Stand up comedians get paid to make fun of Christianity... cool hey? and speaking of dinosaurs

Dinosaurs and the bible... sigh. For years they've been happily teaching Noah's Ark to Sunday school kids and using plastic giraffes and elephants to illustrate how they were organised into the big cubit canoe - two by two - and everyone was happy. The curriculum was set and many grew up and hopefully outgrew it. Then some smart-ass Christian probably tapped the head guy on the shoulder and said, "umm, what about dinosaurs? Umm, we're gonna have to fit in the dinosaurs into the story... somewhere between Adam and Noah". The reply to this conundrum has produced dozens of whacked out theories and ideas to fit them in to the dreamtime fables.

Some of the various ideas I've enjoyed:

• Ken Ham vigorously preaches that the book of Job describes a dinosaur when he quotes an obscure scripture that says, “His tail is like a cedar.” when the verse actually says "He moveth his tail like a cedar".
• The dinosaurs were all originally vegetarians- Those huge sharp teeth evident in T-Rexes and Raptors were for ripping tomatoes apart.
• Lizards don't stop growing and in the times of Adam the lizards lived for a thousand years, hence their great size.
• Dinosaur fossils don't actually exist. They are part of a huge conspiracy to throw us off the truth of god.
• The devil made the dinosaur fossils.
• Even the gap theorists who try to fit dinosaurs into an old earth scenario don't have any scientific evidence to back their claims.

It's a hot topic at the moment and I've found some more fun stuff to bring back here to the nest. I found the following Lewis Black stand-up routine on Youtube at Kristi's blog, Pink Prozac and a similar routine by Bill Hicks. I transcripted Lewis' routine below, but couldn't be bothered giving Bill's the same treatment. You'll have to watch his - it's short and he has more body language to flesh it out.

Bill Hicks: It Seemed So Plausible



Lewis Black - Fossils: The Devil's Handiwork

Was the earth created in seven days? No. for those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you, you don’t understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take in seven days because we know what we are good at. And what we’re really good at bullshit. This was a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert to distract them from the fact that they did not have air-conditioning.

I would love to have the faith to believe it took place in seven days… but… I have thoughts, and that can really fuck up the faith thing, just ask any Catholic priest.

And then there are fossils, whenever anyone tries to tell me it took place in seven days I reach for a fossil and go, “fossil” and if they keep talking I throw it just over their head. There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together; that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which have dioramas to show them this… and what this is, purely and simply, is clinical psychotic reaction - they are crazy - they are stone cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this because these people are watching the Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

I met gentleman in Georgia who had his set of belief and I had mine, and this makes it tough, because evolution is a major thread in the larger tapestry that I call REALITY. He said, “Lewis, Fossils are the handiwork of the devil,” (long pause)... I had to remind myself to breathe. I’d been tasered by the concept of the devil. Apparently the devil is like Wile E. Coyote only he is more evil and he has a ACME factory where he makes fossils, and he sends his minions to scatter them across the earth every day, in order to confuse my tiny Jewish brain.

No Answers In Genesis

"Creationism is not the alternative to Evolution - ignorance is"

This is an old topic, but it serves to highlight the gross stupidity from the morons at AiG (Answers in Genesis). Along with such incredible facts, as... sabre-tooth tigers were originally herbivores, and dinosaurs were rescued via the Love Boat (during the fourth dynasty of the Egyptian era) only to die out soon after, they keep reeling out their superior knowledge - In all their wisdom they worked out why disasters such as Tsunamis and happened: it's our fault:

"At Answers in Genesis, we have written many articles and given many talks explaining that it's not God's fault when a massive tragedy occurs, but rather, it is our fault - the Bible says we sinned in Adam (Genesis 3)."

It always amazes me how much they need to take the blame off of their god. And as has been pointed many times, this doesn't take the blame from god because supposedly he's responsible for creating us and knew exactly what we were going to do.

However this is the first time I've heard it quite put this way: "we sinned in Adam". What the hell this means is beyond me. If "we sinned in Adam" then why doesn't Adam get his house ruined by a hurricane? So if I have this right, god doesn't kill a kitten if I masturbate. Instead I sin through Adam (I wonder if Adam has an orgasm?) and because of my sin through Adam god has people die in hurricanes. - Voltaire

If God is innocent, why defend him so strenuously? If God is all powerful and innocent, why can't he defend himself? I mean, in OT times he drowned the entire Egyptian army to save the whiney tribe of Israel, for Christ's sake; now days he can't whip up a defense against skeptics, he has to hide behind Ken Ham, of all people! Boy, that pile of wisdom is sure steamy, and stinks like a cess pool, too.

