Ken Ham #fundie

Ken Ham #fundie answersingenesis.org

In March, I woke up to the terrible news that a massive earthquake and tsunami had devastated Japan.

Today I can still see the TV images of the tsunami hitting the eastern coast of Japan. The mud, debris, and destruction were almost unbelievable to watch.

Now, there is a different kind of tsunami I want to write about. It’s one that is also causing major destruction, and it’s happening all around us as I write. This tsunami is biblical compromise in the church, and it’s creating waves of spiritual destruction throughout the Christian world.

I have written a number of blogs recently about Christian academics who are publishing books and articles—and giving talks—on topics relating to how they approach the Bible, and Genesis in particular. The blogs revealed that an increasing number of Christian academics teach that:

* Adam is just a metaphor for Israel and was not a real person.
* Genesis chapter 1 is not a material account of origins, but is supposedly about the creation of some “cosmic temple.”
* God took two animals and gave them “animal amnesia”’ so they wouldn’t remember all the death over the supposed millions of years that turned them into Adam and Eve.
* The image of God evolved in man over time.
* The apostle Paul “would have flunked hermeneutics” (the practice of Bible interpretation).
* The “apostles were lousy at exegesis” (expositing the biblical text), etc.

63 comments

old comment by Pule Thamex

Bible God has taken to cowering among the cumuli that waft over remoter, less populated parts parts of the world. He has been totally subdued and effectively KO'd. Humiliated by atheists everywhere, He's given up the ghost, as it were, and nowadays won't even respond to prayers, even the prayers of His most fervent zombies. Even His blue-eyed, golden-haired son, Jesus, is still busy enjoying His eternal paradise and has forgotten His earthly puppets. And we long ago duffed-up that scaredy cat Satan. What a complete namby-pamby pushover joke Ol' Nick was. Thankfully, there's a good side to all this deity quelling, now that the Supernaturals are largely ignoring us, we can free ourselves from idiotic superstition and take responsibility for our own actions and try and make a better world for our children and their children.

old comment by Brendan Rizzo

Now, I have gathered that both fundies and atheists dislike moderate (read: non-fundie) Christians (and those of other faiths) for "compromising" their beliefs. The fundies use this as "evidence" that the moderates are not Real True Christians (TM) while the atheists are upset that the moderates can reject obvious irrationality in one area of their holy texts but are unwilling to go the whole nine yards and reject the whole thing. Thus, the atheists consider moderates hypocrites while the fundies consider them heretics. A non-fundamentalist Christian just cannot win, it seems. So merely being upset at "biblical compromise" does not in itself qualify as a darndest thing. However, the fact that Ham is both misrepresenting what the scholars say and denying that they have any legitimacy whatsoever (after all, they are the scholars; they have used the historical method and know what they are talking about) puts this as unequivocally fundie. And that's when he doesn't get it just plain wrong. (I have never heard of any Biblical scholar advocating the third bullet point, for instance, and have never heard of any "cosmic temple". Ham is obviously trying to make these respectable scholars sound like New Age lunatics.)

old comment by

"Vimes shook his head. 'That always chews me up,' he said. 'People killing one another just because their gods have squabbled'

'Oh, they've got the same god, Sir. Apparently it's over a word in their holy book, Sir. The Elharibians say it translates as "God" and the Smalies say it's "man".'

'How can you mix them up?'

'Well, there's only one tiny dot difference in the script, you see. And some people reckon it's only a bit of fly dirt in any case.'

'Centuries of war because a fly crapped in the wrong place?'

'It could have been worse,' said Carrot. 'If it had been slightly to the left the word would have been "liquorice".'"

Whenever I read of arguments over interpretation of religious texts, I am reminded of this exchange between Vimes and Carrot (Terry Pratchett, Jingo).

old comment by Pule Thamex

"This tsunami is biblical compromise in the church, and it’s creating waves of spiritual destruction throughout the Christian world."

Yawn! When hasn't there ever been waves of "spiritual destruction" since Jesus's days. Never, that's when. We can truthfully conclude that Christ's sojourn on Earth coincides with the beginning of a world-wide increase of "spiritual destruction". Whatever "spiritual destruction" is? Coincidence? I think not. Presumably "spiritual destruction" means not paying enough heed to the gobbledegook of maniacal money worshipers. No doubt the "spiritual destruction" will cease after Christian wizards and their supernatural demons have destroyed the world and everyone in it.

old comment by Iron Boomer

1) Actually, Adam wasn't real. See, the Israelites, lack the scientific clarity and created a mythos to explain it.

2) "Cosmic temple?" And Genesis 1 is the first creation story that doesn't involve Adam or Eve in the slightest. It's poetry, certainly, but hardly a material account.

3) Not entirely sure what you're going with here, but it's more likely that our movement away from apes and into the Homo genius did not start with just two individuals.

4) I call total B.S. Our image of God has changed over time; the ancient Israelites didn't even believe in strict monotheism till the Greek Helenization; if anything God was one among many deities.
Moreover, the perception of God in the Hebrew Testament versus the Christian Testament is much different.

5) Actually, I do agree on this one. Paul was a Roman-born, well-educated Pharisee Jew before his conversion to Christianity. Compared to most of the other apostles, he would have been a very smart and knowledgeable about the Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Testament at the time. Now if you're asking if he would flunk modern hermeneutics? Probably, if only for the 2000 years of study since.

6) Most of the Apostles would have been functionally illiterate. With the exceptions of say Paul, or Matt the Tax Collector, or Judas Iscariot (There are debates on what he did for a living), most of the early apostles would have been simple day laborers, fishermen, etc. While their Jewish background would ensure that they grew up learning to speak and read Hebrew as part of their faith system, those skills would have been abysmal at best, given they didn't use it in their day to day jobs.

In short, Mr. Ham; those Christian academics that you're decrying? Actually know what they're talking about. You are blinded by subservience to a worldview that is unsustainable in modern academia.

old comment by Berny

Ken, I don't expect you to understand but those other Bible scholars actually have degrees in history and languages and know that the Bible is largely superstition. They're trying to interpret it in a way that keeps it relevant to modern civilization. I think it's a complete waste of time but they're making the effort, and in the process have decided to accept that Genesis is complete fiction given what we've discovered about our universe over the past several centuries.
In short, Ken, it's only morons like you who wish to force people to accept the entirety of the Bible as inerrant and true.
It isn't and no amount of wishful thinking on your part will ever make it so.