I’m not surprised. Why should I be surprised? Religion does this all the time. I’m just mystified at how people let themselves be taken advantage of.

So, the Ark Park lobbied for all these tax breaks on the promise that it was going to be an economic boon to the region. They lied, of course. Right now they’re in the interesting position of claiming that attendance exceeds expectations (although the gigantic empty parking lot says otherwise) but none of the economic benefits have materialized, for anyone other than Answers in Genesis, that is.

“It’s been a great thing but it’s not brought us any money,” said Grant County Judge-Executive Steve Wood during a break from a budget meeting.

The county is teetering on bankruptcy and is trying to balance the budget. Wood said they were to the point where jobs may have to be cut. He will propose a 2% payroll tax at next week’s fiscal court meeting. He blames prior fiscal courts for the budget crisis, not the Ark. But he said the Ark had not lived up to its promise.

“I was one of those believers that once the Ark was here everything was going to come in. But it’s not done it. It’s not done it. I think the Ark’s done well and I’m glad for them on that. But it’s not done us good at all.”

It’s a “great thing” and it’s “done well”, but it had not lived up to its promise. I suspect that the Ark Park was the biggest development in the entire county, and it’s done nothing for prosperity. All that investment disappeared into a black hole of special exemptions and religious excuses, and now the county is on the edge of bankruptcy, but Wood is still making excuses for it.

If you think that’s bad, though, you should read about this church in North Carolina. Standard practice there was to beat people savagely for even minor transgressions. Smile at the wrong time, and wham, you were smashed to the ground. Teenagers were constantly howled at and abused for lustful thoughts and masturbation.

The ex-members said the violence was ever-present: Minors were taken from their parents and placed in ministers’ homes, where they were beaten and blasted and sometimes completely cut off from their families for up to a decade. Some male congregants were separated from their families and other followers for up to a year and subjected to the same brutal treatment.

Teachers in the church’s K-12 school encouraged students to beat their classmates for daydreaming, smiling and other behavior that leaders said proved they were possessed by devils.

“It wasn’t enough to yell and scream at the devils. You literally had to beat the devils out of people,” said Rick Cooper, 61, a US Navy veteran who spent more than 20 years as a congregant and raised nine children in the church.

Wait. You stayed in this vile ‘church’ for twenty years, and you sent nine children to be tortured in this hell hole?

“We were warned to keep the abuse to ourselves. If we didn’t, we knew we would be targeted. … You lived in total fear,” said Liam Guy, 29, an accountant who fled in 2015 after nearly 25 years in the church.

It took twenty-five years to figure this out? Religion is a hell of a drug.

You won’t be surprised to learn that, like the Catholic church, the place is a haven for sexual abuse cases, too.

There’s something flawed in human psychology that allows grifters to flourish in the guise of the godly. You’d think people would wake up at some point and realize that this stuff is dangerous.

He’s leaping from our shores to yours: David Avocado Wolf is going to visit Australia! If you only read what he writes about himself, you might think this is a good idea.

David Wolfe, who refers to himself as the rock star and Indiana Jones of the superfoods and longevity universe and boasts the world’s top CEOs, ambassadors, celebrities, athletes, artists, and the real superheroes of this planet — mums — all look to David for expert advice in health, beauty, herbalism, nutrition, and chocolate. He incorrectly states on his website that a growing body of evidence indicates that vaccines are not safe and that they can injure, permanently maim, or even kill you or a family member. There is no such body of evidence.

Of course, if you ask anyone else, he’s a flaming nutbar.

His claims…include that chocolate is an octave of sun energy, mushrooms are extraterrestrial, and… gravity ain’t no thang.

Or a fraud.

David is a con artist. He preys on anti-sciencers by using pseudo-intelligent word salad. He is fantastic at combining a string of words together that sounds intelligible, however when you actually examine them, they’re nonsensical.

His only talent seems to be gaming facebook.

