Rebecca Watson is exactly right in this video: Ken Ham’s ark is not going to be a happy story about cute baby animals. He really likes to play up the horror.
For the record: I agree with Ken Ham. The Christian God is a horrible monster.
Ham is not in any way trying to contradict this reading of the Bible, and in fact the Ark is going to have an entire exhibit debunking the “dangerous” image of Noah as a happy old man surrounded by cute animals and rainbows. Ham wants people to know that it is not a happy children’s story — it is a horror film in which God literally commits mass murder, and he believes that it’s dangerous for kids to grow up thinking otherwise.
It’s the same story in the Creation “Museum”. When I went through it, I was rather repelled by the portrayal of what they imagined happened in their mythical flood: they almost gleefully show all the damned souls drowning and begging to get on the big boat, and they also show this heartwarming little video of what they think happened. Notice the innocent, happy people just living their lives when the giant wall of water sweeps over their village? They all died, and deservedly so, because God decreed it.
So no, Ham doesn’t sugar-coat the murder of innocents by his god, he revels in his righteousness, the sick fuck.
Also, think about what that video shows: a tsunami that sends a wave that is miles high, and that is so immense it crashes all the way to the center of the continent.
And his little wooden boat rides it out, no problem.
That’s not what the Bible says.
Where’s the forty days and nights of rain?
see?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/genesis/god_drowns_everyone/16_gn07_11-12.html
So long as Ken Ham is motivated by money, I will have reason to point to this:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2010/12/03/disaster-at-the-creationist-theme-park/
Does Ken Ham explain to the rubes how Noah collected examples of all the animals from North America, South America, Australia, Antarctica, & hundreds of oceanic islands?
Maybe I can scratch Antarctica: the penguins could swim, eh?
If Ham’s imaginary deity was truly omnipotent, he could have killed all the sinners by stopping their hearts, without killing all the innocents around. Either his imaginary deity has terrible aim, or the babble tale is nothing but a fable.
Funny how no flud supporter has shown an all continent submersion at the same time (never mind the records from Egypt and China that continue before, during, and after this catastrophe), that killed essentially all life on Earth. Cue the Twilight Zone them music….
From the video:
A few will regard themselves as “back-sliders” and join the fundamentalists.
Nearly all the others will says to themselves, “Well at least Ken Ham’s heart is in the right place, so good luck to him.”
Not one of them will look at the Flood story and say, “This god of mine is a bit of a prick.”
They all are.
http://oglaf.com/parenting/
PZ: “And his little wooden boat rides it out, no problem.”
Ah. But you see: God! It was clearly his plan for Noah to survive. And good for him, how embarrassing it would have been if he’d killed off his own creation. Then he’d have nothing to show off at the Deity Fair.
Technically, if the boat was far out enough at sea, it would experience the tsunami as a long low rise and it could be ridden out. The tsunami gains power as it reaches shallower water. That’s why fishermen take their boats out deeper when they know a tsunami is approaching.
But yeah…Ham plays fast and loose with the truth. He’s not interested in what’s true. He’s interested in getting and keeping attention and money.
Wait, didn’t it rain for 40 days and 40 nights? How could God truly savor the drownings of all those millions of babies and children if he killed them all within a few hours?
The myth states pretty clearly that God’s only supernatural act on the ark itself was the closing of the door. The rest of the time, Noah’s boat was on its own. (Yeah, God rounded up the animals and triggered the flood, but that’s it.) Nothing says God did more than tell the guy to build it to certain dimensions – the ark is sufficient to the conditions.
If God have gotten any more involved, and started intervening, there would have been no end to it, and no need for a boat. I envision Charlton Heston as Noah, prequelling exactly his parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus movie.
Those cutesy children’s Bibles with pictures of the flood on the front always creep me out. How the hell do you explain that?
So this is a giraffe, and this pink one is an elephant. Yes, she has a long nose, doesn’t she? And what is this? A lion, you got it!
See how nicely they all march onto the boat, no fighting and squabbling. They are going to get on a boat and float far away so that they don’t drown like all their brothers and sisters…. .Why are you crying?
@ Nerd … 5
Ah, but you miss the subtlety of god’s mercy. All the adults were corrupt [except Noah & family] so if all the big people were killed, the babies would starve after crying for days. So, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, all the babies had to go too. Or something like that.
I’ll just leave this here.
@dick #4:
Take a look at the video — it clearly depicts a landmass that doesn’t correspond to any of today’s continents, probably a singular supercontinent. Presumably, Ham believes in a kind of hyper-accelerated post-deluvial continental rearrangement, just like he believes in a hyper-accelerated “micro-evolution” to keep down the required number of “kinds” on the boat.
Yeah … I guess I think Ricky Gervais’ take on Noah’s story is more realistic.
