I suppose it was necessary for someone to form a group of Christians Against Dinosaurs, but I have to admit that I was unprepared to read that dinosaurs “lack family values.”
You know, if you actually sit down and read the Book of Genesis, you will quickly realize that God supposedly created the creatures of the sea and the birds that fly over the Earth first. Then he created the creatures of the land.
Only after he was done with these tasks did he get around to creating “mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
But, yeah, it doesn’t say anything specifically about dinosaurs. On the other hand, if birds are dinosaurs then this might not be as much of a problem for Biblical Literalism as some people suspect.
Unless, of course, you keep reading. Because God seems to have created all these creatures without, at first, providing them anything to eat.
Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.
Who can reconstruct a timeline from such gibberish?
All we can be certain about is that God put Adam and Eve in this garden of his, but Steve was most definitely not invited. And dinosaurs didn’t eat plants because there were no plants before Adam and Eve showed up, and Adam and Eve never saw no damn dinosaurs.
But, then you can solve this conundrum by positing that humans once lived with the dinosaurs. It makes perfect sense.
All of this would be no more honorable than picking on the special education kids on the short bus if it weren’t for things like this:
It ought to be the friendliest of soil for White House hopefuls looking to pad the resume with a little foreign policy experience: a trip to the United Kingdom.
So far this campaign season, however, the trips to England have been anything but merry for several prospective GOP candidates.
The latest to emerge scathed from a trip across the Atlantic Ocean is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who capped an appearance at the prestigious Chatham House think tank on Wednesday by avoiding a question about whether he believes in the theory of evolution.
“I’m going to punt on that one, as well,” Walker said at the end of a Q&A during which he also declined to answer questions about foreign policy. “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”
Evidently, Scott Walker thinks that the Christians Against Dinosaurs are a constituency he can’t afford to alienate if he hopes to win the Republican presidential nomination.
Unfortunately, he might be right about that.
That Christians against dinosaurs thing sure looks like a hoax. It’s just too funny. However, the fact that we are considering the possibility it ISN’T a hoax is a sad statement on our current discourse…
It’s definitely parody. Which won’t stop Bobby “The Smart Republican” Jindal from citing it.
For extra yuks, dinosaurs and heavy metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hry-cRRcXa8
I’d like to think it’s a hoax. Unfortunately, that’s not clear. I’m a religious person but not one who treats sacred texts literally. They contain great insight and wisdom but not when one treats them like children’s stories. So much of what passes for religion couldn’t pass muster with intelligent five year olds.
I call POE.
Purity of Essence?
Propagation of Error?
“I have nothing against women, Mandrake, but I never let them have my essence.”
Preserve Our Essence.
Just another contradiction:
“Only after he was done with these tasks did he get around to creating “mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.””
And yet woman was made after Man and man was given dominion over woman. Doesn’t really matter WHEN you were made … you just gotta be a man (being white is a plus, also -> New American English Bible).
no, completely not correct. in Genesis 1 mankind is created, “male and female created he them” – fascinating couple of verses, male and female are created simultaneously and ancient readers of the Bible (and some modern) developed some very interesting discussions of what is implied
26 Then God said, `Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
27 So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
[NRSV translation]
note the plurals “humankind, “let them”
” and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
Darryl Issa and Mitch McConnell! They’re in the Bible!
Just exactly what does create “mankind in our image, in our likeness”? I thought the wild haired, grey bearded white dog with pinwheel eyes did this alone.
An attentive reader can find a fairly accurate account of the collision of proto-planets and formation of our earth and its’ satillite four and a half billion years ago, and the subsequent condensation of the seas, the upthrusting of land and distillation of a life supportive atmosphere before the attentive reader gets to the part about creating mankind in “our” image.
No fear.
lots of ink spilled over that one for millennia actually. the new creation care theologians [who in general read the text literally] interpret it as requiring proper [ecological] stewardship of nature,
In the early part of Genesis, God is plural. In the later parts, God is singular. Probably written after exposure to Egyptian Monotheist ideas. I recall scholars saying they think Genesis had three writers because of the stylistic divergences. The first part is pretty much the standard Middle Eastern creation myth straight out of Sumer and Akkad. I think they had the flood, too. Do Republicans believe in Gilgamesh?
It’s saddening to think that those ancient goat herders had evolving ideas about God, but now it’s all been frozen for thousands of years.
