Teach me, Conservapedia.

So, I'm reading the Young Earth Creationism article on conservapedia.com because I loathe myself. While reading this article, though, I have stumbled upon the genius that is conservapedia.

Within the article I found the sentence, "Young earth creationist scientists also believe that there are multiple lines of evidence from the field of geology showing that the earth is young." Since I was pretty sure that sentence was incorrect I sought out the 4 footnote links which provide support for it. The four links are to:
1)answersingenesis.org
2)www.creationism.org
3)nwcreation.net
4)globalflood.org

This is what made me realize the brilliance of conservapedia, Young Earth Creationism, and Religion as a whole. The brilliant position maintained by these ideological views is that they ignore everything that proves them wrong. They set the terms of the argument to be such that they can't be incorrect.

Think about that. How many times have you and I been shown to be wrong due to demonstrable fact, empirical observation, or appeals to recognized authority? The mistake we made, I now realize, is that we acknowledged these other sources as meaningful. We argued within a context in which people who don't agree with us can be correct.

And that's the mistake the likes of conservapedia, young earth creationists, religions, etc. refuse to make. They only acknowledge sources which agree with them. They frame the argument to be such that demonstrable fact and empirical observation are less meaningful than their own types of "evidence". If evidence is presented which is contrary to their own opinion then they attack the fundamental assumption which makes that evidence meaningful. If presented with a 2 billion year old fossil, for example, a young earth creationist would say, "That is not 2 billion years old." When confronted with the information obtained through carbon dating the young earth creationist would say, "That is incorrect. Carbon dating does not work."

Do you see how wonderful that view is? It's brilliant! It's inspired! Their world view is that they cannot be wrong, that any contrary evidence is fundamentally flawed because it is contrary!

Surely they are some of the most thoughtful and intelligent amoung us. And if we gathered up every god-damned one of them and threw them into a fucking volcano they would do naught but laugh politely and say, "Silly secularist. Lava is not hot!"

Brilliant.

Edit: I had to throw this quote in because it's so beautiful. This sentence comes from the "Starlight and the Age of the Universe" section of the conservapedia article:

"Thirdly, the work of young earth creationist scientist Dr. John Hartnett proposes an alternative, creationist view, by theorizing the Earth was trapped in a time-dilation field caused by extremely strong gravitation during the first few days of creation, from Earth's point of view, while billions of years passed for the rest of the universe. He attributes the field, it's removal and the continued balance in our solar system (after the field was removed) to divine intervention."

Why are other planets so much older than Earth? Why can we see starlight from millions of light-years away? Well, God put earth in a time bubble, you see.