A purveyor of myths and miracle products, David “Avocado” Wolfe fuels the decline of critical thinking, convinces people they can prevent or cure real ailments with ineffective supplements, and demonizes life-saving vaccines and cancer treatments, all by growing his massive social media following with clever internet memes.

But there is a sucker born every minute, and a predator who preys on the stupid is going to thrive.

Owner of Jing Organics Adam Kingsley said he did not care about the concerns of people and hoped David Wolfe would spread the anti-vaccine message.

“I’m anti-vaccine, I’m publicly open about that, just because stuff is peer reviewed doesn’t mean it’s true. David Wolfe is a world health expert,” Mr Kingsley said.

David Wolfe calls himself a nutritionist, believes the world is flat and claims gravity is a hoax.

Mr Kingsley claimed vaccines cause autism because he is in the health industry, (he makes saukraut and fermented foods and sell organic products) and he speak to mothers whose children have autism.

World Health Expert, hah. He’s a phony. Australia is actually letting him into the country to lie to its citizens? Tsk.

It’s kind of a backhanded compliment — atheists are a little better than crooks! — but I guess it’s moving him in the right direction.

Christians who exploit people, lead a double life and get involved in “dirty business,” scandalize the church, Pope Francis said in a sermon Thursday in Rome. In fact, it might be better just to be an atheist.

“And so many Christians are like this, and these people scandalize others. How many times have we heard — all of us, around the neighborhood and elsewhere — ‘but to be a Catholic like that, it’s better to be an atheist.’ It is that, scandal. You destroy. You beat down,” Francis said, according to Vatican Radio.

I’m charitable, too. I’m willing to admit that many Catholics are, in fact, better than child-rapers.

Creationists have a big problem: reality contradicts their beliefs. They are all in a situation of having to deny reality to some degree, but the question is…how much? Do you just go full on crackpot and declare that all of science is wrong, and that you just have to realize that God created everything with the illusion of great age? That’s tempting, but might be too great a reach for some. Better still is to deny the interpretations that conflict with your fable, and recast all the evidence in light of the Bible. That allows you to claim science supports your views while rejecting the science, which is a neat trick.

But there are multiple alternative ways to do that! Creationists have focused on two major problems with Biblical geology. One is the age of the Earth; the Bible makes it sound like our origin is relatively recent and human, while all the scientific evidence says its ancient. Another related problem is change: geology documents all kinds of upheavals, from seashells on mountaintops to warped strata in the rocks to the slow accumulation of sediments. That sure sounds like we need a lot of time to accommodate all that change.

One popular strategy was to shove all those ancient changes into a long period of time outside the scope of the Bible: yes, the Earth is old and there was a lot of irrelevant chaos over vast periods of time, but the Bible isn’t talking about that — it’s about God’s relationship to humankind, so it fast forwards through all the stuff about God’s relationship to dust, gas, and rocks. This was probably the most popular explanation at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century.

You may notice, though, that that rationale is no longer in vogue, even if it is just as compatible with the Bible as anything can be with that mess of contradictions. Instead, most creationists push a peculiar alternative.

The Earth is young. And all those geological changes occured during one cataclysm mentioned in the Bible, the Noachian Flood.

This is why modern creationists are obsessed with the flood. This is why Ken Ham spent all that money building a giant fake ark: The Flood (and the Fall) are their giant excuse. Geology and biology are all about change…well, hey, the Bible has you covered! It’s just that all that changed occurred in one year.

It’s a weird and very specific idea, and not a necessary one at all. Where did it come from?

We know exactly where it came from, and so does Ken Ham: he credits one book, The Genesis Flood, by Whitcomb and Morris. All you have to read to understand the ‘science’ of Answers in Genesis or the Institute of Creation Research is that one book. It was incredibly influential and set the dogma of creationism in stone. All the modern creationists acknowledge its importance.

