I was sent this curious photo, and of course I had to look up the Bible verse.
And here’s Isaiah 14:
12How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
15Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
No dinosaurs, no genetics. I was so disappointed. The believers always oversell their story.
How else would you explain dinosaurs?
Evolution, or something? Snort!
See, if you snort at it, you don’t have to consider it.
Glen Davidson
Your -$50 million at work, ladies and gentlemen.
What do they put on the pages of the babble? Appears to be a powerful hallucinogen.
Once again, without any other information to assess this by, Poe’s Law (or maybe Poe’s Corollary) holds.
The answer was never in Isaiah, it’s right here (for your amusement) Genesis 1:1
I knew someone could explain it. Thank god I have an internet.
most High indeed
This Satan character seems pretty powerful if he or she can do genetic engineering at that level. Almost godlike, if he or she were working with bronze age technology.
@ #3:
They’ll tell you right quick – that hallucinogen is Da Trooof!
Brilliant. Not just Isaiah 14, but Isaiah 14:14–
Dude admits he is like the most high. If he had another poster, it would say “have you ever really looked at your hands?”
He’s probably using a different translation. Look, it’s right here:
“I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be, like, the most High I have ever been. Totally wasted. Then I will genetically engineer dinosaurs. -Love, Satan. ;)”
–Isaiah 14:14, CRV
Nerd of Redhead @ 3, that’s still better than what was on the pages of Aristotle’s lost book on comedy…
Lots of critters in that book–ostriches, jackals, hyenas, and slaves of course–but no dinosaurs. And no genetic engineering. Lots of Yahweh unleashing various horrors on people.
You know, the usual. Nothing to see here, folks.
Do they think an apatasaurus’ head could reach the clouds?
The other sign mentions Daniel 11 which provides a gauge for when it was written. It pretends to have been written before the Babylonian exile. It gives very accurate “predictions” for Alexander the Great and the Greek generals who followed him, specifying them by their nicknames up until 167 BCS. The “prophecies” that follow those were all wrong because the person they were about died in 164 BCE.
David Icke, please pick up the scaly green courtesy phone…
Yeesh. I’m kind of impressed how much this guy was able to twist that verse. The xians with whom I am familiar just use that passage to shoehorn Paradise Lost into the Bible*.
*For those who don’t know, Isaiah was prophesying the downfall of Babylon (whose king counted “Son of the Morning” among his titles). It’s pretty clear in context; the prophecy starts at 14:4 (“That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!” [emphasis added]. But xians never let what is actually written in the Bible affect their interpretation.
Hmm… A dirty mind like mine would think an emetic, a purgative, or the anti-vi*gr*.
When I saw the picture I figured it was satire. If he truly believed that was Isaiah 14:14, he couldn’t have gotten that sandwich board sign on or escape from the institution he was in.
On second thought congresspeople escape all the time.
Ernest Scribbler must have been one of the bible authors in a previous life.
This disposes one to believe that though Lucifer, Son of the Morning, may have been a monkey’s uncle, he was a pterodactyl on his mother’s side.
A discussion on Facebook suggests that MAYBE he meant Isaiah 14:29:
“Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.”
At least it involves serpents, cockatrice (basilisk in some translations), and flying serpents.
13
Of course, wholething.
The Lord was uncommonly fond of apatasaurus, and raised its head up to heaven so he could pat it 24-7 without waxing wroth at himself for sabbath-breaking
Finally, my town’s famous for something!
Try poison, actually. (It’s the murder weapon in The Name of the Rose.)
What I’d like to know is, who is the blond next to this dude?
mattpegan, everybody! Isn’t he a card.
Reminds me of the citations quacks use. Just put a bunch of them in, and hope no one will actually check to see what they really say. Any verse will do, just have one in there to look good.
Teach the controversy!
Yep. I do believe the picture-taker is torn between the old religious crazy guy and the inciting sexy blonde at the crosswalk. Decisions decisions.
Whether or not the Bible supports this guy’s point, I wonder just exactly what his point is. Even biblical literalists don’t claim that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, so even if ole Scratch fooled around with dinosaur genomes, so what? We’re here and the dinosaurs are not. Satan was surely a sucky engineer. Or am I over-thinking this?
