Russ, the fact that you hold the beliefs you do and still run this forum where people who don't agree can come freely and post about mercury issues and even issues on this thread, is admirable. This really is a good place. And yes, I agree that where medicine and dentistry are concerned, there's a lot going on in the shadows to help people make money at the expense of public health. Because there may be some genuine conspiracies there, though, does not mean we need to start seeing them coming out of the woodwork.

Archaeology. Geology (my sister-in-law is a geologist). plate tectonics. The speed of light. There are so many facets to science that are in general agreement with each other, that it is just laughable to say they're all wrong, or all a conspiracy. So we're deluded about . . . radiactive decay. Light that reeaches us from parts of the universe where it was emitted billions of years ago. Magnetism in rocks and the structure of the earth's crust that show the plates have been drifting for millions of years. There's a story in the news just now about evidence that has been discovered of a flood of catastrophic proportions that came from the North Sea area, which had been a lake, and flooded the English Channel, turning us into an island. The sea floor has been mapped by sonar. This is estimated to have been 200,000 years ago.

Neanderthals. Wooly mammoths and mastadons trapped in ice. Rock strata with fossils in. Anyone can find a fossil if they go look. They are not all manufactured in China for the sole purpose of tricking American scientists into buying them for lots of money. Get real! This is all, ALL of it, a pack of lies is it. You may as well just say we don't even know whether the world, or we, actually exist because what is the nature of reality. Clearly people will interpret their version of reality however they like, sometimes no matter what the evidence to the contrary may be.

I did have a look at the video you linked to Russ. I would have watched it in its entirety if it were not 2 1/2 hours long. I could not watch 2 1/2 hours of the absolute rubbish this person was peddling, but I scrolled through enough to get what seems to be a good flavour of his agenda. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, rather felt like doing both.

I won awards for rhetorical speaking in school. I now teach my students to unpick this language to get at what advertisements, politicians, etc are really saying. The only people this man is going to convince are those who are already creationists, and who are willing to laugh at his ridiculous jokes about how evolution is as nonsensical as showing a series of utensils graduated from spoons to forks. Ho ho, yes that really shows how evolution must be wrong doesn't it?

He criticises textbooks, but it is impossible to read what many of the examples on his overheads say, and he flashed past them too fast for anyone to actually be able to read them. He'll take a quote from part of one sentence, part of another, leave out what is said in between, and then make a criticism. He gives quotes from various scientists but does not put them in context. I suspect that where some of these scientists are saying quite truthfully that we do not yet have all the answers, and that some of the things we think we know may be wrong, he is taking this as read that they are saying it is ALL wrong and all nonsense. He flashes pictures of trees supposedly fossilised upside down in rock strata. Sorry, but where did these pictures come from? Anyone can doctor a picture in any number of ways, when it is taken or processed. Again I'd like to know the context. And then there are all these people saying things like look, we are physically different from chimps, so how can we be as closely related as evolutionists claim. Small mutations can cause quite large physical changes, we see this just in the human species. No we do not know all there is to know about genetics, far from it. But in a way that's just the point. We don't know everything about how genes mutate or how they work together. I think it is spurious for a layperson to just sit there and say something like, our faces are not like chimps' faces so how can we be related. Personally I think there is something quite human in the face of an ape, and I find it a moving experience to exchange gazes with one.

Watching that video, and the people in it who were loving their entertaining presentation of nonsense, made me very sad, though as I said some of it was so astoundingly ludicrous that I wanted to laugh too. Look at the body of knowledge we have built up, the things we have discovered and learned. No humans in the history of the race have ever achieved these things to such an extent. People like this would throw it all away and plunge us into new dark ages, all for the sake of their religion. And religion IS at the heart of it, it has to be. Find me a single creationist who is not also a fundamentalist Christian. I'm afraid the rest of the world is just going to look on at this in wide-eyed disbelief.