But where did Whitcomb and Morris get this idea? We know the answer to that, too. We know exactly who the most influential creationist in the period from the Scopes trial in 1925 to The Genesis Flood in 1961 was: it was George McCready Price, who was both fanatical and prolific in promoting his crackpot ideas about Flood geology. Read The Creationists by the historian Ron Numbers; he’s thorough in describing the efforts of fundamentalist Christians to rebound from the debacle of Scopes, and George McCready Price is everywhere and central in their attempts to recover some credibility.

One catch: Price was a heretic. He was a gosh-darned Seventh Day Adventist, and he was always praising the visions of their prophetess Ellen White and working SDA doctrine into his accounts.

Ken Ham hates it when you link his theology to George McCready Price. He wrote an article denouncing the idea, stating that it was a false accusation that what we believe at AiG had its roots in the Seventh Day Adventist movement with Ellen White. No, no, those heretics had nothing to do with his obsession with the Flood!

At the same time, though, Ham acknowledges the indebtedness of the creationist movement to Whitcomb and Morris.

It is widely recognized today by both friend and foe that the modern creation movement—now growing steadily across America and other western nations—had its genesis in the early 1960s. But it happened in a somewhat surprising manner. First, it came through God using Henry Morris, a soft-spoken, bespectacled academician living in central Virginia. Second, the resurgence of the creation movement in modern times (a movement that had become relatively quiet since the Scopes trial of 1925) was launched not at a major rally led by Dr. Morris nor through any controversy in the courts or schools—nothing noisy whatsoever. In fact, the event was not even associated with the first chapter of Genesis and the account of creation.

The resurgent movement’s surprising trigger was the release of Dr. Morris’s groundbreaking book The Genesis Flood (coauthored with Dr. John Whitcomb). But what a stir that book created. The impact of this now-classic work was such that many church historians have concluded that Dr. Morris was a giant—perhaps unparalleled—in the battle for biblical inerrancy, as he defended the most-attacked book of the Bible. This unassuming scholar was to spearhead an international movement that was to shake the very foundations of the evolution establishment and, just as importantly, challenge the church to accept biblical authority from the very first verse.

All this is true. It doesn’t answer the question, though: where did Whitcomb and Morris come up with flood geology as a unifying concept? Whitcomb was a theologian, Morris was an engineer; neither were geologists. They had to get this idea from somewhere, and if you read The Genesis Flood and any of George McCready Price’s numerous tracts and papers, it’s obvious. Morris and Whitcomb were idea launderers. They took the flood geology of a Seventh Day Adventist and washed off the taint of Ellen White. And now Ham is in denial.

Oh yes he is! The gang at BioLogos (ooh, ick) looked into it. Poor George McCready Price and Ellen White have been mostly expunged from AiG’s history of creationism.

While conducting research for this column, I searched for Price’s full name on the AiG website, as well as a separate search without using his middle name (which found just one more article along with nearly 100 false positives). The result was unexpected, but revealing. AiG is a massive site devoted to almost every imaginable aspect of creationism, including a very large number of articles partly or entirely devoted to the history of the ideas and the movement. Yet my search for Price produced only nine articles—a remarkably small number, given the enormous role that he actually played in the history of creationism. Henry Morris’ name appears in more than 500 articles, with Whitcomb’s close behind. And, searching for Ellen White yields only three articles. Many other historical figures who didn’t really contribute to creationism come up far more often. Dozens of articles mention Robert Boyle, nearly 200 mention Johannes Kepler, and even more mention Isaac Newton. Now, there’s nothing odd about AiG showing much interest in great scientists from the seventeenth century, even someone like Newton who denied the divinity of Jesus, but the near absence of Price (and White) is passing strange.

Even better, they go to the earlier books of the Sainted Henry Morris, and guess what? Morris himself declares the source of his ideas about geology!