Omnipotence!
If this guy is a satirist, he’s the most committed satirist the world has ever known. He’s a walking whale.to.
The dinosaurs and genetics are in there, you just need the password and secret decoder ring to unlock it.
O RLY!?
SPOILER ALERT! Oh, wait never mind.
what do you expect?
Hebrews 13:8.
“Jesus Christ – the same yesterday, today and forever…”
.. ain’t it ever.
The above list of animals in the bible left out Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.
Even biblical literalists don’t claim that dinosaurs and humans coexisted,
you better tell Ken Ham then.
His has an entire museum dedicated to the idea that the Flintstones was a documentary, sourced from the bible.
Oh c’mon now >.<
you can seriously see only the back of her head and that she is thin! Why does this always get mentioned with women. If it was a man standing there no comments like this would come up. Ugh.
Um… are Lucifer and Satan even the same person? They’ve long been conflated in the popular imagination, but aren’t they really different characters?
Also, Satan/Lucifer/whoever established the cults of Osiris, Dionysus, Mithra and all the other Jebus-like pagan gods in advance of Jebus coming, just so it would look like the Jebus cult was ripping off a bunch of pagan cults.
Pretty cool that he can pull off that sort of shit *and* make dinosaurs as well.
Someone should really make a movie about that guy. Those guys. Whatever.
Naturally Satan genetically engineered dinosaurs… how else do you reckon they’re the perfect shape for PZ to ride them?
That said, the notion that Satan can design stuff to suit his sinful purposes also begs some questions about the banana!
Where’s Ray Comfort when you need him to tell us which designer is responsible for what?
Assuming Relic* from The Beachcombers in the pic up there isn’t a Poe, this photo is really all the evidence a person needs to describe the gaping chasm between what the hardcore believers want to believe is reality, and actual real reality that most normal folk inhabit and are quite comfortable living, breathing and working in.
*(http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/01342/robert_clothier_1342190cl-5.jpg)
‘Satan genetically engineered dinosaurs’
So, god is such a lazy arse and a profit dog that he outsourced creation?
Now I understand why my genitals aren’t adequate — Devil’s sweatshops are to blame! (my caring about the adequacy of my genitals at all owes its existence only to god’s shitty fax machine — some parts of the brain blueprints came in a little fuzzy, so Devil’s minions had to figure out what to substitute them with. And being the underpaid wretched bastards that they are, they went with the crippling, agonising irony!)
Who knows? Like everyone in the bible including god, they evolved over time.
Satan started out as god’s buddy in the OT story of Job. He gradually gained powers and at some point was merged with the Greek character Lucifer. He really got going in the NT, probably stolen from the Greeks.
And who created satan and lets him run around loose. God the creator. Thanks god.
It’s all just a bunch of primitive fiction and make believe.
Yes, they do.
Your total ignorance of just how cuckoo the xians are is showing.
The fundies all believe the earth is 6,000 years old and Noah had a boatload full of dinosaurs. We are talking around 20-30% of the US population, at least, around 60 million people.
When you decide to abandon reality, nothing is too stupid to believe. 26% of the fundies are Geocentrists who still think the sun orbits the earth, (source wikipedia).
Weren’t they supposed to live in swamps? Aren’t swamps often foggy? Then obviously yes. Some days, they might even have reached above the clouds – something I only manage on vacation in the Alps. (From which you can deduce I don’t fly.)
Uh, what? Who are you talking about? The only blond(e) I see is the bad hair day whose leg looks like it has a knee backwards. I don’t know about you, but that’s not my idea of sexy. From the painted-on trousers and the side bag I suspect that at least you’re right about the gender, but obviously that’s no guarantee. In any case, I find it hard to care.
I could have sworn I knew that intersection, except for a few details – crosswalk missing zebra stripes, wrong language on the signs, stuff like that. Oh, and this kind of standing around with such crazy signs isn’t part of our culture.
Is that blue car a taxi? That would be another discrepancy – over here they’re all what I believe is called “eggshell”.
Hi Raven,
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I’ve been listening to Robert M. Price’s Bible Geek podcast, and it’s interesting to hear a bit about how monotheistic Judaism evolved out of polytheism/henotheism.