Ken Ham... I tell ya... I'm sure he's got good intentions and believes what he says, but holy cow, for someone who doesn't believe we came from cavemen and monkeys, he's sure doing his best to strip us of the accumulated knowledge we've developed and send us back scurrying into the caves.

He tries to give examples in the bible where it mentions dinosaurs, he finds ones about sea monsters, and flying monsters and ties those to pterodactyls. He explains that in all ancient cultures, they had legends about ‘dinosaur-like’ animals which the called “dragons”. From Gilgamesh to a book published in the 1500s, there is evidence that dinosaurs were actually dragons, now gone due to hunting by humans. - Stupid Evil Bastard

Zombies, Unicorns, Devils, Sea Monsters, Satyrs, Dragons, Six Winged Angels, Gods, Demons, Witches, Astrologers, A walking & talking snake, Magical fruit, Talking donkeys, human headed six-winged beasts, Ghosts. All that stuff is in the Bible and yet they tell me it"s not mythology?

Jurassic Ark - The Lost World of Freaking Reason and Logic... sheesh

The $27 million Answers in Genesis Creation Museum is scheduled to open on May 28 in Petersburg, KY, amidst protests by the reality-based community. This museum is not only a colossal embarrassment to those of us who value reason, science, and reality itself, but it undermines science education at a time when the United States cannot afford to fall behind in science and technology. - VJACK

It's just so... cringey. It makes me cringe. 27 million dollars? By Zeus, that's an obscene amount of money to promote mythology! Our aboriginal Australians have their stories about the 'Dreamtime' when giant serpents carved out the landscape etc. but if they started spending a large fortune making museums and selling it as fact... well, we'd all roll our eyes in amusement at that. That millions of people believe dinosaurs were led onto a large wooden boat with kangaroos and crocodiles and koalas - that's just sad.

Dinosaurs on the freaking Ark - Jurassic Ark - what a joke. Stegosauruses, Brontosauruses, Veloceraptors, Pterodactyls, Pteradons, Sabretooths, dodos, platypuses, diplodicusses, triceroptosses, the spinosaurus from Jurassic Park 3, those big lizards from the islands that start with a G.

But just like in ancient times when we used to pray to Thor to help us out in times of drought, the need to petition gods for help continues. Christians will live happily in their creationist ignorance and pass on the precious fables to their wide-eyed young 'uns, and they in turn will sleep easy in the knowledge that someone is looking out for them. Sleeping easy was something Noah had a hard fucking time doing... he had fucking Veloceraptors on his boat! Have you seen those bastards! Big fucking claw talons that rip the shit out of things. He didn't have only Dinotopia on his floatboat, he had T-freaking-rexes!

Time to balance out the stupidity (any help at all for our de-evolving population) with this following Youtube. The guy is not precocious or aggressive or condescending. It's just a good and reasonable sober response to creationism, and is a pleasure to watch. You won't disagree... unless you're Smirk Cameron, that is. 'Growing Pains' - sheesh - grow up dude... sha la la la...

Are we all just evil bastards destined to destroy our own planet?

I don't think we're evil, but are perhaps overly self-centered and self-serving when left to our own devices and instincts. In our defense though we've needed to survive under harsh environments and have sometimes had to look after ourselves while we've evolved or progressed. Our peripheral vision and perception of reality is solely ours and we look out primarily for number one. Of course I think maternal/ paternal instincts and social rules dictate that we love each other and try to work as communities if we want to be happy.

Our survival instincts are not themselves evil (but maybe that's just semantics and a matter of perception)... We just have to go beyond ourselves and work as teams rather than sole entities. Then as teams or tribes we also tend to become self interested and cliquey -sigh- so we defend our tribes or selfishly invade others to make our tribes bigger and stronger. Again, not evil, just the way we work as sentient beings who are condition for the survival of the fittest.

I just don't know about describing myself or ourselves as evil. Sure I'm a freaking wally sometimes, but not inherently evil (That's a matter of opinion though as I do know a few people who wouldn't hesitate to label me that way). The word implies an unnatural state of being to me and I don't think we deserve it. Although men are all 'bastards', I know of some girls who are just plain unevil.

A few million years from now the sharks may evolve and come out of the water to ravage the land in their cold-hearted plight to rule this world. They won't be filled with a supernatural 'evil' but will rather be running on the instincts that drove them to evolve in the first place. It's a drive... a purpose. Who knows? Perhaps the dinosaurs actually died out because they got so big and driven that they eventually ended up eating each other until there was just a few hungry T-rexes running around.

