Alternatively, he’s old enough to be from an age where we were still putting lead in everything.
7 Likes
1 Like
I know evangelicals fell hard for Trump, but I wonder specifically about the overlap between young Earth creationists and Trump supporters - I’m guessing it’s an almost perfect circle. If you’re poorly educated, have no critical thinking skills and are willing to credulously accept whatever nonsense authority figures tell you, you’re primed to accept Trump, too. The whole YEC movement is chock full of both suckers and grifters (and those who are both, somehow).
Well, I think the YEC realized that if they were going to accept dinosaurs as having been real (and it’s hard to deny them and accept, well, every other type of animal), then they also had to accept that they must have been on the Ark, as their texts specifically say all types of animals were on it. This obviously creates all sorts of problems, but if one accepts the Ark story as literally true, one has already swallowed a lot, and so in for a penny, in for a pound. (So you then get the YEC trying to convince everyone that dinosaurs were actually around quite recently, and all manner of mythological monsters - and poorly drawn animals - around the world were actually dinos kicking around during recorded history.)
The YECs have a totally weird solution to the “how were all those animals on the Ark” problem - there were actually a tiny number of animals, but after they left the Ark, there was this sort of magical second act of creation that doesn’t get mentioned in the Bible, where their offspring all rapidly diversified into an absurd number of forms, naturally (and then that process apparently stopped suddenly). Weirdly, they don’t accept evolution, not finding it at all credible, yet at the same time they believe in this one period of what has to be super-evolution that completely destroys all their objections to evolution. They don’t talk about that a lot, I notice.
As for the dinosaurs going extinct - well, I’m not entirely sure they accept that, either. Certainly some YECs believe non-avian dinos are still out there, waiting to be found in some African jungle.
Ah, now you see - the water came out of the rocks. Because rocks can have water chemically locked up in them, so obviously it was just like squeezing water out of a sponge, and that’s where the water went after. (Yes, this is a given explanation I’ve read.)
The Ark only had “types” of animals (not species) so it wasn’t all that much, and they hibernated. (Because some animals can hibernate, obviously all of them can do it. In the same way that some aquatic animals can survive in both fresh and marine waters means that they don’t have to worry about how all the marine animals survived the water suddenly becoming brackish.)
The lions were like, you know, vegetarians for a while, just like in the Garden of Eden*. (Animals’ bodies are so perfectly “designed” for their current lives it’s irrefutable evidence of a creator, even though they were all created to be peaceful vegetarians with no need for either weapons or defense and er, wait a minute… shut up, stop asking questions!)
*Do not ask where the plants came from that fed everything off the Ark, given that the land had been underwater so long. Just don’t.
The YEC position is that after the animals came off the Ark, some magic happened. Some magic that made them incredibly diverse in form and genetics. Nothing less than a second act of creation (that might have been even more impressive than the first one), that goes unremarked upon in the Bible. There was a single “cat” type, for instance, that gave us everything from house cats to tigers in the blink of an eye. Also, everyone was incredibly, incredibly fertile. Humans would have had to be giving birth to like 30 children (all of whom survived) for hundreds of years for the numbers to work out. A sudden increase in genetic diversity would be nothing compared to everything else they require to happen.
I find it hilarious that science was overtly a Christian endeavor, that the history of science was completely fully of clergymen who believed that creation was encoded with messages from God, and studying all the various branches of it would reveal divine messages and inform their understanding of the Bible. The Biblical-literalist position was the default for everything. And then what they found was… not so much. It’s hilarious because modern creationists try to turn that history, including these guys - these literal Christian clergymen - into part of an anti-Christian atheist conspiracy to keep their heads from exploding from the cognitive dissonance of claiming to believe “science” while denying it entirely.
Well, I’ve seen people claim so.
It’s only hours old*. Spoiled milk is the creation of the devil, to deceive you.
*Minutes. Seconds! No, wait, it’s not even yet been created!
