There is a group of Christians (maybe — could be a stupid Poe) who disagree with Ken Ham. Ham argues that dinosaurs were real, that they were created 6000 years ago, and the they were on Noah’s Ark, but were killed by dragon-slaying knights in the Middle Ages. Stop laughing. It’s what he actually believes.
This other group, Christians Against Dinosaurs, argues instead that dinosaurs never existed, they’re totally fake, and that paleontologists just assembled random rock fragments into phony assemblages, inventing dinosaurs.
So here’s one of their people trying to make the case that you can smash up anything and assemble it into a dinosaur skeleton, if you use enough spackle.
When I first saw this, I thought it had to be a hoax. Nobody could be that idiotic, could they?
But then I thought…if somebody suddenly sprang Ken Ham and his wacky ideas on me, I’d be thinking exactly the same thing. This guy is just a bad actor, right, trying to make religious people look like nitwits? Nobody’s going to fall for that goofy routine. You’re pulling my leg.
If you think it’s satire, tell me how you’d know…and sorry, but the argument that it’s too ridiculous to be credible is not valid in a world of Hams and Hovinds and Trumps and Bergmans.
I know what all the broken fragments are. Its whats left of the brains of a paleontologist after they finish bashing their head against a wall at this woman’s gross stupidity.
I think it’s actually a spoof. The website ‘Christians against Dinosaurs’ has none of the signs of a genuine pseudoscience one. It’s (almost) literate. There’s no sentences printed entirely in capital letters.
good god is she ever smug in her stupidity..
Oh, really?
She can’t tell the difference between feet and meters. Based on that alone, I say she’s for real.
She’s legit, Aronra interviewed / debated her.
If I remember correctly, the “movement” was a poe, but she got suckered in for real. Something like that. You should ask Aron.
Based on their Facebook admins, the group itself is a Poe.
Vertical video too. So, truly evil whether or not it’s satire.
Even if this group is fake, I do know people who actually do believe that paleontologists are building fake dinosaurs from rocks because… something. I think it has to do with the huge amounts of money that paleontologists get that allow them to drink imported champagne while eating caviar and truffles every night. Or something.
https://www.facebook.com/kristen.auclair/about
Aronra was trolled.
That’s what they taught me when I was a kid; that there were never any dinosaurs, and that they were all fakes built by dishonest scientists in order to prove that evolution was true. I believed them, then. It was a given that all evolutionists were evil, evil, evil.
There’s the usual progression: adulation, emulation, imitation, satire, farce. We see here only the last stage.
https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/christians-against-dinosaurs-is-a-hoax/
I was part of a fundie church for a while in high school, and near the end I asked our pastor about fossils. He explained that they had been placed in the ground by Satan in order to trick people into not believing in God. Paleontologists being frauds would’ve been much easier BS to swallow.
The video comes across as sincere, smarmy ignorance. If it’s satire, it’s too subtle for me.
@Tabby Lavalamp #10: What are we supposed to be looking at on that page?
miso– The variation I was told was that dinosaurs never existed and that the bones that were dug up were a hoax planted by God to “test our faith”.
TG– Bad enough God won’t put in any more personal appearances to prove his existence, but to deliberately try to trick people into not believing in him, as a test of faith? Wow. To be fair though, God being a monumental jerk like that is a lot more consistent with the Bible than the whole blame-the-devil thing my church went in for.
CAD is totally fake. I even participate as a crazy fundy denying the existence of dinosaurs. The admins seem very intelligent and are often ridiculously funny. One ongoing joke is to confuse Mary Tyler Moore with Carol Burnett. Just so stupid it is hilarious.
The woman in the video, Kristin Auclair, no longer participates because she is running for city council. Confronted about her supposed wacky beliefs, she admitted it was all satire.
http://ozonesouthbridge.blogspot.com/2015/06/kristin-auclair-candidate-for-town_16.html?m=1
Like various others here I was taught that dinosaur fossils were put in the ground by god to test our faith. This was at a small primary school in rural England. I’d found a fossil – a pretty much perfect Ammonite – and brought it to school to show my teacher (yeah, I’m a geek) and she made me stand at the front of the class while she lectured us about how dinosaurs weren’t real.
I didn’t help my case very much by telling her that Ammonites obviously weren’t dinosaurs.
If I hadn’t been such a geek, an experience like that could have crushed the curiosity out of me, which is no doubt what the teacher intended.
Aah, the “Satan is a Dick” theory of fossils.
(this joke shamelessly stolen from SMBC Theater)
Videos NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlqDu2cDT0A (Just a Theory)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ (Both Sides)
Though this group is a spoof, I ran into the whole ‘there were no dinosaurs, paleontologists just take a piece of rock and keep chipping and filing until they have something that looks like a bone’ back in junior high and high school. From preachers giving assembly programmes at school to two different biology teachers. I accept the evidence given above that it is satire. However, I heard that shit back in the 1970s and 1980s in public school.
Not that that means anythings. Just a personal observation.
Though this group is a spoof, I ran into the whole ‘there were no dinosaurs, paleontologists just take a piece of rock and keep chipping and filing until they have something that looks like a bone’ back in junior high and high school. From preachers giving assembly programmes at school to two different biology teachers. I accept the evidence given above that it is satire. However, I heard that shit back in the 1970s and 1980s in public school.
Not that that means anythings. Just a personal observation.
Though this group is a spoof, I ran into the whole ‘there were no dinosaurs, paleontologists just take a piece of rock and keep chipping and filing until they have something that looks like a bone’ back in junior high and high school. From preachers giving assembly programmes at school to two different biology teachers. I accept the evidence given above that it is satire. However, I heard that shit back in the 1970s and 1980s in public school.
