The Sun, 28 January, had American Christians seeking both to propagate creationism and coin a few dollars – more than a few as two million visitors a year at fifty quid a throw for adults were expected to visit a creationist museum in Kentucky which features a five-hundred-foot-plus model of an Ark based upon the ‘Noah and the flood’ fairy tale. A hundred million dollars to build allegedly. Sure they could have got some cheaper wood from somewhere. It doesn’t say whether that figure is inflation-adjusted from the time of the event which supposedly took place a few thousand years ago. In the real world it’s generally agreed that dinosaurs became extinct sixty- five million years ago. Inside there are models of dinosaurs because dinosaurs and humans apparently existed side by side.
If you can believe that someone in the sky was responsible for making the Universe and everything in it then you can believe any old twaddle.
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Another American group of similar ilk aims to ‘open people to the gospel by revealing God in science’. ‘Do Extinctions in the Fossil Record Undermine Creation?’ (Reasons to Believe, 31 January). Guess what their ‘scientific’ conclusion is. They conclude, ‘It means that mass extinctions and mass originations were part of a divinely orchestrated natural history.’ It’s a heads I win, tails you lose sort of thing. Can’t argue with the ‘science’!
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There’s a painting in a church in the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, of Lenin being cast down into ‘hell’. A futile gesture but given its history under the Soviets it’s probably the equivalent of a traditional British ‘up yours’. Whatever makes you happy. Have the Georgians consigned Stalin to the same ‘fate’ or are they still proud of one of their own?
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James Joyce’s 1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, contains a sermon, delivered by a Catholic priest, on the subject of hellfire and damnation. It’s a powerful piece of writing and may have come from Joyce’s own experiences within the Catholic church. Is hellfire still a tool to keep the sheep under control? Perfectly normal to have depictions of the savage Roman method of execution, crucifixion, looming over them?
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‘You couldn’t make it up’ news that a man in Iowa, USA, is facing criminal charges for beheading a statue. Where was it? In a Satanic Temple. Apparently, Satanism is designated an ‘official religion’ which makes the vandalism a ‘hate crime’.
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‘Liberation Tarot seeks to serve as a tool for those inspired towards revolution in the face of the able-centered, capitalist, hetero-cis-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy. Tarot helps us rewrite the vocabulary of power, and with it, to strengthen our muscles of radical, revolutionary, and abolitionist dreaming. The deck eschews conventional tarot cards. Figures in the deck have bodies of all shapes and sizes, colors, genders, ages, and abilities—together, elaborating a vision of collective liberation and co-resistance.’ Whatever. Bargain at fifty dollars. Sarcasm redundant…
DC
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