn, p. 257)
This cosmogony emerged in the heart of Christendom at the time of the Renaissance. At that time magic science and evolutionary philosophy originally took the form of occult pantheist humanism bespeaking evolution of divine spark or spirit to higher and higher states of god-consciousness. Later on another form arose: evolutionary secular (materialist) humanism. While the former was blatantly occult and spiritually pagan, the latter was essentially a de-spiritualized but nevertheless arcane version of the former falsely presenting itself as demonstrable empirical science to masses of hopeless people. Research historian James Webb comments:
"Reason had died sometime before 1865...After the Age of Reason came the Age of the Irrational...." Bereft of assurances of immortality after so great an attack on biblical revelation masses of hopeless people were "begging for a revelation which was scientifically demonstrable."(The Occult Underground)
Karl Marx's irrational secular-atheist dialectical-materialism (evolutionism) was offered as a scientifically demonstrable revelation that cannot be understood apart from the inventor of the dialectic system, master-magician G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was an important member of the occult Gnostic intelligentsia that emerged out of the Renaissance. He closely studied ancient and modern wisdom traditions including ancient Egyptian Hermetic magic and Babylonian Kabala as well as mesmerism, psychic phenomena, dowsing, precognition, and sorcery. He professed belief in a pantheistic Earth Spirit, and informally aligned himself with Hermetic societies, Luciferian Freemasons, and the pantheist-Rosicrucian's. (Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Glenn Alexander Magee, 2001)
Enrico Ferri (1856-1926) provides an example of the magic undergirding dialectical materialism. A prominent socialist of his day and an Italian criminologist who for many years was the editor of Avanti, a socialist daily, Ferri wrote of the divine miracle-producing 'knowing' energies animating ideological systems in "Socialism and Religious Beliefs." Ferri confessed:
"....modern positive science...has substituted the conception of natural causality for the conception of miracles and divinity....I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing else than the logical and vital outcome partly of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian evolution." (Marxists.org)
What 'scientific' secular-atheists aspired to be in completely reordering Christian-based Western society and the souls of men according to scientific evolutionary principles, 20th century Fabians actually were. Much if not most of the apostasy, madness, lawlessness, chaos and all else that has gone so horribly wrong here in America is attributable to the occult Gnostic Fabians.
The first Fabians had almost all been lapsed Anglicans from Evangelical homes who became dignitaries in the Church of England:
"There was a Christian fringe to the London socialism of the eighties, but this too was Anglican. The Christian Socialists came together in Stewart Headlam's Guild of St. Matthew and the Land Reform Union; and the more respectable Christian Social Union, formed in 1889 -- seeking in Fabian style to permeate the Anglican Church -- soon attracted more than two thousand clerical members. Dissenting clergymen too began to find a place in the Fabian Society and the London Progressives, while Unitarian churches and centres like Stanton Coit's Ethical Church provided a meeting place for believers and idealist agnostics . . . Socialism was for all of them, the new Evangelism." (Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Fabians, Simon & Schuster, 1977, p. 18)
The failure of many Anglican hierarchy to repudiate apostatizing higher critics and radical freethinkers scandalized faithful, orthodox Evangelicals, whose outraged response was considered reactionary by the scholarly community. In 1861, Benjamin Jowett and six liberal apostatizing Churchmen published a volume entitled Essays and Reviews, in which they expressed alarm lest,
"…the majority of Churchmen, by holding fast the narrow, fundamental beliefs, should estrange themselves more and more from contemporary thought." (The Founders of Psychical Research, Alan Gauld, p. 49)
The apostatizing Jowett held that, "Scripture must be interpreted like any other book and some of the essayists were even more radical in their tone."
The portents of apostasy in the Church of England were ominous:
"It seemed to conservative Christians quite appalling that at a time when the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture was being undermined by Darwin and his allies, a group of those whose sacred duty should have been to shore it up again had conspired to hammer their wedges not under it but into it." (Gauld, p. 50)
Gauld records the rapid decline in faith among younger Cambridge men:
"Scepticism based on science flowed into and reinforced the older stream of doubt stemming from historical and ethical considerations. Their joint effect may be traced in the fact that whilst the outstanding Cambridge men of the 1840's -- B. F. Westcott, C. B. Scott, J. Llewellyn Davies, J.E.B. Mayer, Lord Alwyne Compton, E.H, Bickersteth, C. F. Mackenzie, Charles Evans, J. B. Lightfoot, E. W. Benson and F.J.A. Hort -- all took Orders (three of them becoming great clerical headmasters and six bishops), the outstanding Cambridge intellectuals of the 1870's -- the Trinity group centring on Henry Sidgwick and Henry Jackson and including Frederic Myers, G. W. and A. J. Balfour, Walter Leaf, Edmund Gurney, Arthur Verrall, F. W. Maitland, Henry Butcher and George Prothero -- tended towards agnosticism or hesitant Deism." (Gauld, p. 64)
In this same period a group of young dons from Trinity College, Cambridge, were also turning to psychic research as a substitute for their lost Evangelical faith:
" In February 1882, Podmore took Pease to a meeting at which this group founded the Society for Psychical Research . . . Among those who founded the SPR were Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour -- later a conservative Prime Minister -- and his brother, Gerald." (The Fabians, p. 18)
The progenitor of the socialist Fabian Society was the Cambridge University spiritist group, the Ghost Society founded in 1851. The Ghost Society also spawned the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) founded in 1887:
"Council Members and Honorary Members of the SPR included a past Prime Minister (William Gladstone)...and a future Prime Minister (Arthur Balfour)...2 bishops; and Tennyson and Ruskin, two of the outstanding literary figures of the day (as well as) Lewis Carroll (and) a surprising number of titled persons." (Gauld, p. 140)
Having replaced the Genesis account with a secular mathematical formula, conceptually murdered the God of Revelation, disowned their own souls, and closed the way to Heaven Gnostic pagan Fabians sought power here below, thus the over-riding interest of the S.P.R. was the spirit realm. In search of power they conducted scientific research into phenomena such as mesmeric trance, telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, haunted houses, seances, and all aspects of mediumism, or contact with spirits, to determine the scientific laws of physical spiritualistic phenomena.
Above all else, revolutionary/evolutionary socialist organizations such as the Fabians were anti-Inerrancy, anti-Genesis account ex nihilo, counter-establishment, anti-tradition, sexual liberationists consisting of committed Darwinian Gnostic elitists who were intolerant of the Holy God in three Persons, man as His spiritual image bearer, and every vestige of authority such as immutable Truth, Moral Law, sexual ethics, the traditional family, free market systems, individual liberties, and cumbersome processes of Americas' Constitutional Republic and wanted to see a new order ruled by a superior caste.
It is out of this fetid swamp of Gnostic God-hatred, magic science and nature worship that modern evolutionary theism and progressive creationism emerged.