Not that that means anythings. Just a personal observation.
Though this group is a spoof, I ran into the whole ‘there were no dinosaurs, paleontologists just take a piece of rock and keep chipping and filing until they have something that looks like a bone’ back in junior high and high school. From preachers giving assembly programmes at school to two different biology teachers. I accept the evidence given above that it is satire. However, I heard that shit back in the 1970s and 1980s in public school.
Not that that means anythings. Just a personal observation.
Holy fuck. Sorry, PZed. I have no idea what just happened.
Three times in the first 20 seconds she uses the phrase “liddle bid aboud”. That’s not satire, that’s fucking boring.
Yeah, this seems to be a poe. But there are, in fact, several dinosaur denialists out there who think what Ken Ham is doing is close to heresy. David Wozney, for instance. And David Awbrey, who used to be the Kansas State Department of Education Director of Communications back in the Kansas creationist kerfuffle days, claimed that dinosaurs were just “metaphysical speculations by people who look at the same evidence and disagree with what they see.” Then there is Eric Dubay, of course, but Dubay is also a flat-earther (he’s got at least one book defending that idea) who thinks Hitler was really a nice guy who had the misfortune of having his reputation ruined by a grand, evil, zionist conspiracy; he doesn’t seem to be a Biblical literalist, either, but rather belongs to the ancient aliens and dolphin teleportation school for whom absolutely everything is a conspiracy.
Honestly I don’t think the idea that dinosaurs ever existed is measurably more idiotic than the mainstream young-earth creationist view that they coexisted with humans, though.
I first understood the title as “Cage match idea: Christians vs. Dinosaurs vs. Answers in Genesis” and thought “well… a brutal, yet morbidly entertaining idea”
Given their record against lions, I don’t think Christians have any business challenging dinosaurs.
(This is a bit vague, my apologies…)
There apparently are some people who think dinosaur fossils are manufactured. I’d never heard of the claim until a few years when, on one of the SciBorg blogs (as I now recall), what was being discussed was some kook — a creationist, I presume, but do not now recall — who had found a letter from one of the early fossil hunters (during the so-called “Bone Wars”, albeit I don’t recall if it was Marsh or Cope or who, exactly) saying something like “the fossils have been delayed”, apparently referring to some shipping problems. The kook took that as meaning there was a problem / delay in making the fossils, and hence the letter was “proof” all(?) fossils were fake.
@18 flakko — I accept that she claims it was satire, but I’d like to see her degree from Yale Drama School, because she fakes it so well I find it hard to believe that she is not claiming satire now just to get out of embarrassing explanations. I’d also be interested to hear the rest of her platform planks. If they include any Teahadist talking points, it’s probably a safe bet that she’s lying about her original; position being satire.
But what really stood out for me was the “millions of dollars at stake” if I lied as a paleontologist. My degree in evolutionary biology (with significant work in paleontology) has led to a very unprofitable career in public health projects in the anti-developed world. Had I only known the uncounted millions I could have made as a dishonest bone-digger (second only to the fortunes of meteorologists on Al Gore’s secret payroll), my career trajectory might have been far different.
Sigh.
Lurkeressa @28:
Yeah, that’s what I thought it was at first, too.
If you want the Truth About Fossils, google Monty Python – Archeology Today.
If you want the truth about dinosaurs you must hear the theory of Anne Elk (which is hers):
Her statement that the fossils were found after the term dinosaur was coined is patently false. Fossils were found over 2000 years ago in China and the first scientific description of a “dinosaur” was Megalosaurus in 1824 by Buckland. The term “dinosaur” wasn’t coined until 1841 by Richard Owen. And of course the rest of the video is just total nonsense. As an aside, I would think if paleontologists are really carving the bones, they are fantastic sculptors and could perhaps earn more money in that field.
Sarah Palintologist strikes again.
An employment tax:
http://www.newsweek.com/noahs-ark-kentucky-dinosaurs-416653
Nemo @15 – It’s the About page from her Facebook. Just going through it should determine if she’s the fanatical Christian type.
Likes:
Butt Sex (Political Party)
Ban Bottle Feeding in Public (Bottle feeding is a perversion of nature! God gave women breasts to suckle their young. BOTTLE FEEDING IS BLASPHEMY.)
IFL Science
Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented (We have allowed the Christian religion to become a captive horde of Bible-worshiping, homophobic, fundamentalist, Evangelical bullies. NO MORE.}
@35…
And, of course, not all “fossils” (liked the air quotes) aren’t of dinosaurs. One of my favorite theories of fossils was that the sort of resembled greek or hebrew letters if you squinted hard enough, some thought they were reflections of the words of god during creation that were imprinted into rock.
Don’t know how widespread that belief was (it was probably just a single crank) but I love it.
Judging by how many other people are frequently taken in, I figure my sarcasm meter is above average[*]. Christians against Dinosaurs, like Christians for Michelle Bachman, is satire. Auclair’s video seems straight. If it’s satire, she’s pretty committed to a bit.
[*]… that was sarcasm…
The link is interesting and exposes another flaw in their fundangelical literalism. The flood and the ark ark predate the Iron Age by a few thousand years. I guess God must have magically blinked into existence all those steel bolts and plates they are using to hold the logs together.
There’s no QUESTION that dinosaur fossils are faked. Take a look at this:
http://www.prehistoricstore.com/category.php?class=Dinosaurs&type=Skulls
They even admit right up front that these are cast from resin.