USA | Right-Wing Christian Group Claims Scientists are Peddling Dinosaur Hoax

How Evangelical-Fundamentalist Christian "thinkers" pervert the minds of "believers" with their un-scientific myths and idiotic fantasies.

This is why you just have to love so much of what passes for right-wing thinking in 2013. Call it the Fred Flintstone Effect. Yesterday, Ken Ham, President of “Answers in Genesis,” a staunchly conservative Christian group, released a brief radio spot claiming that dinosaurs are being used to “indoctrinate children.”

As Mr. Ham sees it, this is part of a plan hatched by paleontologists to trick innocent youth into believing the theory of evolution.

Well, you may be able to fool some people all of the time, and other people some of the time; but you can’t fool Ken Ham. God, Ham insists, created all living creatures on the same day, “about 6,000 years ago.”

Fortunately, when it comes to all of America’s impressionable children, Ham is not alone in his position. Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) is also on the job. Until recently, in one of their most popular biology texts they noted:

“Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”

See how simple science is kids! If Nessie is real—and dinosaurs aren’t extinct—then, evolution is a myth. God, it all makes such perfect, right-wing sense.

You might have thought right-wing thinkers would have been sad when ACE decided not long ago to drop this passage—but Mark Looy, chief communications officer for “Answers in Genesis,” actually agreed with the publisher’s decision.

“There are just so many of these legends, like the dragon mentioned in Beowulf, the numerous accounts of St. George and the dragon, and so on, that they can’t be dismissed,” Looy told reporters for the Christian Post.
“However, because the Loch Ness monster is a questionable example to use, and also because the claim has become such a distraction, we agree that it is wise to delete Nessie’s reference from a textbook that lists possible living monsters.”

(We are thinking here:  maybe they should insert Sasquatch instead.)

In any case, Ham’s theory eliminates many perplexing questions in science—and even history—all in one Book of Genesis swoop. What happened to Neanderthals in Europe, for example, 40,000 years ago? Scientists have struggled to explain their extinction. Now we know. Nothing happened. They weren’t even there. The fossil record is all screwed up. Neanderthals were stomped on by dinosaurs sometime in the last 6,000 years.

Kind of like Jurassic Park—only worse.

Suddenly, the past becomes clear. How did humankind first reach the Americas 25,000 years ago? Science is wrong again. Okay, maybe the first inhabitants of the New World did cross a land bridge over the Bering Strait—but no ice age 25,000 years ago was involved. Man did not yet exist. Mastodons did not yet exist. Sabertooth Tigers did not yet exist. All would be created 19,000 years later and all would hitch a ride on Noah’s Ark.

Without a doubt, hunting must have been good 6,000 years ago. Spear-chucking folk would head out of their caves to bring back the bacon, so to speak. Hmm, what do we feel like eating tonight, buffalo steaks or barbequed Brontosaurus ribs?

Now we know that even the Weather Channel is in on the plot to trick the kids. You want proof? Like scientific proof?

How about this headline from their website today:  “Climate Changing at Fastest Pace Since the Age of the Dinosaurs.” According to a report by two Stanford climatologists the planet is warming at a faster pace than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago:

“Over the next century, the pace of climate change is expected to continue to pick up speed, the report warns, which could lead to a rise in average annual temperatures of 5 to 6 Celsius degrees (about 9 to 11 Fahrenheit degrees) by 2100.”

You can click on a link and see pictures of retreating glaciers round the world. But this is just more scientific propaganda, like when the story mentions plants adapting at the end of the last Ice Age, 20,000 years ago.

This climate change crap is just some left-wing scheme to put the Big Oil companies out of business, and by the way, remember that all that oil was created in just the last 6,000 years, after God in His infinite wisdom decided to create plants.

SOURCE: John Viall at AddictingInfo

Right Wing Snake Oil Salesmen

It does well to step back once in awhile and remember that the leaders in the conservative movement see their followers not as fellow travelers working towards a common political goal so much as marks. Which isn’t to say that the leaders don’t actually buy into the bigoted worldview. In fact, I’d say that the contempt for humanity that causes them to want to ban abortion, slash the social safety net, support people who murder unarmed kids in the streets, and start wars for the hell of it allows conservative leaders to view their followers as just one more group of people who don’t deserve your sympathy if they can’t see through your bullshit. Conning your followers is seen as just one more strike against those who are perceived as weak.

This is so woven into the fabric of the right that it’s hard to even notice sometimes. See: The way that right wing media blatantly lies to its audience, clearly indicating that they think the audience is stupid and gullible. (Why people fall for that is a topic for another post entirely.) But it was really driven home to me by this Family Research Council mailing that might as well have been titled “We’re Going To Pump You Up With Scary Lies So You’ll Give Us Money Which We Will Not Improve Any Lives But Ours”.* The mailer was sent from Tony Perkins

"If a foreign enemy had plotted to infiltrate America, I’m not sure an army of undercover subversives could have done more damage than our government-run schools….
Leftists don’t want a single American child to escape their thought control.  And they are crowding out true education."

See, I don’t believe that Tony Perkins actually thinks that American public education exists as a leftist reeducation camp. In general, the heated warnings about how “leftists” control everything should be treated as the conspiracy theories they are—”leftists” don’t even control the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party doesn’t control the nation, so the chain of command issues here pretty much put a kibosh on this conspiracy theory. He’s just whipping people up with obvious lies, and there’s not a little projection going on with the “thought control” thing. What’s more “thought control”-oriented than telling people deliberate lies in an effort to keep them in your thrall?

Perkins then went on to complain that the U.S. is not a global leader anymore in….wait for it….the sciences. To blame? Teaching children accurate science in schools.

"Today’s science classes often feature big-government political propaganda, taking time and focus away from true science. Not to mention attacks on the Bible and arrogant censoring of any theories like intelligent design that challenge their Darwinism."

The claim that the way we need to improve our nation’s standing in the sciences is to cease teaching science and instead teach students a bunch of magical stories about Jesus riding dinosaurs is such egregious bullshit that one has to wonder if there’s some kind of intra-wingnut competition between orgs to see how far they can take it and still get donations.

Who doesn’t want to believe that all we need to make dramatic advances in science is to, uh, believe in magic? That’s an attractive belief! Believing in magic is easy to do (for most people, anyway) and it’s a lot less work than actually reworking our education and incentive system to improve scientific research, which also costs money, by the way. But it’s bullshit just like other magical and implausible “too good to be true” claims, but unfortunately, the social cost of right wing con jobs is even higher than it is for your typical snake oil sales.

SOURCE: An article by Amanda Marcotte at RawStory.com