How gay is the anti-gay movement?

Something extraordinary happened recently:  My cousin recently proposed to his girlfriend of three years.  Doesn't sound very extraordinary does it?  But it is.  Or at least, it's supposed to be.  See in this country gays have full marriage equality and if you have been listening to Christian Conservatives you would know that once same sex marriage becomes legal it will inevitably be followed by the destruction of the institution of marriage!  The Family will cease to exist!  People will marry horses and cows!  Slippery slopes will drag us all down to anarchy!  Civilization will cease!

Except none of that ever happened.  Civilization is still going (despite the best efforts of Greece), my cousin is getting married in a year and it turns out they have to wait that long for a venue because apparently a lot of other couples also plan on getting married it seems.  It's been years now since the legislation passed and despite all expectations heterosexuals are still getting married and starting families - which seems rather extraordinary considering the fact that gay marriage was supposed to destroy both marriage and the family!  Imagine that.  In yet another shocking turn of events, people are still not marrying their pets/toasters, pedophilia is not legal and "the gay agenda" somehow failed to turn us all gay.  So much for those slippery slopes...

The thing about all these demonstrably false claims about "the gays" is that, like a lot of the anti-gay movement's activities, they sound a little... well... gay!  Think about it:

Firstly there is the preoccupation with gay sex.  I'm a hetero male.  Do you care to guess how much time I spend imagining gay sex acts?  None.  I spend absolutely no part of my day picturing what gays get up to behind closed doors.  "None" is also the amount of homosexual pornography I look at.  Now I can't possibly speak for all straight people but I'll wager that for pretty much all of them the answer to the above questions would be somewhere between "very little" and "none at all".  You know who does spend a fair amount of time thinking about gay sex though?  Gay people, sure.  But also anti-gay activists.  How weird is that?  The people who act the most outraged by the very idea of gay sex spend hours of their day thinking about and talking about the details of gay sex.  They even check out a lot of gay porn - and not just any old porn, the hardcore S&M stuff - and then show it to other people who also claim to be very much against homosexuality.  They do this on a regular basis too. Yeah, that's totally not gay...

Secondly there is their need to make the lives of gay people as miserable as possible.  To the anti-gay brigade, the concept of "live and let live" is more abominable than socialism and secular humanism combined.  They don't believe in liberal hippie nonsense like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".  Instead they go out of their way to oppose anti-bullying and hate crime legislation that would protect gay kids from being tormented to the point of suicide.  Yes, here you have "good" Christian folk being PRO-bully.  Their rationale seems to be that kids won't "choose the homosexual lifestyle" if they can make it unattractive enough.  The fact that countless kids still somehow "choose" a sexual orientation that will guarantee lifelong harassment, mistreatment not to mention verbal and physical abuse never makes them consider that perhaps choice has nothing to do with it.  Now I'm not saying that these pro-bully, anti-gay folks are themselves homosexuals who feel that since they are forced to live miserable, closeted lives by their beliefs then no other gay person should be allowed to be happy and openly gay because that would be slander.  All I'm saying is that it sure looks a lot like it.  The logical inference of their position is that being gay is so attractive that if it was a hassle free option then everyone would want to be gay!  Which makes very little sense because typically the only people wanting to be gay are people who actually are gay.  Just sayin'...

Thirdly there is the statement that same sex marriage will "destroy marriage".  I've never heard a particularly good argument as to why allowing more people to get married will somehow lead to less marriage though.  Like my cousin (and the millions of people like him and his girlfriend) demonstrate, the fact that same sex couples are getting married does not in any way diminish the desire for marriage among opposite sex couples.  Really the only scenario I can imagine where legalizing same sex marriage would end a hetero marriage is if say you're a gay person who entered into a straight marriage (due to religious or societal pressure) during a time when gay marriage was illegal but then when it became legal you decided to stop living a lie, get a divorce and finally marry your true love.  Again I'm not saying that when anti-gay activists are saying "same sex marriage will destroy marriage" they really mean "if it was legal it would probably be the end of my marriage".  Sort of sounds like it though...

