Never trust this liar
Several years ago, Terry Mortenson spoke at a church here in Morris, and I attended along with several students. It was somewhat entertaining for me, because he lied and misrepresented evolution non-stop, and it was hilarious to look over at the UMM contingent and see all the jaws dropping open, unbelieving that anyone would be this blatantly dishonest. But then, if it’s Answers in Genesis, it’s always bullshit.
Now I’m amused again. Ken Ham is shocked and horrified that one of Mortenson’s speeches prompted a rebuke — he had been told afterwards that his homophobia is unwelcome, as was his unscientific stance on the age of the earth. Yikes. How dare anyone point out that the grand poobahs of Ken Ham’s bizarre cult are hateful and ignorant!
But the worst part, to Ham’s silly brain, is that the person who chastised the official position of his narrow understanding of literalist creationism was … the church’s pastor!!!
In various ways, AiG has been deplatformed by organizations too. This makes many people quite frustrated, angry, and upset. But do you know what is much more upsetting? When AiG is “deplatformed” by a church! And what issues do you think might cause this “deplatforming”? Well, LGBTQ and the age of the earth/universe issues! And actually, I assert that as a result the church itself has been “deplatformed” by the pastor as he is denying people the teaching they need on Genesis. OK, that’s a lot to take in. So let me share with you what happened to our speaker Dr. Terry Mortenson, who was “deplatformed.” Here is Terry’s report in his own words:
So what exactly did Mortenson say? It wasn’t subtle.
Sunday morning [Grace Point Church, Bentonville, AR, on Jan. 17, 2021], I gave a message on the “relevance” of Genesis, similar to what Ken Ham and all our speakers present for a first presentation in a church. I explained that Genesis 1–11 is foundational to the rest of Scripture and showed that the acceptance of millions of years and evolution undermines the Bible’s teaching on sin, marriage, death, the gospel, and morality. With respect to marriage, after quoting Jesus in Matthew 19:4–6, I said that adultery, fornication, pornography, homosexuality, and transgenderism are all wrong because they are contrary to God’s created order and commands.
Well, good for Grace Point Church of Bentonville, AR! It’s about time more churches pointed out that Ham and his ilk aren’t at all representative of the majority of Christians, although they like to shriek that they should be (it’s like how the organization One Million Moms is actually just a handful of prigs). Ham even admits it that he’s part of a tiny minority.
Sadly, the majority of Christian leaders compromise Genesis in some way.
Sadly, Grace Point Church is not without flaw: they invited Mortenson in the first place and, although they admit that the Earth is old, the dislike evolution and want it to not be true. I guess it is a major step forward when they are speaking out against homophobia, at least.
I’m also happy to see a smug obnoxious twit like Mortenson getting slapped down. Maybe progress in greater tolerance will have the added benefit of breaking AiG someday.
“Okay class, use the word ‘deplatform’ as many times as you can in a single paragraph.”
There is no good Christianity. There are, however, some people who (at least seem to) believe some form of it, yet despite their religious convictions and affiliations, remain fairly decent people who otherwise (mostly) do good/neutral things rather than bad things.
Accommodationists, on the other hand, are all entirely evil.
It’s hard to believe a pastor would allow someone like that to take the pulpit without bothering to research first. I wonder what happened.
One thing that has struck me about young earth creationism (YEC) is the extent to which the entirety of the gospel takes a back seat to the tall tale of Noah’s Ark. Some years back, I kept up with a long Panda’s Thumb “Bathroom Wall” thread between Floyd Lee, a creationist minister, and David MacMillan, who grew up as a YEC and was groomed as a spokesperson before he eventually learned enough science to reject it (but is still religious as far as I know). It was very revealing.
MacMillan has made many great points about YEC, but one that I find especially memorable is the extent to which the Flood wreaks havoc with the special creation narrative. You not only can’t get past evolution, but you need some kind of warp-speed evolution to explain diversity after a bottleneck like that. Lee for his part seemed obsessed not only with literal truth of the Flood, but the penal substitutionary explanation of the crucifixion. As far as I could tell, this was of greater importance than the resurrection, which I thought was the key theological doctrine of Christianity (let alone love and charity).
Anyway, my point isn’t even that one religion is better than another. I accept self-identified Christians as Christians. YEC is just like no form of Christianity I know.
@brucegee1962, I’m sure he at least opened his bible at random and read a verse. What more research should he have done?
when I was i high school (a catholic one)we had a speaker for a whole school assembly one day (was a small school) who spoke on morality and something with a rather strong quite edge to it as far as I remember was not inspiring to say the least as do not remember anything specific about it. maybe some element of patriotism he was not inspiring in any way
some time later one of the religious instructors a member of the order which ran the school talked about a conversation that occurred later in their lounge with the fellow turns out he sounded just like a nazi racist I think he had approached and must have had some credentials to set up his bona fides , he never returned nor did we ever have any other speakers from outside again.
