Why do creationists largely use only straw-man arguments?

[Scam of God]

The weakling flails and lashes out when his position has been compromised - so, too, does the established interest, once it has been undermined, attack with an increasingly unstable furor and exceedingly less logical coherence. That Christianity today is increasingly seen as the sole domain of a collective of radicals, careless in their arguments and without regard to conservatism in method, is simply and solely the result of a solid truth: it is.

Value systems, like nations, grow stagnant and die - not because 'human progress' renders them obsolete (though it is simple to pretend it is so), but because each such system leads eventually to the conditions that give rise to its own destruction: the multipolar and heterogeneous world of traditional European tradition - and when I consider myself a 'traditionalist', it is the values of this world-order I hearken to - eventually found its fullest expression in polytheistic Rome: in the immediate centuries before Christ, it was commonplace to see, for instance, rabbis dwelling alongside the priests of Sol Invictus and members of the mobedan mobed - and these were competing cults, all of them. In fact, the Latins were every bit our equal in broad-mindedness and tolerance, for the basic structure of their civilization compelled them to be; an intercontinental superpower is not built on marginalizing and alienating those inhabitants of its frontier regions.

But such a situation could not last, and in Rome's great tolerance it fell prey to Christianity: only too late did the Romans understand the dictatorial aspirations of the upstart faith, and their initial reaction - enforcement of the Imperial cult, a curtailing of general religious liberties, and a lack of political will to attempt to assimilate Christianity with Rome's polytheism - served only to turn ill will from other adherents to non-traditional faiths. Devotees of Cybele and Mithras were just as targeted as were the Christians, which led these other counter-cultures to give support to the largest burgeoning anti-Rome movement - Christianity.

The same dialectic is at present in modern Christianism, but in reverse: rather than killing itself to death out of tolerance, it has shut out any possibility for self-renovation through an infusion of new ideas and new readings of Scripture. So thoroughly has the American laity rejected higher criticism that, here, virtually no Biblical criticism is embraced by the great median of believers - even Reinhold Niebuhr, who preaches by and large a simply intensely personal variation of the moral absolutism of American evangelicals, is largely unknown amongst them.

Which is not to say that the Christian experiment among Europeans has been a total failure - but even then it has provided the very tools now turned against it. Christianity was responsible for the burning at Alexandria, but it also encouraged the refinement of epistemology among a clergy who alone were permitted direct access to the Divinity. This epistemology - chiefly developed out of need to parse the literal story of the Bible from its meta-moral meanings - would eventually give way to the really integral elements of our Western methodology of science, which in turn does Christianity in.

The modern fundamentalist Christian, then, on the whole, is simply acting out what is natural to him; really his behavior cannot be expected to be any better. He has a nose, and understands intuitively that his religion is beginning to smell more than a little like dessicated meat. The intelligent among them are now looking for ways to revitalize the religion; the idiots are content to toil away at shoveling the landside; and the few who are really attuned to themselves already are experimenting in new methods of existence, new values and new creations.