@DavidMacMillan Enjoyed watching you on the film. Have you seen the filmmakers’ other films? “Jesus Camp” was SO creepy!
Watching it now. Early on, the woman with the unfortunate hairdo preparing to talk at a lectern, says something about speaking of a Bible account, a Bible event or Bible history - but never a Bible story. There is that same tired trope that stories are lies and an unworthy mode of communication for God. But what is that even based on. I’m glad there are Christians speaking up for more reasonable positions because I get tired of hearing other atheists defeating the low lying fruit of YEC.
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Wait these are the Jesus Camp people? That movie was the like story of my husband’s childhood. He thinks it’s kind of funny looking back, but his sister claims that movie was almost PTSD-inducing to watch.
Babylon Bee could have field day with that. Looking at the link, it struck me strange that you have to give three weeks advance notice if your group wants a hot breakfast. I guess they need that long to save eggs from the one chicken on the ark.
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From the concordist standpoint, this is perhaps not quite as preposterous as it appears at first glance.
For the sake of argument, suppose that “spreading out the heavens” is the same thing as the expansion of space itself. That expansion is very much accepted by the astronomy community AND it accounts for most of the red shift at deep space distances.
FWIW, I don’t accept the concordist premise.
Best,
Chris
I watched “We Believe in Dinosaurs” tonight. In a word, outstanding: the content, the subjects, the editing, the storytelling, the animation, the soundtrack, all of it. Kudos to the filmmakers and participants, including you @DavidMacMillan (thank you).
Did anyone else do a double-take at Eric Hovind lying through his teeth, straight to their faces, to the Kentucky state troopers about whether he had organized the counter-protesters?
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00:52:58 - Eric Hovind fundraising video: “I would love you to help me get a team of people that I’ve assembled to the Ark Encounter so that we can protest the protest.” Etc.
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01:08:54 - Eric Hovind onsite to Kentucky state troopers: “There’s nobody in charge of it [his group]… I didn’t - I haven’t asked people to come at all. I’m telling you, I have not asked anybody to show up here at all.”
(At issue, apparently, was whether Hovind’s counter-protesters had a permit. It seems the protesters from Tri-State Freethinkers had one, but the counter-protesters did not - see 01:07:54 - something which this lie would seem to suggest Hovind was aware of and trying to dodge responsibility for.)
(All timings are from the PBS streaming site: https://www.pbs.org/video/we-believe-in-dinosaurs-hnhjlz/)
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I thougth it could be a form of misdemeanor child abuse.
Well, that just means you’ve been indoctrinating your family with the notion that logic, reason, and reality need to be essential elements within their faith. We’ll assemble prayer teams to help you get through all this. 
More seriously, though; ;yeah - kudos to the film makers here. @DavidMacMillan, I’m curious if you feel that any family / or “fields” that you’ve lost through all this - have they been replaced by many times more in terms of needed community, support, and friendship? Not that we welcomes or encourage permanent family estrangement, but … there is biblical acknowledgment of that to be sure.
A couple of points that really made my own heart rate accelerate a bit were the bit where the children are singing the home-spun-sounding “I don’t believe in evolution” song. Song is powerful stuff - guess that’s why we use it so much! The other part was the phone conversation with the protest-planner in which he’s told repeatedly toward the end how he will burn in hell. If I’m not mistaken, there was apparent, if not even explicitly stated glee in the interlocutor’s voice as he spoke of his enemy’s damnation.
As concordism goes, associating cosmic expansion with “he stretches out the heavens like a curtain” is admittedly pretty understandable. Incorrect, of course, but fairly harmless.
What’s amusing and on-point about the Hovind clip is how well it illustrates the inanity of concordism taken to the extreme. One of the challenges faced by the filmmakers was the need to make creationism understandable without legitimizing it. Unfamiliar viewers needed to see why people like Doug Henderson could sincerely believe these truly bizarre things.
In the redshift clip, we see Eric confidently telling a group of churchgoers that he’s going to “prove” how science backs up the Bible. He then gives a disjointed, nonspecific explanation of “red light” and confidently declares that redshift is what we would expect from the Bible.
For anyone with even a passing famiiarity with cosmology, it’s patently obvious that Eric has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about and is just stringing together sciencey buzzwords. His implication that redshift is a mystery only explained by the Bible is just rankly absurd, given that quantized redshift is the way we measure the tremendous age of the universe. But the clip illustrates to viewers the unique appeal of this kind of reasoning. These lay creationists aren’t stupid; they’re just being duped by a dynamic personality who is projecting immense confidence despite knowing absolutely nothing.
Several people who were’t previously familiar with creationism have told me that this was the “ahah” moment for them, where they realized how this crap is packaged and sold.
You know Ken Ham would actually write a critical blog post about you and accuse you of disrespecting the Bible by not realizing that there would have been seven pairs of each clean fowl.
I have kids, so that softened the blow with respect to my family. I have also struggled a lot with faith personally, and so that has been challenging.
One of the most frustrating scenes for me was the warehouse, where viewers are faced with the millions of books and DVDs being shipped all over the country. The enormity of the YEC propaganda machine is a gut punch. The filmmakers don’t need a narrator to say “Creationism is a tremendously lucrative business that wields shocking amounts of influence over the conservative religious community” because viewers can see it with their own eyes.
