No? I don’t blame you. He’s a rather repellent character who always gets everything wrong.
In case you don’t bother to watch that video (you are very wise), he cites the fact that she was a Christian, but one who tolerates LGBT people, and even wishes them happiness. God hates gays! That’s not an interpretation, according to Ham, it’s literally a commandment.
Conversely, I found Parton’s simple Christianity to be silly, but that didn’t matter. She lived a life of joy and kindness, and if that wasn’t enough to get her into Christian heaven, then that’s just another reason Christianity is wrong.
Who would you choose to represent your beliefs, Ken or Dolly? The answer ought to be clear.
What an absolute pile of shit.
Of course I haven’t. I mostly live my life without even recalling that Ken Ham exists, which is the best version of my life.
What the astronaut Ken Ham? The man who flew on Space Shutle missions firts a s pilot (STS-124 ) then as commander? (STS-
Oh wait no.. Of course not.
Despite one guy being an actaul astronaut and naval aviation hero and the other one being a disgusting Christianist bigot and lying polemicist. Sigh.
Have Christians ever considered that gays and Trans may be part of God’s plan and not conjured by the devil? That would require thinking.
Donald Trump (or at least a flunky posing as him) and the Democratic Socialists of America both posted tributes to Dolly Parton on social media. I can’t imagine anyone else who could get respect from both sides of the moral universe like that.
Dolly considered charity the act of giving money to those less fortunate than herself. Ken thinks charity is the act of giving money to him.
I need the occasional reminder that decent Christians exist. Dolly Parton was one of them. Ken Ham is the human filth I usually end up meeting.
^ Commander of STS -132 Atlantis orbiter. Ken Ham. Callsign “Hock” & the one that might wellbe worth listening to
Obviously, there are many kinds of Christian. Some are kind and loving. Some are even gay. Some are creeps and assholes…their dogma just a coat to cover hate.
Claiming that there are many types of christians is correct but the problem is the creeps and asshole christians splash their version across all the types, becoming the predominate version in everyone’s minds. It’s like dumping the effluent from the sewer into pure, clear water. Very quickly, all water becomes polluted. Ham is that pollution and is the reason so many of us have grown to despise those who label themselves as christian, regardless of their true nature. Ham’s version, along with other RW variants, is just so ugly, it overwhelms the others.
I judge people by their actions, not their mere words (case of words sometimes being actions themselves considered).
What did Dolly do with her fame?
What did Ham do with his, for a certain definition of the word, fame?
Case closed.
If all Christians and all Capitalists were like Dolly Parton I would have no problem with either.
@4: There are “affirming” congregations among the more liberal groups, e.g: https://united-church.ca/community-and-faith/being-community/gender-sexuality-and-orientation
I note that my former congregation is now one of them.
@ stuffin :
Funny how a child getting cancer or being killed or all sorts of other horrific stuff is just Gods will and him moving in mysterious ways but the ghey (& trans) is supposed to be choice. (Just like being straight is..Oh wait, isn’t?)
Yes, they say ‘God doesn’t make mistakes’. So I guess every person who was born with some medical condition, whether mild or devastating or anywhere in between should not take any measures to alleviate said conditions because that’s how God wanted them to be. Anything from wearing glasses to getting enzyme replacement treatment for Gaucher disease is a sin!
Just another hateful loser who can’t pretend he’s relevant except by latching onto someone more famous and respected than himself, and trying to suck attention away from them by trash-talking them and pretending to be some brave iconoclastic truth-teller. Oh well, at least he’s not trying to pretend she liked him, like Trump just did.
Also, without watching Hammy’s ankle-biting hate-piece, I’m just gonna guess that the “this” he claims “nobody is talking about” is actually a lot of long-known facts about Dolly that show she was always a nicer, more decent and respectable person than Hammy and his ilk could ever be. He just has to pretend it’s all a “big secret” so he can make her look sinister.
PS: I saw the perfect comment on Bluesky a few days back: “Imagine being rich, famous and beautiful all your life, and still the most noteworthy thing about you is how good a person you were.” A LOT of people remember her many and various charitable works and activism* more than her music, and their tributes to her often ended with “…oh, and she wrote that song ‘Jolene!'” Like she was a one-hit wonder. Or “Oh yeah, the book lady!”
For which she was sometimes attacked by pond-scum like Ken Ham.
Dammit, that last line @16 was supposed to be a footnote! What does this site do with effing asterisks?!
