Filter out the con men such as Jim Bakker and you are still left with the vast majority of weirdness. This is because the con men are leveraging the existence of such ideas, they are not the root cause.
When faced with absurd religiously inspired claims, then there are two things that you can be sure of and need not doubt
- Those that embrace and promote such thinking are often wholly oblivious to just how weird their stance actually is and so they quite sincerely speak up
- They are also sincerely wrong … but that of course is rather obvious to most.
Here is a personal selection of the top three examples from the past seven days.
Item 1 – Ken Ham: The Bible is the “True History” of the Universe
Ken Ham, the young earth creationist who has built a life sized replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky and is also famous for insisting that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old, popped up last week to make the following claim on twitter …
The Bible provides the true history of the universe, and this has been confirmed over and over again as we study the world around us.
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) June 15, 2017
Note that he claims “The entire Universe“, and not simply “The World“.
Today we know that the number of galaxies in the universe is at least 2 trillion. Yes, “Trillion”, not “billion”. We also know that each of those trillions of galaxies has hundreds of billions of stars … yet strangely enough the Bible is rather silent about all of this.
If you wish to truly understand reality, then reading just one book to the complete exclusion of everything else is really not going to cut it.
Item 2 – Christian Facebook Page promises to Ban Anyone Posting Rainbow Emojis
With a hat Tip to the Friendly Atheist …the Facebook page, “Warriors for Christ,” really really do not like rainbows. They feel so strongly about this that they declared this …
… and part of their reasoning is that apparently Rainbows belong to God …
Can you possibly guess what happened next?
Yep, you nailed it, the response was exactly as you might anticipate, they got flooded with Rainbows …
This was not simply a reaction from those that are not religious …
The response was not a religious vs non-religious tussle, instead it is about standing up for the LGBTQ community against those who wish to discriminate.
Item 3 – David Barton: Bad Weather is caused by God being upset with us
If interested in knowing the weather next week, then according to David Barton you should skip all that sciency forecasting stuff and crack open the bible instead. During the past week on WallBuilders Live, an outlet for the rather weird extremist Christian group founded by Barton, he explained things as follows …
Another one I’ll throw out is weather. It’s interesting in the Bible, weather patterns are often predicated on whether the people doing the right thing or the wrong thing. And if people sin against God, then you get floods, and you get storms, you get lightning, you get all your crops get destroyed, you get all sorts of things…
…
… today 52 percent of Christians think that God does a really lousy job with the weather. Maybe it’s not his choice that is doing it. Maybe it’s our own sin or our own unrighteous policies. Maybe it’s because we love killing unborn kids, 60 million of them. Maybe God says, “I’m not going to bless your land when you’re doing it.”
Rather a long time ago, our distant palaeolithic ancestors would observe seasons and weather. With no understanding of how any of this actually happened, they attempted to grasp for an explanation and so attributed it to Gods. Perform the right rituals and all was well, but get the rituals wrong and you would suffer the wrath of the gods who were no longer pleased.
We have today mostly moved way beyond all that and now actually do understand what causes seasons and weather. I say mostly, because all that sciency stuff appears to have gone whooshing right over a few dominionist heads and has resulted in them quite literally promoting palaeolithic ideas as “truth”.