Oh and apropos of nothing, here is a growing list of the top anti-gay crusaders who turned out to be gay.

Pat Robertson vs The Sanctity of Marraige

I remember that back when Pat Robertson made his immensely horrible comments on the Haitian earthquake Jon Stewart did this amazing response to it, pointing out all the great (and Biblical) responses Pat could have made instead.   That was one of the clips that got me started watching The Daily Show because I thought it was just such a smart and well thought out response that showed Pat Robertson for the insensitive jerk he was.  Apparently not everyone thought so though.  In the comments on that clip I was stunned to see many comments along the line of "How dare you criticize God's anointed?", "Pat Robertson is a man of God, shut up about him!",  "Pat is a prophet speaking the Words of God, you will be judged for opening your mouth against him!" etc.  And I remember thinking "WTF is wrong with you people??"  Do you really think this failed apocalyptic prophet, this ghoul who has never found a tragedy so heartbreaking that he couldn't turn it into an opportunity to take cheap shots at the groups he dislikes, this horrible, cruel, self righteous old man - you think he is God's anointed prophet?!  How ugly would your God have to be for that to be true?  How damaged would you have to be to actually buy into such a claim?

Long story short, I try to avoid Pat Robertson because he's really bad for my blood pressure.  But now he's gone and said something else that I simply can't ignore:



So if your wife has Alzheimer's disease, consider her dead, consider your commitment to your marriage vows done and go find yourself someone else.  Just be nice about it and at least dump your spouse at a care facility first - just dumping them on the street just wouldn't be Christian after all!

Lest you think I'm upset just for the sake of dogma or ideology, I'm not.  I am all too familiar with the horror that is Alzheimers.  My grandmother, the only one I ever knew and who I loved dearly, had Alzheimers and it was hell.  It's not like most bad diseases where someone gets it, gets worse, dies and then everyone gets to mourn and move on.  No with this hellish disease you get to watch for years how someone you love turns into someone who doesn't even know who you are.  I've never lived through anything worse.  So I get how hard it is, I understand fully just how badly one wants to escape from it.  But I would never agree that it would be OK to forget about them and move on as if they are already dead.

See, her illness was hard for me - it was hard for everyone in the family - but no one suffered due to it like my grandfather.  I just had breakfast with him last week, he turned 93 and the man is still as sharp as a tack.  I can't even begin to imagine how it must have felt for him to watch his wife of about 50 years slowly deteriorate day after day until there was nothing left of the woman he married.  I can't even conceive of that kind of pain.  Here's the thing, he never bailed on her.  He stayed with her, taking care of her all day and every day until the day she died.  Just by doing that, my grandfather taught me more about what it means to be a real man and far more about what the term "sanctity of marriage" means than every lecture, book, sermon and talk I've heard on the subject my whole life. 

A real man, doesn't take the easy way out.  A real man stands by his loved ones until the very end no matter what.  Marriage vows mean something.  Phrases like "in sickness and health" and "for better or for worse" are not just idle words, if you speak them you better mean them.  The vow you make is the vow you live by.

I don't think anyone ever called my grandpa an "anointed man of God" but I have to say, I think he is a million times the man Pat Robertson is.  If I can live to be half the man my grandfather is I would not have wasted my life.

Sally gets Stoned (But not really) (And not in the fun way)

Ye gods how I despise the modern breed of faux martyred Christian!  The last time I blogged about Persecution Envy among modern Western Christians I was still able to be mostly amused if rather exasperated by the phenomenon.  But between then and now I find that I have been worn down by countless instances of Christians striking a persecuted pose over the most inane bullshit, causing me to lose my sense of humour about this phenomenon entirely.

