Today is the day that Answers in Genesis begins their Renew-A-Thon
. For a mere $299 (with additional expenses for hotel and meals, but hey, that includes free parking and admission to the Creation “Museum” and Ark Park!), or $459 for a family of 5, you can sit through two long miserable weeks of bullshit from a parade of liars. I took a look at their schedule, and I was tempted — not $300 tempted, but more like $1.99 for a couple of lectures tempted — because dear gog, this looks awful, like here’s a giant blob of jello and me with a chainsaw awful.
Here’s a piece of that schedule. It goes on for ten days beyond what I’ve cut and pasted here.
I’m just goggling at it all. Start with the first lecture: The eyes don’t have it,
by Tommy Mitchell. The molecular and morphological history of the animal eye is one of those beautiful examples of the evidence coming together to support evolution; this bozo is going to tear at it with weaponized ignorance, and the audience is going to eat it up. The second talk is Big Bang: exploding the myth,
by the ridiculous Terry Mortenson. Mortenson spoke here in Morris 5 years ago, and it was two nights of non-stop dishonesty and garbage. Ken Ham? Irrelevant. The Genetics of Adam and Eve
by Georgia Purdom will be a total misrepresentation of what science says.
One of the biggest debates in Christianity today concerns the first two people: were Adam and Eve real or are they the product of myths? Those who claim we have evolved over millions of years believe that Adam and Eve, as the Bible teaches about them, have no place in human history. They argue that the science of genetics proves we cannot be descended from only two people. Many Christians have accepted this position and propose that their historical existence is irrelevant to Christianity and the gospel. In this session, I will show how current findings from scientists who study DNA actually support the biblical position that Adam and Eve were real people. More importantly, I will demonstrate how absolutely necessary Adam and Eve are to understanding original sin and the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. Come find out why there can be no Jesus without a real Adam and Eve.
That’s simply not true. The molecular evidence says we did not descend from just two people, that our species evolved over 100,000 years ago, and that the hypothesis that we evolved from only Adam and Eve a mere 6,000 years ago is completely untenable. But of course, her real argument is that the Bible requires this counterfactual BS.
My blood pressure is rising just reading the schedule. It’s probably for the best that I’m not going to be there, because I wouldn’t make it past the first day.
I wonder how many attendees they’ll have?
I’m sorely tempted, but I’m afraid I’ll be spending that fortnight peeling all the skin off my hands and eating my own tongue.
I’ve never understood why creationists feel it’s necessary for things that are demonstrably false to be true in order for their god to be real. I don’t believe that their god is real, but surely a god who expresses itself through dodgy mythology and questionable cosmology is more believable than one whose existence relies on things that we know for certain are not true? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that creationists are deep cover atheists, trying to discredit religion entirely, but I’m pretty sure they actually believe this crap. It’s so weird.
It’s like those apologists who wrap themselves up in knots, arguing that even genocide is cool when their god does or commands it in order to get around the problem of evil, when there’s the ready-made claim that the god of the old testament is evil, and that Jesus was the son of a different god who came in to save humanity from their creator? (Which also handily does away with the whole sacrifice of himself to himself problem.)
Still, the mid-afternoon movie lineup sounds just swell!
“Genetics of Adam and Eve”
Maybe he’ll be discussing how Eve was cloned from Adam and had his….er…it’s…er…her DNA changed.
Adam is cloned to Evan (or Steve) and Steve (or Evan) becomed the first and, I guess, most successful transgender.
“becomed” or perhaps became??
That was a weird slip.
richardelguru@#4:
Which bathroom did they use?
@Athywren: by now I’m pretty certain that the religious folks have a fundamentally different concept of things like “truth” and “reality” (maybe even “logic”) than us. I can’t tell how these concepts look, though, it seems to be borderline lovecraftian. But there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent of “objective reality” in there. “Faith” somehow takes this place, I think, but then again they seem to understand that “faith” is something you believe for no reason, on some level at least… I better stop thinking about it before I have to start doing sanity checks…
The fundies could save themselves two weeks and thousands of dollars.
Creationism reduces down to:
Ken Ham said it. I believe it!!! End of story.
Since Fundie-ism is based on Presupposition, it is immune to facts and reason.
PS And why is this waste of two weeks on site? Haven’t they heard of the internet? Thanks to the magic of modern communications, you can get all the lies and delusions you want for just logging on.
Why are they always worried about descent from Adam and Eve?
All the breeders died except for Japheth, Ham, Shem and their (parenthetic) wives.
If any day — actually, half-hour — had the classic Chicken Chicken Chicken talk (PDF), it would be infinitely more plausible than the entire remaining “conference”.
Marcus #4
Any bathroom they damn-well liked :-)
I have said it here before and gotten a surprising amount of push back. It is true that evolution is incompatible with Christianity, for the reasons Purdom elucidates. Ergo, the pope, who accepts evolution, must repudiate Christianity. There is no way out of it.
Cervantes, the Pope does not accept evolution. He believes in a variety of god-directed intelligent design. He only calls it evolution because he knows that’s acceptable to educated people. But if you hear him talk about it, it’s clearly not scientific evolution at all.
Because without Adam and Eve, there is no Original Sin. Without Original Sin, there is no need for redemption, and no need for Christ.
There are some great topics in that program. I bet there might be a few amusing moments. Tower of Babel!? Oh boy. Astronomical Anomalies in the Bible…as in sun stopping war lords and UFOs?