I think they took his profession of religion as credentials. That they told us in class was kid of impressive for me.
uncle frogy
” adultery, fornication, pornography, homosexuality, and transgenderism are all wrong because they are contrary to God’s created order and commands.” Being contrary to God’s created order is a neat trick. How do you propose it is possible ?
Many people have a problem with allegations of God’s commands – and yes, I am one. I was raised in the Holy Catholic Church ( Church of England / Anglican ) which is an offshoot of mainstream Catholicism – and predates King James’ commissioned work ( the Bible ) designed to protect the “Divine Right of Kings’ from incursions by the Pope. Until one recognizes the disputations of black robed authoritarians as politics rather than enlightenment, many of their representations are as vile at that representing magicians of the Egyptian mystery schools as being equivalent to beliefs of herb witches. Ecumenicism, my aunt Fanny.
AiG – Advantages in Grifting
Before I had fun looking for contradictions and weird absurdities in the koran and hadith, I had a good time looking for contradictions in the Bible. It is no wonder the eternal truths of scripure have led to a thousand splinter groups forming all over the world.
All nut-on-nut quarrels warm my cold, dark heart.
PaulBC @ #4
I still read the Panda’s Thumb even though I don’t understand all the science. I do miss the troll bashing on the Bathroom Wall they had at the old Panda’s Thumb. Robert Byers is still making the same tired PRATTs he’s done for years in the comments, but it’s just not the same.
There’s a video over on PineCreek’s YouTube channel where he joins a call with a bunch of mostly young Christian apologists, most of who turn out to be Young Earth Creationists.
Throughout the first few hours of the call, they’re all gung ho about proving the existence of God by means of some pretty esoteric scientific theories — like the necessity of having an observer to collapse the universal wave function, “debunking” chromosome-2 fusion as evidence of evolution, and challenging the technicalities of certain aspects of the theory of abiogenesis.
To the untrained ear, it all sounds like pretty sophisticated stuff and that they know enough about physics and evolutionary biology to prove they know what they’re talking about…
But in the end, they just can’t help themselves, and start talking about Noah’s family being the bottleneck of the human gene pool, and the pace of genetic mutations being accelerated by the advanced ages of the patriarchs who were still siring children when they were well over 100 years old.
So while they want to pretend to be Michael Behes and have the veneer of respectability that comes with sounding all sciency and sophisticated, all they are is a bunch of lazy little Hams regurgitating the same old YEC talking points.
It’s hilarious to hear Ham complaining about deplatforming. I doubt he would allow an evolution-affirming speaker on his show.
And it’s a milder alternative to defenestration, as tempting as that sounds.
In other words, unless you accept the literal truth of one particular spin on the Ancient Near East creation mythos, then everything else in the Bible is undermined. I am not saying I accept his proposition, but if so, it seems to be a bigger problem for him than it is for me.
Actually it doesn’t.
The proof is that most xians do exactly that.
In practice, all xians are cafeteria xians, picking and choosing from the Big Book of Mythology. The fundies are as bad or worse than all the others at that.
What really undermines xianity is insisting that obvious lies and myths are true. YECism has made more atheists in a day than Dawkins has in a year.
“If the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, then none of the bible is true.” OK, if you insist, then none of the bible is true. That was easy.
Ah yes, the good, thinking christians dont believe in the whacky or bad stuff in the bible. They are allegories. Jesus rises from the dead, now that is true. They must have a nagging feeling surely that maybe its all just a story.
Regarding your comment about inviting Mortenson demonstrated a flaw, I make this point: Had the pastor not invited him, he and his congregation would still not know about AIG’s position on homosexuality. Now that they know, there is the possibility some of them might question other AIG positions. Not likely I admit, but more likely than before they heard Mortenson.
Human beings are very good at compartmentalization and selective skepticism. Their beliefs might not be as crazy, but liberal Christians, but in many cases, their belief in a resurrected savior is just as strong as those who believe in YEC.
I didn’t become an atheist until after 30, and grew up in the UK in a liberal Christian family. I was always skeptical about ghosts, horoscopes, and other such nonsense, as were the people around me, but I was given to understand that the very liberal brand of Christianity (ignoring the OT stuff) was in a completely separate category and could be trusted. When I was in college talked to the Methodist chaplain about all the crazy stuff American evangelicals believed, and I clearly recall he was as incredulous as I was.
It was a bit of a shock to me, when I first started traveling to the US on business and I discovered that most American Christians did believe ghosts, horoscopes, tarot, witches, etc., were real, only Satanic. How could these people be so dumb?!
Tacitus: Welcome to MAGAt World, where 70 million people were given a choice and voted for Donald Trump…ANYTHING is possible here~
Oh, I know. I’ve lived in Austin, Texas for almost 25 years, just two miles from the latest mass shooting (three people dead) in an currently still ongoing active shooter incident. I’m on the other side of the Atlantic right now, but the madness of the American right still manages to impinge on my day…
I’m glad I’m not a Christian because I hate these people. A fiend of mine moved to the Czech Republic about 20 years ago and married a Czech woman. She once told me that the only good thing to come from communism was atheism. Funny, I’ve been to the Czech Republic many times and it seems a very nice, happy country.