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Someone needs to cast out the demon of physics, apparently.
Yes, exactly. Red shift calculations for some objects allow us to calculate ages of 3+ billion years. So to dismiss one of the more compelling dating techniques for an ancient universe, by saying “the Bible says God stretches out the heavens like a curtain” isn’t really concordism in my book, it’s sticking your finger in your ears and singing la-la-la. Or like you say, trying to sound to an uninformed audience that you can speak “science.”
Yes! And they are some pretty books, too. They have put tons of money and effort in hiring very competent illustrators and graphic designers to beautifully package their nonsense, and all the blogs debunking it aren’t going to “compete” with it in a marketing sense.
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Absolutely. It just sort of takes your breath away to see the mass of propaganda ready for distribution. I am not sure what the response should be. I go through periods of thinking Ham and his like should be ignored and hopefully with no attention paid, will shuffle off to oblivion, but at other times, the mass of misinformation and untruths spewed out by the such voices demands rebuttal. It reminds me of the Proverbs on how to respond to fools. Lord give us wisdom!
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I’m not even sure what to do with my own copy of Dinosaurs of Eden. The recycle bin has occurred to me, but there might be other uses for it.
tough one. I think it’s ok to keep others’ viewpoints in my bookshelves, even though I no longer agree. It helps us remember the arguments, explain better, and reminds them that we listen to others–that it’s not just out of prejudice that we keep our own? I still have some Henry Morris and other books from the '60s from my dad.
In the same vein, I still even have a Qur’an (for better discussion, if necessary).
That’s a good point. If you ever do need to counteract certain information, you can access it easily without creating a straw man unintentionally. I will probably hang on to it for now, but since it’s a kids’ book I don’t really want it in the regular bookshelf to avoid confusing the kids.
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Looks like Ham was none too happy with the documentary:
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It is interesting that while complaining about misrepresentations, Ham never really gives any examples of what those might be, undercutting his assertions.
His point about it focusing on dinosaurs was an empty one, as it was a fairly tightly focused documentary. I wonder if he would have been happy if they were to film the production of the fabricated proto-cats and proto-goats that he proposed hopped off the ark and super-differentiated or evolved into the species we have today? That would be interesting to have seen, both his reaction and the reaction of audiences who generally are unaware of the strangeness of it all.
that is a great point. I am still digesting what to do with my experience last night–I was reading the Lego Bible (actually well done) to my 6 year old daughter. Starting at the story of Adam and Eve, she said, “I just wish that Adam and Eve hadn’t done that,” referring to original sin and being cast out of the Garden of Eden. That is something she learned in Sunday School in our strongly YEC, Baptist/somewhat Calvinist church. I moved on to another topic, but I can see significant confusion and possibly even disillusionment with the Bible coming if we emphasize this interpretation too narrowly, as it is in my church.
We love our church, and would not want to leave over something like this. It’s a good exercise in how to put the most important things first.
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And now Mark Looy has waded into the fray.
He chooses his words very carefully. No money from the state treasury. Because the money initially came from the city treasury and was merely repaid by diversion away from the state treasury.
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So to make sure I understand, and to avoid perpetuating any misrepresentation of all this on our side …
Is it accurate and fair to say then that the claim that “not $1 came from tax money” is only a truth of technicality then? I.e. if I understood things correctly, it sounds like the local economies gave considerable tax incentive (tax breaks) to get the attraction there. So at the very least, it should be observed that the attraction is not helping the local tax base by adding (any?) support to it … other than sales taxes perhaps? It also sounds like such incentives are fairly typical for communities to offer to any large corporations in hopes of enticing their presence. Which may be an unfortunate practice generally for corporations … but not atypical. And if it’s a non-profit, maybe even more typical? How many private religious schools lean on community support to help keep tuition down so that it isn’t just the wealthiest that can attend?
Still, it is a reputational far cry from the early church’s reputation for responding to persecution with blessing, becoming a beacon of light as they would help the poor and generally sacrifice themselves for their surrounding (and very pagan!) communities. In all fairness, nearly all of us here in the west, to the extent that we made ourselves cozy and quick to indignation at anything less than full community support (which we now choose to see as ‘persecution’) - just about all of us fall dismally short of that early church example. But to almost take a celebratory attitude toward anticipated judgment of one’s neighbor (never one’s self it seems), is about the most antithetical-to-anything-Christian attitude that I can imagine.
It’s not even a truth of technicality.
Now, the Kentucky State Treasury never wrote a paycheck to AiG for construction costs. That’s technically true.
What did happen was that a substantial amount of money – cash, property, and gifts in kind – went from the city government’s treasury to AiG. Additionally, the city government gave AiG unsecured loans that would be paid back by a combination of local revenue and state revenue, so money is currently being diverted away from the state and city treasuries to repay loans for money AiG received directly.
It’s like saying, “It’s a lie to say my parents gave me money! My mom merely loaned me money and my dad is paying her back. Not one dollar ever went directly from my dad to me.”
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