Enter the latest great martyr of the Christian faith: Sally Kern.  You know she's a martyr because she did something few other martyrs in the history of Christianity has ever done, she wrote a book to tell the world all about her sufferings as a martyr for Christ.  So what happened, you ask?  Did she face a lynch mob because she preached the Gospel in badlands of Afghanistan?  Was she arrested for running an underground house church in North Korea?  Was her life endangered for distributing Bibles in Somalia?  No, not so much.  What happened was that she gave the following speech:







In it she likens gay people to cancer, she accuses them of undermining the United States and claims that acceptance of homosexuals will destroy civilization itself.  In fact she goes so far as to call them a bigger threat than terrorism and describes homosexuals as if they all belong to some Illuminati type secret sect that is hell bent on infiltrating and controlling every aspect of society.  Basically she spouts every bigoted idea that only people who have never met a real gay person can buy into.  What she didn't realise was that someone recorded this speech and published it on Youtube, which in turn caused a huge backlash by both gay people and straight people who weren't completely batshit insane.  This is now what goes for martyrdom these days apparently.  You can read all about it in her upcoming book, "The stoning of Sally Kern".  (Spoiler alert!  It's a "media stoning", whatever the hell that's supposed to be.  Turns out people calling her on her ignorant bullshit counts as persecution, who knew?  I bet St Stephen would have loved to trade the actual stoning he received for a "media stoning"!)

Times sure have changed!  Once upon a time Christian martyrs had to face lions - these days they apparently just have to face facts...

I so wish that Representative Kern was the exception but unfortunately she's the rule.  There exists in Christianity today a generation of umbrage junkies, people who despite the fact that they possess every privilege and advantage a free society can offer still feel the need to feel constantly offended and persecuted.  Of course, since they face no actual persecution they have to continually force themselves to be outraged about the most inane, trivial crap.  And so we end up with a group of people who manage to feel martyred by the very existence of opinions contrary to the ones they hold.  Therefore the very act of disagreeing with them becomes an act of persecution and so being called wrong and ignorant somehow becomes equivalent to stoning.  It's not enough for them to enjoy freedom of expression and belief.  No, they cannot feel happy unless they are the only ones who are allowed these freedoms.

How can anyone live like this?  Isn't it absolutely exhausting to have to constantly work up outrage over the most meaningless things?  Isn't that the most joyless way of going through life?  Doesn't it destroy your very soul to constantly manufacture feelings of persecution when in truth you live a life of unmatched privilege?  How can you sleep at night knowing you compared being disagreed with to the actual pain, suffering and death of millions of believers through the ages? 

It sickens me.

How Francis Chan converted me to Paganism

Francis Chan

So the other day I watched a free online premier for a new Christian video series called BASIC.  Sadly the free, full length video is no longer available but you won't have to simply take my word regarding the content as I did find a copy of the audio here.  The first thing that struck me was how incredibly alike this video seemed to the NOOMA series by Rob Bell.  The similarities soon became even stronger and I started to suspect that the presenter of this series, Francis Chan, was a really big Rob Bell fan because he was downright channeling the man.  In all fairness, I probably can't judge since I've only seen the one video but to me it seemed that Francis here would like nothing better than to find Rob and skin him so that he may wear him and be him!

Anyway, apart from that it wasn't bad.  The theme of this particular video was "follow Jesus" and it made some very good points, for instance that we needn't debate how to follow Jesus since it should be obvious - just look at what He told you to do and then do it.  But then, about 8 minutes in, things got iffy.  The conversation turned from "how do we follow Jesus?" to "why should I follow Jesus?"  The first answer he offered basically came down to "Because it's totally a privilege that Jesus even lets you follow Him so you should, like, totally do it!".  Somehow I doubt that would convince a skeptic.  He probably guessed as much because then he sheds his Rob Bell impression completely and tells you that you need to follow Jesus because Jesus is one scary dude!

Here is why Francis says he follows Jesus, because Jesus promised to return one day and judge the earth and according to the Book of Revelation, this judgement is going to be pants pissingly terrifying (I may be paraphrasing here).  To illustrate, he quotes from Revelation 6:15-17:

"Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

He points out that Jesus often spoke of Hell - more often that He did of Heaven - and concludes that you should follow Jesus because He is a powerful Being and you want to be on His side because you wouldn't like Jesus when He gets angry!  So really, according to this video it's a case of follow Jesus or else!

