BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: "CREATION SCIENCE"

Probability, credibility, credulity abide,
but for the greatest of ease
on the high moral trapeze
credulity puts God on your side.

All the explanations of "Creation Science" seem to be based on the concept that God is a senile delinquent running some sort of shell game on creatures he devised in his image; or else is letting Satan run it, having delegated the details of the divine Ponzi scheme to those bright boys in the Dept. of Evil.

This idea goes back a long way. In the book of Job, Satan says to God, look at your faithful servant Job, he's got it pretty good, nice life, makes it easy to believe in you. Why don't we kill everyone he ever cared about, take away everything he ever had, and torture him until he cries uncle. I bet it won't take long before he curses you. And God said, what odds will you give me?

Why this is an appealing idea is a mystery to me, but it might explain why fundies keep voting for guys like Ronnie Raygun and Howdy Dubya. The Creationist attempt to suborn science to their cornfed inbred theology is what H.L. Mencken called "An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it in terms of the not worth knowing."

Well, I think they have alot of explaining to do. P.S. The branch of theology concerned with explaining why a good God allows evil to exist is called "Theodicy." Nuf said.

"If Evolution is outlawed, only Outlaws will evolve." Jello Biafra

As an Seventh Day Atheist Aztec Baptist, I'm quite as fundamental on the question as the Godlicking creationists. If you truly understand and accept the hypotheses of physics and evolutionary biology there is just no way you can believe in a personal god who creates the kind of parochial universe retailed by these poisonously and willfully stupid nimrods. They've gotten really clever, aping the rhetoric of the skepticism they oppose, making a charade of the scientific method, and employing the trappings of science to decorate the altar of their patriarchal, tribal, Bronze Age War God.

The truth is not in them. They are liars and fools. Shame on them. Yes, I do judge their belief system, and find it wanting. Of course, I was tortured by Southern Baptists as a child. "The vast majority of the unwashed masses," the Noncogs as my friend Julian calls them, are what I call turbideists (turbid+deist). They run their belief "systems" on the go along get along principle, and can believe any number of impossible (and contradictory) things before breakfast, and are indeed mostly harmless, unless you make them think, the only real "thou shalt not" in their moral compass. They "believe in belief" as E.M. Forster said, as spiritual vitamins, an uplifting placebo, a sort of mental insulation against the cold facts of existence.

The fundies by and large are a different matter. They really do believe in something. They do have a belief system that is coherent and internally consistent to the believer no matter how stupid or insane it seems to an outside observer. This provides the fundie, of whatever stripe, with a coherent program and consistently causes them to do bad things, particularly to people who don't agree with them, in word, deed, or just by having the effrontry to exist. True believers commit atrocities. Without strong belief there is no reason to act. Weak believers, turbideists who attend the chinese restaurant church, one from column A, two from column B...etc., just shrug their shoulders, smile, and think about something else.

I've been told that arguing with fundamentalist Christians is like shooting fish in a barrel. I think there are some sharks in that barrel. I heard about the "miracle car" scam on the BBC World Service. At least one of the people arrested was a fundy prot in good standing, with her own "ministry." I don't think that most of the fundies are stupid because they were born with defective equipment; I think it's nuture, not nature. Fraud, whether conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious, is essential to fundementalist belief; these sects could not exist without it. These people are inculcated to accept fraud with complete credulity from childhood on. These true believers are strong in their faith, and therefore have no trouble swallowing lesser lies, so long as they come from their brothers and sisters in Christ.

I can remember very clearly getting up in front of the congregation of our Baptist church when I was six years old, testifying and praising Je-sus just for the sake of the attention it got me, understanding, without being able to put it into words, that I thought it was all a crock of shit. I was a precocious lad. And the Sundaygotomeetin crowd just lapped it up.

Much later in my career I had a torrid affair with a married fundy woman, who told me, often, and with complete sincerity, that I was going to Hell, sometimes while we were still screwing. She believed in predestination, and thought she was among the elect of god, so she wasn't. Going to Hell, that is. This woman was not congenitally stupid. She was, in fact, maybe the brightest person I have ever met;.she was so smart she was scary. By the way, if your scruples allow it, I recommend married fundies as lovers: since they really believe in sin, all that transgression and betrayal makes the sex really hot.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 5.7.03)