I, for one, approve. Exposing people to the hideousness of the bible is a pretty effective way of creating atheists. Sure, most people will just tut and say he misunderstood the story, or giggle quietly to themselves as they bask in the glory of the goodness of the monster they worship, but this sort of thing does get through to people.
@Nerd, 5
Or the biblical god is evil and doesn’t care to aim. Now, I’m no theololificator, but that seems consistent with the bibble to me.
Did you know that there was a gnostic sect who held that Jesus was the son of a good god who opposed the evil god of the bibble, and that his death was the ransom price set by Yahweh for the souls of the rest of humanity. That one thing makes the whole lot orders of magnitude more believable* – certainly makes more sense than sacrificing himself to himself to save us from himself. Sometimes I wonder why that’s not a more common belief, considering that there’s basically no way to look at the old testament and believe that god’s good unless you’re working from some variation of the nonsensical divine command stuff.
*still unbelievable, of course.
Years ago, when the AIDS epidemic was (at least on the surface) confined to homosexuals, I remember the catholic church being quite gleeful about the “fact” that there was a punishment from god, that they could point to.
So
seems quite ordinary.
#15: Yes. His little “museum” has the continents zipping about in the 4,000 years since the flood, and also great rafts of logs and debris from the flood scudding across the seas, carrying loads of plants and animals and depositing them on the now-dispersed continents.
And this is all supported by geology, he says.
Just a side-note on the “40 days and 40 nights” thing — the “40” should be read as meaning “lots” or “many”, not a literal forty. Ditto for the forty years wandering about, and so on.
Why didn’t god just his Ctrl-Z and make his flawed creations disappear?
He had to kill them painfully.
Twain was so right in “The Mysterious Stranger” — the horrible and brilliant scene where the boy keeps trying to fix his creations and everything gets worse and worse.
Of course it’s all a myth: the ancients came up with plausible scenarios for how god might sterilize what they knew of a planet and the weapons available at the time were the four horsemen. Nowadays god’d just stuff us down a black hole or suck our atmosphere away or … raise global temperatures just a little bit.
I see nothing at all unusual with Ken Ham’s interpretation – Ham’s view would have been typical dogma of his generation: god is an asshole and you’d better worship him or else he’ll fuck you over. The other side of the story is that if you’re a good mindless sheep then god will protect you while he murders countless others. Don’t forget that the bible stories aren’t simply fiction with no purpose: they are propaganda.
I cannot help thinking Ol’ Hambo’s video pretty funny.
Anybody know anything about the game the sinners are playing in the Creation Museum flood video around the minute mark? The board looks just like a mancala board, but for some reason it looks like one of the players is rolling a die. The mancala I know doesn’t involve dice. I wonder if there’s an alternate game I’m unaware of which does (certainly possible), or if this is representative of some lost antedeluvian game (that is, completely made up like most of the “literal interpretation” of the Bible).
I just assumed the game they were playing was Dungeons and Dragons, the most evil of games. I also assumed the peaceful matketplace was selling animals for beastiality or something. Otherwise, God was just killing ordinary people just for the thrillm8f it.
If you look at the god of the flood story, he is very much a nature god, with no power over people, just animals and weather.
blf@20 – Except we’re talking about people who take the Bible literally. If the literal flood happened, then it was literally 40 days and 40 nights.
This behind the scenes video is.. umm… I don’t want to say enlightening but it’s something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVRghWdkg5M
Perhaps most notably it’s quite watchable from a production standpoint. Even if they do talk about the need to “capture youth” to christ and Ken compares developing a taste for vegemite to learning the bible.
@Muz, 27
Heartbreaking moment near the beginning there – “maybe Noah hired people to help him!” and then left them to drown when the job was done. Shit. I’ve heard of some cold behaviour from employers, but that takes it. At least my short term contract employers gave me a good reference once the job was done.
Also, I’m overwhelmed by the urge to shave right now.
A couple years ago a friend of mine and I made our own “ark museum” display. Total cost was about $40 including expensive lego stuff on Ebay.
IT needs a proper ships name.
Boaty McBoatface has had it’s time. How about;
Arky McArkface
All the Cthulhlu followers around here and none of you thought of Ark-Ham ?
Also, you have to remember, in Ham’s book, all men born of women are inherently evil and sinners, because some snake somewhere gave a woman an apple. Yes, you are going to hell because a woman ate a piece of fruit. That’s why God flooded the world, and that’s why he’s going to toss you in the lake of fire next time. Because your distant ancestor ate a piece of fruit. Yup. makes perfect sense, doesn’t it ?
+Chigau Looks like their depiction of the ‘fountains of the deep’ being ‘broken up’ (Genesis 7:11). Of course, this depiction of a seven-hour tidal wave does rather annihilate the whole ‘escape to higher ground’ explanation for the fossil record (you know, where the Cambrian layer is full of molluscs, sloths and tortoises, while a massive deposit of monkeys, goats, gibbons and frogs can be inexplicably found at the Pliocene boundary and the top of every mountain).