Particular favorite: “Halloween, Paganism, and the Bible?” Let me guess…we can’t celebrate Halloween because its pagan, and Harry Potter is satanic. It’s true that Halloween is pagan, but so are all the Christian holidays. You could just as easily do a session on “Christmas, Paganism, and the Bible.”
When it comes to promoting these fictions, the attitude of creationists and fundy christians is
NIMBA: Not In My Bank Account
They want this stuff paid for with taxpayer money, not their own. They want it built and to have it exist. They have no intention of travelling to see it themselves, but they expect others should or would want to waste their money doing so.
These sorts of things are always infuriating to me. Ignorant shit-spewers who don’t even understand the science that they’re denying get up in front of a crowd of giggling dipshits and accuse all of the real scientists who actually study biology, physics, and geology of fraud. I’ve pointed this out before, and I’ll point it out again here; for all of their blustering accusations of fraud on part of real scientists, creationists sure do love to steal real scientists’ work and misappropriate it to support illiterate bullshit. It’s aggravatingly common to see creationists take studies done by actual, hard-working scientists and then distort and cherry pick it to make it looks like it supports creationism when it doesn’t. Creationists barely ever do any sort of actual experiments or studies themselves, and when they do it’s always embarrassingly bad cargo cult science. It’s gut-wrenching to see creationists simultaneously take swipes at their betters while parasitizing their work.
I would like to place a bet that that lecture will contain a certain (truncated) quote from Darwin himself regarding the eye. What odds can I get?
PZ: I think you went a step too far there:
I don’t think the molecular evidence says squat about when our species evolved. That’s all fossils. Molecular evidence can tell us when two populations diverged, but I don’t think it has much to say about the timing of speciation. (And let’s ignore any questions about whether “species” is a meaningful concept when extended over evolutionary time, or whether the term “speciation” means anything when applied to chronospecies.)
If a had time and money to spend on this, I would go and shout during each presentation/Q&A session “Where you there?” over and over again. Hey, if it is a valid argument against evolution, it is also valid when used against them, right? Right?
zenlike
Wouldn’t work.
They have inerrant eye-witness accounts for all of it.
Case in point, you see Purdom saying that “current findings from scientists who study DNA” supports the existence of Adam and Eve. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most, if not all, of the data and studies she cites are going to be distorted versions of research done by non-creationist scientists.
I’m with Athywren, puzzled. Two weeks of this stuff, so many resources thrown into doing mental back-flips just to justify one tiny, arguably irrelevant, corner of Christianity.
Grown men and women fight tooth and nail for fairy tale shit, while ignoring everything to do with morality or the well being of life, supposedly the central issues of religion.
@chigau
It’s funny how creationists never consider that they only have the bible’s word that it was written by an infallible being who was there to witness all of the events in it. Were they there to see that the bible was written by the god described in it? If not, how do they know that the bible wasn’t written by a human who simply lied about it being written by an infallible god?
multitool
See, this is where you’re mistaken. The central issue of religion is money. It’s been that way for a long time.
Thank you for justifying Atheism. [drop mic]
——
seems he’s garbled up the metaphor of “mitochondrial eve”, where geneticists traced the DNA of mitochondria (which only gets passed through the matrial line) and found they suggest that there were very few survivors who branched off to start the homo sapiens line from the habilis (?) sequence. Into thinking their work PROVED the existence of a single EVE, and thus could only be impregnated by a single man, QED Adam. Thus the problem with extending a metaphor as if it were deduction.
re 23:
maybe not the creatoturds, but the RCC has. When speaking about who, and how, the Bible was written, they always emphasize inspired. That the physical writers of the text were essentially stenographers writing down what God (or some intermediate angel) dictated to them in their head.
The RCC claims their evidence for “inspired” is the fact that if so many randoms wrote so many different storied that were later cobbled together into a single book,there would be tons of inconsistencies, of which there are absolutely none. “None”, RCC tells us, “go finds somes if yous cans.” says the RCC. [excessive plurals for deliberate mockery]
John (of Revelation, that is; not the earlier Gospel) even had to consume hallucinogenic herbs, writing down the hallucinations they gave him, and somehow readers thought these “trips” were inspired predictions.
wonder why i mock those who hold the bibble as evidence, or as history. closest it gets is what we now call docudrama.
@richardelguru, 3
Erm… hey, could you maybe get into the habit of using nouns when talking about people? It’s not the greatest to use unaccompanied adjectives to refer to people.
slithey tove @25
Notice how they’re doing pretty much exactly what I said they were. They’re taking the research on mitochondrial lineages done by actual scientists and distorting it to support their bullshit about Adam and Eve. Creationists are perfectly willing to accuse pretty much every biologist, astronomer, and geologist in the world of fraud, but they’re also willing to cannibalize the same scientists’ research if they think they can reappropriate it.
Sorry, that should be “misappropriate”.
It is time some US Society started Answers in Hesiod. More fun stuff than in the dreary desert ramblings .
“The eye’s [sic] don’t have it, [sic]”
There are no odds long enough to make me take you up on that one…
Sorry, I realize that there are so many much, much more ignorant things said (or at least implied) by this schedule, but I just can’t (cant?) get past the fact that somebody wrote, proofed (well, maybe) and then had printed a document with such a glaring greengrocer’s apostrophe. Can they be trying to look amateurish?
Not one program on Day 4 isn’t a repeat of a lecture or movie given or shown earlier.
@holytape #32. The repetition is staggering. In the first 6 days (they have Sunday off, which is nice), 15 of the 38 “sessions” are repeats. In week 2, there are again 38 sessions, only 2 of which are “new”! Talk about value for money.
The repetition starts on day 3, with 3 repeat sessions out of 7.