Even Yahweh, IIRC, was initially one of several sons of El Elyon. I’d really like to learn more about that sort of stuff. Do you know any good books off-hand?
J A Lurker @38,
It’s called the difference between men & women. (Cue complaints based upon the is-ought problem or the naturalistic fallacy.) Let’s face it, she is bound to attract the attention of straight men, (even if it’s only to look).
You know, I have been thinking about Satan and genetics recently.
It seems to me that if I were trying to argue for evolution with someone who rejects fossils as evidence because they could have been placed in the ground by Satan to deceive scientists, then I might suggest that their own body was some of the best evidence for evolution.
We only have to look at someone’s genes to see all kinds of evidence that supports evolution. The punchline being something like, “Surely you aren’t going to claim that it must have been Satan that made your genes too. That would mean that He is your Creator!”
I guess I’m not that straight, because while I saw another person in the photograph, I only noticed the man with the signs.
Haven’t you “straight” men ever seen somebody waiting at a cross-walk before? What sheltered lives you must lead.
@Tis Himself
I suspect it’s the same people who get aroused from movies like Sexy Experiments of the SS or Last Orgy of the Gestapo or Nazi Dominatrix Death Camp
@ #13:
The book of Daniel is able to be quite accurate in “predicting” Alexander’s little forays into the region; it uses borrowed Greek words which were quite unknown to the Hebrews until some 300 years after the events it “predicts.”
@ #23:
The Name of the Rose is a somewhat melodramatic but basically sound satire on the church’s vigorous and often brutal suppression of independent, rational thinking and the questioning of sanctioned authorities. Well worth a watching every so often.
Satan genetically engineered her, too.
Her hair looks grey to me.
Wow! Here am I, 57 years old, with a wife and son, never having had any sexual interaction with another man, nor felt inclined to, and somehow I never realised that all this time I’ve been gay! Thanks, Dick.
The dots on the upper-case letter Is in the man’s sign are just so…cute.
Dots? How can you even perceive mere dots on a sign when the picture includes a view of someone with long hair – someone who is quite possibly female?!?!?!
ambulocetacean @39
I did a little research and came up with this, maybe it will help you.
The section titled “The Intentional Mangling Of Old Testament Prophecy” is the most relevant part. Hope that helps!
Why doesn’t it surprise me that fundies consider science, particularly biological science, to be ‘of the devil’? They simply write off anyting that holes their delusions below the waterline as evil and carry on as if reality had not intruded on their fantasies at all.
Still, I find it odd that this chap chose to use the phrase “genetically engineered” in this context – surely the magic man in the basement would simply poof the dinosaurs intio existence, just like his dad in the sky supposedly created all other life with a wave of his ethereal hand? Why would Lucifer need test tubes and centrifuges and all the rest?
Actually, that opens up a whole new set of problems. If he did need them, where did he get the technology from? Did he invent it? If so, was it patented? And should scientific equipment producing companies everywhere be paying royalties to Satanists?
Maybe PZ should look into his university’s suppliers of scientific materials, and make sure that his department is using proper 666 series Sata-corp branded equipment.
After all, I hear that Lucifer’s other business interest is a law firm…
;-)
Cosmic Snark — thanks! That was a fascinating post. I’m now poking around your archives =)
“The section titled “The Intentional Mangling Of Old Testament Prophecy” is the most relevant part.”
Isn’t that the old, familiar Sophitimacated Babblical Inerrancy™?
@ambulocetacean – Glad you liked it! If you do crawl through my blog, just keep in mind I was still a (liberal) Christian when I started it three years ago (left Xinsanity two years ago). So there’s a bit of a different tone between my earlier posts and my more recent ones (although I have happily thrashed fundie-ism the whole time). Plus, now I have a big sniny red atheist “A” on it!
@peterh – Yup, that’s the one.
Lucifer is Latin for light-bringer and that’s literally what the Hebrew says, I believe. “Son of the morning” and “light-bringer” means the planet Venus. This verse apparently is about YHWH having some sort of fight with Venus (male in this cosmos) and kicking him out of the heavens.