10 Likes
Flat Earth theory explains it all…
4 Likes
You’d end up like the House of Habsburg which (to retain and concentrate the family’s political power and wealth) encouraged marriage within the family.
7 Likes
I don’t recall any rotting bodies in Arc 2. Although it did have Helen Hunt guest staring in one episode
2 Likes
Well at some level, creation is God’s word made real, so it is no surprise that clergy would study it to find the will of God. Especially when you consider that colleges existed essentially to train clergy. It is only as the natural world seemed to contradict the bible in more and more ways that science and religion were seen as in opposition.
And if you think that YEC people are full of crazy contradictions, they have nothing on KJO (King James Only) fundamentalists. They believe that the King James version of the bible is the ONLY really correct one, and that every other version, even the original Greek and Aramaic texts are corrupted.
4 Likes
Here I was just wondering whether I’d ever get to post that smiley anywhere…
5 Likes
6 Likes
If we’re under admiralty law, I’m a pirate and them landlubbing arseholes best prepare to be boarded!
8 Likes
yo ho! yo ho!
a pirate’s life for me!
under the black banner o’ Capt. Teach, hisself, i’ll be.
7 Likes
Biblical inerrancy is the belief that the Bible “is without error or fault in all its teaching”
always super weird when the translations turn out to be incompatible
except i think there’s some rule that the christian god is unknowable and that its ( his? ) existence is supposed to be unprovable. so if you could find something that proved the will of god, it’d be proof that it wasn’t the will of god.
( gödel probably spins in his grave perpetual )
just because the bible doesn’t mention alien abduction doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. the dinosaurs are fine. and happy they don’t have to deal with all of us
4 Likes
Yeah, there’s a lot of overlap there, for similar reasons. They’re intellectually lazy and ignorant, and can’t bear to admit there’s some cultural context for things other than the one they’re familiar with. (I mean, that’s still not true with the King James version, but they can more easily pretend otherwise.) Much easier to just declare the KJO as the true text, thereby not having to deal with the whole issue of translations (or that the original texts have multiple meanings lost in translation), being unable to understand the actual text, etc. - these people also insist only the English of 1611 is “correct,” rather than having to admit that evolution is real (even if only linguistically).
5 Likes
There’s a Hitchhiker’s Guide joke about that but not actually, and there were no shortage of theologians who thought you could rationally prove that God exists, as in ontological arguments.
Likewise God would be too much for any person to know in entirely, but there was definitely the belief that by studying his creation you could gain insight into him. A fair bit of science was even done by clergy – to pick a neat example, tardigrades were discovered by a pastor.
5 Likes
6 Likes
Please rephrase your statement in English?
2 Likes
Yes we do.
Now get out before the resident archaeologists and historians wake up.
5 Likes
It also makes God look like a moron. Being all-knowing, shouldn’t he have anticipated that they would go extinct and putting them on the ark would be a waste of time? Imagine how much less time and resources the ark would take if it didn’t have to house two of every species of dinosaur! I suppose you could say it was all a test of faith for Noah (as though all the rest of it wasn’t enough already), in which case God is an evil, childish bastard who loves to gaslight and torture his creations like a playground bully or abusive parent, which… hmm, okay, that actually checks out with the rest of the Bible just fine. No wonder these people worship clearly evil mortal idols- they’re just lesser versions of the Big Man himself in their minds.
4 Likes
I sometimes point out that God Himself could not prove to us that He is the omnipotent creator of the universe because we are not omniscient. Any miracle that we are capable of experiencing is a crappy parlor trick compared to the entirety of the Universe. He could prove that he is powerful in ways that we do not understand, but not that He is ALL powerful and ALL knowing. Effectively that he is A god, but not THE God. And as Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Gregor Mendel, the friar that arguably invented genetics comes to mind.
They dress it up, but I think that it starts with “The King James edition is what I listened to growing up, so nothing else seems bible-y to me.” Once somebody points out that the bible quote that they have been trying to beat you with just might be a poor translation, their head explodes.
5 Likes