I always thought it was use of the “Royal We”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we
Oh. I thought it was because we humans, for whatever reason: sheer boredom, desperate survival, or profit, were created as a collaborative project between Ancient Aliens.
Hey, makes as much sense as anything else…
Or the other theory, namely that we evolved from germs left on trash from an alien picnic. Well, Republicans excepted. they haven’t evolved.
Nice fugue on what has been the issue with the literalists all along. They in no way are reading the text absolutely literally but with an interpretation that is increasingly modern in that it tries to read it as if it could be read from a 20th centurty historiographic or scientific point of view. Read from either of those frameworks, what they say is ludicrous, which makes the extensions they draw from it as laughable as a creationist theme park.
And the issue is the difference between the conventional meaning of “myth”, which is an Enlightenment connotation and contemporary understandings of the process and function of myth that comes from two centuries of anthropological study and critical literary studies.
The have not read their Bibles close enough to notice that there are several different (and in some details contradictory) stories pieced together in the early sections of Stories of Beginnings (Genesis). One that is based on a creative process of separations uses a whole bunch of womb imagery about the birth of creation. The second uses images drawn from the potters trade. Another uses the magic of resuscitation with the breath and just a little Frankensteinian surgery that elides where Adam’s extra rib might be. Reading the Bible as a Puritan or Calvinist misses a who lot of very interesting word play.
And it is not coincidental that as archaeology studying the Middle East matured to a more scientific and historical framework, both Israel and especially fundamentalist Christians were cheerleaders for wars, one side effect being the destruction of contrary archaeological evidence. The looting of the Iraq museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo should be seen in this ideological context as well as in the context of the greed of people rich enough to afford to buy stolen artifacts and hide them.
The parents’ imagery in this context is very interesting. “I am getting sick and tired of dinosaurs being forced on our children.” is not that far from accusing schools of oral rape.
The fact that this has a website, donations, and a YouTube indicates that it is just another greedy or desperate family in search of a good grift.
actually more types of creation are there, and all have analogs in neighboring ancient cultures -creation by speech is the principal one for Genesis 1
Indeed.
Jeebus, God was able to create all the fauna out of whole cloth, or um, dust, but all the flora required water in order to appear? What kinda omnipotence is that?
Anyway, another Fox News triumph for the boneheaded “conservative” Walker, entering the atheistic socialist lion’s den and bravely telling ’em to catch his punt. He’s not a goddam scientist after all! Or even a college graduate, praise God! Any UK guffaws only emphasize Walker’s heroic “witnessing” for The Truth and The Way. Next stop, Paris! Now there’s some scary atheists….
So the Party of Rubes is hatin’ on the hapless dinosaurs, extinct for tens of millions of years. Why doesn’t they just throw up their hands and deny dinosaurs ever existed and be done with it? It’s not like anyone ever saw one! And of course all that fossil shit is simply more science mumbo-jumbo. All the poor dinos are is an untidy complication to irritate and confound pious Christianists. It’s not like their candidates need to be educated or informed in order to win elections—Walker is exhibit A for that.
After all, it’s not the dinosaurs that are the problem, it’s knowledge itself—that’s always the real enemy….
Omnipotence is a later doctrine. Previously, it was just implied in the powers that the king who paid the priests asserted. Have to have the abstracting a reifying Greek philosophers before you begin having abstractions like omnipotence and demands for logical consistency.
And philosophy has to break from the clergy before those philosophical demands are not short-circuited by religious tradition. In other words, not until the Enligntenment in the West do you arrive that that sort of criticism.
When you are dealing with pre-Enlightenment or contra-Enlightment thinkers, like those in the current politicized part of the evangelical movement even the idea that a logical contradiction is a problem does not register. Does not compute. They’re just not into that kind of abstraction; they prefer the more flowery.
When I was a boy in Sunday School, we were told that fossils were fakes. Later, we were told that the Devil created them to test our faith. Even school children could see through that.
You know, many blame McCain for bringing Palin forward as his VP nominee; it’s said he “weaponized the stupid,” one of my very favorite phrases.
Truth is that the mutual decision by the GOP and the Moral Majority back in the ’70’s to hop into bed and commit mutual sodomy with each other made the rise of the Palin types not only possible, but inevitable. With the electoral successes which have taken place in the wake of this decision, it was just a matter of time until we would see outcomes like this Walker debacle. And this, from one of the 2008 GOP POTUS nomination debates:
And now, we’re here: almost none of the 2016 GOP POTUS candidates will publicly support evolution science, and many will flat-out deny it. This willfully ignorant POV doesn’t have any public policy implications or anything <sarcasm>.