Talking legless snakes

Snakes with legs? Aren't they lizards? Do snakes eat dust still? Could all the other animals talk or was Eve surprised to see a snake with vocal chords? Snakes are built/ designed/ evolved to slither and slither they do very well. They move very fast without legs. They can swim, climb and do all sorts of stuff. They have a terrible time playing the piano though.

Has anyone heard of the huge Creation Museum the 'Answers in Genesis' morons are building in the states. It seems that the more we humans are progressing, the stupider many of us are becoming... which is sort of ironic because it disproves forward evolution. We can then go on to prove black is white and that white doesn't even exist and then voila the universe dissolves into a puff of logic.

What is really embarrasing to me is that Ken Ham, the guy behind this 25 million dollar waste of money, was an Australian teacher!!! He believes dinosaurs were on the ark and many were probably still alive in Jesus' time. The guy is a complete loon and has raised 25 000 000 bucks to spread the myth that the universe was created over 6 days, 6000 years ago. Oh what a fine religious goal! Don't they have hurricane ravaged states to help out? Christians are way too busy proving their doctrines rather than actually helping society in a real way. It's like those prophesy boards we used to set up in public places.

It has been set up by Ken Ham, an Australian evangelist, who runs Answers in Genesis, one of America's most prominent creationist organisations. He said that his aim was to use tourism, and the theme park's striking exhibits, to convert more people to the view that the world and its creatures, including dinosaurs, were created by God 6,000 years ago.

Converting people is the same as educating them, right? I suppose it really doesn't matter that all the evidence says the world is about 4.5 billion years old; if a few guys read the bible and say the world is a few thousand years old, it's a valid Christian counterbalance to the prevailing secular bias. Pffft...

The first rainbow? - Noah's ark is mythology and nothing more

The narrative bible concerning Noah and his Ark is mythology and it's amazing to have to explain that to people.

There is a problem with the theory that a mist covered the earth until a flood that happened approximately five thousand years ago. It's painfully sad to know that Christians follop around themselves to get all this to make sense for them. What about all the countless varieties of animal/plant life that live in desert environments. Why did camels have the water storing humps if there were no deserts? and we wouldn't have had deserts or desert animals at all if the whole earth was a greenhouse with no rain. Some plants depend on fire to seed. Was there another creation of desert life three thousand years ago, after the flood, when the mists went away? No rain? It's crazy when you do the math. Rain feeds rivers and gets things flowing - it's called the water cycle. There's so much more I could say, but it's a big of a waste of time eh? We're very adapt at believing myths and legends it seems.

And was it the very first rainbow they tell us. I thought a mist would have refracted the sun's light and created many rainbows if you go with the mist theory - did the laws of refractive light and the fundamentals of physics get a do over.

There are literally thousands of animals that have been incredibly designed from the inside out to live and flourish in hot dry desert conditions (See Website). Also there are many plants that necessitate fire to sprout their seeds. Forest fires have been a normal and necessary regeneratory cycle for life... hard to have fire in a greenhouse like the one that hardline 7-day creationists believe in.

Quote:

It will probably never be clear what the Genesis author had in mind when he told us the story of Noah's rainbow, but it seems likely that he meant for us to believe that the bow created by the Lord was, indeed, the very first rainbow. If it hadn't been the first rainbow, then the entire story loses its symbolic impact--even if the bow had been the best rainbow, ever. In order to explain how that rainbow could have been the first one, inerrantists must explain how water droplets in the air would not have refracted sunlight.

There are three possibilities:

• No water in the air
• No sunlight
• No law of refraction

The first possibility requires too many improbables: no water condensation of evaporated lake and ocean water, no waterfalls, and no rainfall. The second is just as unlikely as the first. Since God let there be light on the first day, and created the sun on the fourth, inerrantists would have to argue that there was a continual cloud cover from the time of creation until just after end of the flood. The third explanation might seem at first to be the simplest. All the inerrantist has to do to harmonize the rainbow story is assert that God must have suspended his law of refraction of electromagnetic radiation until he awarded Noah his bow in the sky.

The reason why the third explanation doesn't work is that Noah and his family would not have been able to see without refraction; all light through their eyes' lenses would pass right through to the retina without bending to a sharp focus. Noah and his family would have been living in a world filled with very blurry objects indeed, and they surely would have noticed and reported the sudden change in clarity once God had made the law of refraction operable.