There are a few geologists, even today, who hold to some form of the flood theory. Probably the outstanding example is George M. Price, who is probably as conversant with the whole subject of historical geology as any man living. Because of his views, he has been subjected to a great deal of criticism and ridicule by orthodox geologists, but his wealth of accumulated facts and his incontrovertible logic have never been answered. Much of the material in this chapter is taken from his works.

It wasn’t just Price, either. Morris credits a lot of Adventists for his ideas.

In the bibliography at the end of that chapter, Morris listed four books and four articles by Price—far more than anyone else cited there. He also listed three articles by Adventist author Benjamin Franklin Allen and a very rare item by another Adventist (though not apparently of the Seventh-day variety), namely, The Flood: The Fact of History (1890), by Charles Totten, a military officer and Anglo-Israelite who probably originated the modern urban legend that astronomers have confirmed Joshua’s missing day. More than half of the twenty-three works, including eight by the man he identified as most important, were written by Adventists.

Oops. Not only can’t Ken Ham get the science right, he even distorts the history of his own worldview.

Poor George. He truly was a crackpot, and totally wrong about everything, but now he’s being carefully scrubbed out of all of the official state portraits of the creationist movement.

Gwyneth Paltrow…oh, hey, I can just stop right there. You’re already cracking up at the joke. We’re done. I’m just going to unwind from classes with a cup of tea, you go on with whatever you were doing.

Oh, OK — Gwyneth is selling “jade eggs”, smooth stones, that you’re supposed to stuff up your ladybits and then walk around, doing your business or whatever, while they do magic things for you. She interviews the person who makes these things, named Shiva Rose, and we are enlightened on a number of strangely twisted ‘facts’.

I learned about the jade egg through the yoga community that I was in, and I sort of went down the rabbit hole of researching the practice—there was not as much information about it then as there is now. But it made intuitive sense to me: The word for our womb, yoni, translates as “sacred place”, and it is a sacred place—it’s where many women access their intuition, their power, and their wisdom. It’s this inner sanctum that we can access when it’s not in use creating life. Sadly most people use it as a psychic trash bin, storing old or negative energy. I see it as a place to celebrate ourselves as sexual, powerful beings, or as mothers, not a place to carry negative or un-dealt-with emotions. I’ve always been into crystals, so learning about jade eggs (which are gems) has been a natural progression for me—this particular jade, nephrite jade, has incredible clearing, cleansing powers. It’s a dark, deep green and very heavy—it’s a great stone for taking away negativity.

This sounds exactly like something the MRAs would agree with: a woman’s power and intelligence isn’t in her mind, but in her vagina. It isn’t. Also, whenever you hear the phrase “cleansing powers”, and it isn’t talking about detergents, you know you’re going to get a load of bullshit. Ditto for “clearing” and “negativity”.

I also find this phrase telling: there was not as much information about it then as there is now. That’s only because frauds like her have been busily making shit up and stuffing it onto the internet. There is not more information now, there is more garbage — she just can’t tell the difference.

If you really want one, Gwyneth is selling them for only $66. Here’s an even better deal, though: a gynecologist is offering free advice. You should take it.

As for the recommendation that women sleep with a jade egg in their vaginas I would like to point out that jade is porous which could allow bacteria to get inside and so the egg could act like a fomite. This is not good, in case you were wondering. It could be a risk factor for bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome.

Regarding the suggestion to wear the jade egg while walking around, well, I would like to point out that your pelvic floor muscles are not meant to contract continuously. In fact, it is quite difficult to isolate your pelvic floor while walking so many women could actually clench other muscles to keep the egg inside. It is possible the pained expression of clenching your butt all day could be what is leading people to stare, not some energy glow.

Gwyneth Paltrow seems like a nice, well-meaning but incredibly privileged person who is affably promoting ignorance and exploiting the gullible for personal profit. She may have a pretty smile and better manners, but she is almost as bad for society as the loud-mouthed trumpkins. She happily enables stupidity and makes it seem like a desirable state.