Our challenge is that the fundamentalists have the money to get their message out with a big freakin’ series of megaphones, and that while the flock is willfully ignorant, the Dominionist and fundamentalist leaders are diabolically evil. One of the foundational video evidences of this evil:
Willful stupidity has consequences:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-pentagon-climate-change-how-climate-deniers-put-nation
al-security-at-risk-20150212#ixzz3Rci2Ppc1
I thought these paragraphs were particularly salient:
“Those who talk most about climate change — scientists, politicians, environmental activists — tend to frame the discussion in economic and moral terms. But last month, in a dramatic turn, President Obama talked about climate change in an explicitly military context: “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said in his State of the Union address. “We should act like it.”
On one level, this is just shrewd politics, a way of talking about climate change to people who don’t care about extinction rates among reptiles or food prices in eastern Africa. But it’s also a way of boxing in all the deniers in Congress who have blocked climate action — many of whom, it turns out, are big supporters of the military. The Senate Armed Services Committee is made up of characters like James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and is headed by John McCain of Arizona, who, before he ran for president in 2008, had been an outspoken advocate for climate action, but has been silent on the issue in recent years. The House Armed Services Committee is now chaired by Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, who argued in a 2011 op-ed that prayer is a better response to heat waves and drought than cutting carbon pollution.”
it’s sort of like their economics; they rely on dems to fix the economy after a cycle of slash and burn tax cuts for their overlords. similarly they rely on dems to do the engineering and science that runs a 21st century country. it’s such a scam. iirc it was the Jon Krakauer book about LDS cults that pointed out they wanted to opt out of federal law but survived to a great extent on fed benefits.
It is not that fundamentalists have the money, it is that money created The Fundamentals Sunday school curriculum and promoted it across America. Money created the Bible colleges and the university millionaires like the Bob Jones family and Pat Robertson. Money bought the coup of the Southern Baptist Convention. Money created the alliance of evangelicals, Catholics, and bigots that became the Moral Majority and then the religious right-wing. Money buys their votes with lies and bigotry and finances all sorts of crazy micro-movements.
Just like al Quaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, it is politics that dominates religion and not the reverse. The religion is just propaganda and cover. The core is a grab for individual power on the part of the leaders of these movements.
What made the fundamentalist money particularly deadly is that it was force multiplied by the money from the corporations and oligarchs and financial institutions who have been in this unholy marriage of convenience with the religious/gun/racist nuts in support of Republican candidates who have pushed the Party to the right rather viciously.
It is just so tiring feeling like you are expected to tip-toe around everyone’s irrational religious world-views. This fundamentalist and dominionist takeover of Republican politics would be very comedic if it wasn’t such a threat to the health and well-being of the rest of the world.
These people are frighteningly dangerous. And their sheep are heeding their admonitions with the usual “blind faith” that comes along with the whole package. “Faith”, as an epistemology, is right at the top of list of threats which need to concern us.
There is a reason the rest of the developed world laughs at it, like they did at Scott Walker’s stupidity.
what annoys me is stoking the conflict side of religious disagreements as a form of cynical manipulations of believers by the Kochs et al, for their personal enrichment at the expense of democracy and ecology
Keep fucking that dinosaur, dumbasses.
What about the idea that when dinosaurs lived, they weren’t called “dinosaurs”.
link
The opening sections of Genesis contain two different creation stories mashed together. Believers in the Bible as the literal word of God have come up with various explanations for why this is and to reconcile the two stories. Scientific students of the Bible have done serious work in teasing out Biblical authorship based on the nature of the stories, the language used (including different names for God), and other clues. To take an obvious difference, the first story seems to come from a people who lived by the sea; the second, from a desert people. Many of the scholars who do this work are believers, and many others are atheists.
It’s fine if you don’t care about any of this stuff. And it’s fine if you’re interested in it and are willing to give it some time.
What’s not so fine is for you to read the first half-dozen pages of Genesis (in English, no less) and then say, HEY! I’M THE FIRST PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD TO NOTICE THAT THERE ARE SOME INCONSISTENCIES HERE! GUESS I’LL STOP READING NOW!
it just makes you look kinda dumb.