Clearly, she did not lack business acumen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0klj72p66lo
John @18: If you die with a net worth of $450m without a decent disbursement plan (i.e. not just passing on your wealth to entitled arseholes), you’re a parasite, even if you’re lovely in person.
PS Maybe Parton did disburse her wealth in a socially just way. My point is that simply dying worth a shitload of money is not a virtue.
If I somehow came into big wealth, I’d be focused on spending it on helping people, and I’d definitely make a will on how any leftovers are spent to do the same.
I’m an atheist, but I like the idea that a rich person getting into Heaven is hard to impossible. Hoarding wealth is a crime against the community, as is maintaining any structure that concentrates it into few individuals. Give me the Jesus who’d be denounced as a Communist over any version Ken Ham and his ilk favor.
@4 stuffin IMO of course it has but it would never make any difference. The one consistent thing about all these evangelists is that they hate people. Not even the religion is really the point, it just provides a useful excuse, substrate, and ready supply of wilful, gullible funders. It’s always racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia or what have you and usually very obviously so.
@19, 20 Rob Grigjanis. IMO, again, I would give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. It would be genuinely out of character of her to not have a plan for her wealth to continue to do a lot of good in the world.
Skimmed the video — the usual scolding about maintaining “Biblical” orthodoxy, yadda yadda, and we atheists aren’t really the target audience. But he lays out a false dichotomy: a Christian can either hold true to what the Bible says, or they can reinterpret it to match what the culture says (which is what he accuses Parton of doing). But: since when was there a Biblical interpretation that wasn’t influenced by the culture it came out of, Ham’s hardline hermeneutic included? And there’s a third option: you can look to what your own conscience, and sense of human compassion, are urging you towards, and (if you must adhere to some holy book) let that guide your interpretation. Seems like that’s what Dolly Parton did. And Ken can’t tolerate that.
Parton certainly was rich, as one might expect of a very big star after so long, especially since she was an active investor, and took more care than many artists not to be robbed. She seems to have been pretty charitable, compared to some others at least, but that doesn’t make her perfect, and of course we can always look at others and say “why not more.”
But it seems a little early to speculate too deeply on how her estate will unfold. We don’t know what plan she might have had in place. She had a big family and a lot of enterprises, and being a pretty savvy businesswoman I rather suspect she had some plan in place to keep them going. In any case, I think it also depends a little on how long she knew she was going to die. The time to plan and arrange things makes a difference between heading for your death with X amount, and having X amount when you die.
@ ^ Matthew Currie : Dolly’s battle with cancer has been described as “brief” which may not be a good sign but, OTOH, I gather she’s been in bad health with some issues for quite a while too. So.. dunno really. But she was a very intelligent as well as beautiful and kind person so I hope and think its likely she has planned and prepared pretty well. Probly?
@ 17. Raging Bee : “Dammit, that last line @16 was supposed to be a footnote! What does this site do with effing asterisks?!”
I gather there are other probly better ways of doing it but I use a full stop in front of an asterisk to get it to show.
.* Like this
It is annoying that we have to do that and they don’t show up like they should.
Just seen this excellent suggestion in meme form on fb :
[meta]
StevoR, I’ve told you 3 times now. You still forgot.
Asterisks are markdown, so a single unterminated string beginning with one is removed by the comment preprocessor.
One asterisk on either side is italics and two are bold.
The escape character is backslash.
\* shows an asterisk because it escapes it. No need for a full stop.
* See?
HEY! It works: Thanks.
The first sentence is probably true without qualifications. I find a lot of these evangelical types to be fundamentally anti-human, essentially demanding we give up everything that makes us human in order to join the divine orgy and coke party in Heaven.
It probably irritates them that when I look at their god, I see humanity’s worst reflected in it. No different than their devil, who often ends up looking good, or at least tolerable, in comparison.
All of the Abrahamic religions are anti-human at their core. Prioritizing appeasing an invisible man so you can get a reward after death over actually living life now with your fellow human beings is a corrupting ideology.
@30 & 31: I think a lot of the anti-human attitude comes from escapism: these are people who simply can’t or don’t want to deal with real people or the real world; and they keep running away from it into one End-Times fantasy after another, one excuse after another to pretend other people aren’t real, don’t matter, are all doomed to Hell anyway, aren’t worth lifting a finger to help, and nothing matters but Getting Right With God and going to Heaven.
@14 StevoR
They need free will inserted somewhere or the eternal punishment part they really yearn for is more difficult to justify.
@33: Except for the hardline predestinationists, which was a position I never, ever understood when I was a Christian.