Apparently it’s all a reference to a king of Babylon mixed in with an old story about a fight between Venus and the other gods/planets. But I think the exact story has been lost, and it’s unclear how the king ends up being Venus. None of this has a thing to do with Satan or dinosaurs, of course.
Ladies, look, many men (not all) are in a constant search mode when it comes to women. We are hunting, and we can’t turn it off, even when we try. Just being honest about it shouldn’t stir up disgust, unless it’s your man and you don’t like him checking out the competition. It’s not lust, it’s more like a mental notation on our surroundings; “blonde at eleven O’clock”.
We share this insight with you so that you may be aware of our inner workings, not to gross you out.
Anyway, it’s my experience that I will take note of some feature of a perceived female and then, upon finding that feature to be attractive in my estimation, to strive to discover if the rest of her features measure up. In the meantime, nice legs automatically leads to a presumption of further attractive features, thus leading to heightened expectations.
The moral? If you have great gams, show them off, but I suspect that you knew that.
Anyway, the other point about noticing the woman is simple; she is in focus, the main subject isn’t, it’s a valid observation that the photographer hit the focus whilst aiming a little to the left, then re-framed the shot or cropped it.
Anyone else lose interest right here in the rest of the post?
CC,MM,OM
yup
My, the man is splainin’, isn’t he?
I have a higher assessment of males than you.
Ladies, look, many men (not all) are in a constant search mode when it comes to women.
Citation needed.
We are hunting, and we can’t turn it off
citation needed.
, even when we try.
citation needed.
It’s not lust, it’s more like a mental notation on our surroundings; “blonde at eleven O’clock”.
citation needed.
We share this insight with you so that you may be aware of our inner workings, not to gross you out.
it’s not an insight, it’s a projection of apparently your own behavior, and what do you mean “WE”, paleface?
Anyway, it’s my experience that I will take note of some feature of a perceived female
aha! honesty at last. no citation needed for personal anecdotes.
of course, they aren’t evidence, either.
The moral?
is: “I grew up with male privilege, and now think it as natural as breathing.”
yes, we know.
Daniel @ 64: Thank you for giving me the occasion to recycle my comment #4:
Once again, without any other information to assess this by, Poe’s Law (or maybe Poe’s Corollary) holds.
(Sadly, I fear daniel is 100% sincere…but it just reads as such obvious sexist bullshit, I really WANT it to be a parody)
Ya know, by the gaffer’s reasoning in the pic up above, God genetically engineered sandwich board-wearing crackpots. This would not be a deity you could trust to do the right thing with the souls of mere mortals.
I sort of knew that that would be throwing meat into the lion’s den, but I do that…..
I am basing my observation on watching men, and how they observe women. Have you ever walked down a street and seen men swivelling their heads or just glancing over as a woman walks by them? It seems to be common behavior. My daughter came back from France to report that the men (boys) there are much more overt in their attentions to women. Perhaps a cultural taboo in the US makes looking at attractive women somehow forbidden.
I know that it is unwanted attention, and I know how sexist my speil seems to be, or actually is; I led off with “Ladies, look,” because I knew it was inflammatory, I was getting attention. Kind of like putting on tall boots and leggings.
Geeze, I can’t believe I pissed off Ichthyic, whom I have always admired. Sorry ’bout that.
danielmeagher FYI
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/01/pharyngula-standards-practices/
I doubt you’ve pissed anyone off; you have, however, flagged yourself as a bit of an idiot. *shrug* My advice: lurk moar.
Emrysmyrddin,
No, you’re wrong there: danielmeagher has flagged himself as a fucking ginormous idiot.
Daniel, the moral: if you’re a complete fuckwit, don’t show it off, and being a fuckwit, you wouldn’t have known that.
PZ, I realize you’re awfully busy, but if you do turn up Satan’s instructions for genetically engineering dinosaurs, would you mind sharing them with us? Sounds like a fun project for a lazy weekend.
NO. You will not know the answer until you see me and my minions rampaging out of the midwest riding our legion of tyrannosaurs. There will be no lazy weekends after that, I promise — you’ll all be running, screaming, fleeing for your life.
We clearly shouldn’t let men drive or do anything important due to their handicap of having the attention span of horny hamsters.