This was a moment of epiphany for me!  He was completely right, I was using all the wrong criteria in deciding what to believe and who to follow.  Obviously one should follow the one that scares you the most.  

Therefore, thanks to Francis Chan, I now follow Xipe Totec! I'm a little confused as to why I seem to be the only one though, Pastor Chan made a good argument though for some odd reason he claims that he is following Jesus because "what other choice do I have?"  Seriously?  Have you even looked at some of the other deities out there?  Did Pastor Francis even consider deities like Set or Kali?  I did and there sure are plenty of powerful beings out there you don't want to be on the wrong side of!  In the end I settled on Xipe Totec because honestly, just look at the guy!  He invented war!  Jesus wants you to give Him your heart (metaphorically) - Xipe Totec literally wants you to give him (the still beating) hearts of other humans!  Jesus wore a robe, Xipe Totec wears flayed human skin* - you tell me who you find more fearsome.  I just hope my new lord will forgive me for not offering him any freshly removed human hearts, flayed skin and human blood as sacrifice.  Sacrificial pyramids just take time to build thats all.  Perhaps I should have started with arrow sacrifice or a fire pit instead...

"Our lord the flayed one"

 I must admit though, sometimes I do lie awake at night wondering if I made the right choice.  Especially when I consider the incredibly cruel punishments Zeus enjoys dispensing.  Don't get me wrong, hellfire is very scary!  Somehow having a a giant bird eat out your liver every day for all eternity sounds worse!  I guess it's because the flames of Hell just never end, its the same thing for every second of eternity.  But when you are chained to the rock waiting for the bird to come for your freshly regenerated liver those few hours of dread filled near normalcy just sounds even more excruciating somehow...

*Funny enough, according to Wiki, it seems both could heal you if you touched it.

Getting Stuck in a Pumpkin or How To Destroy Christianity through Biblical literalism

Up until very recently, very few people outside the United States had even heard of the state of Delaware.  Then Christine O’Donnell came along and changed all that thanks to a seemingly endless stream of clips of her making statements that make Sarah Palin look like a reasoned intellectual.  Now there have been a couple of doozies but arguably the most famous is the one of her arguing against masturbation, claiming that based on the Bible it was the same as committing adultery.

The strange thing is that this is probably the least crazy of her statements.  A very large subsection of Evangelical Christians would tell you the exact same thing – especially if you’re a teen at a Christian Youth Camp.  Many Christians would tell you that Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:28 – “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." should be interpreted literally and therefore it’s a sin to even fantasize about another person.  I bought into this too as a teen and suffered endless guilt for being normal.  Eventually I figured out a loophole for myself.  Since the verse specifically mentioned “adultery” I would therefore be OK as long as I never fantasized about a married person.  I still recall the sad day that all my Sarah Michelle Gellar posters had to come down because she got married...  But I digress.  I mentioned this in an earlier post on the Ten Commandments but this literal interpretation is a vital weapon in the evangelism arsenal of groups like Way of the Master.  To recap, their method of evangelism typically goes as follows:

• Ask the target if he/she considers themselves to be a good person.
• When they answer “yes”, test them against the Ten Commandments (aka God’s rules for being good enough to make it into Heaven.)
• When they do well on this test (and they tend to since most people aren’t adulterous, thieving murderers), go “Oh Snap!  But what about thought crime?”
• Then convince them that since God counts sinful thoughts the same as sinful deeds, they are horrible, evil people deserving of an eternity of torture.

Now this approach is surprisingly effective at making converts but it does have a rather severe flaw built in.  See, while it can convert you, it cannot convert you to Christianity.  This is because if the premise of this method – that God punishes thought crime – is true then Christianity is false.  Don’t believe me?  Let me show you how a literal interpretation of Matthew 5 utterly destroys the Christian religion in just a 3 easy steps:

1. If you take Matt 5:28 to mean that lust in your heart is literally the same as adultery in the eyes of God then it follows that anger must literally be the same as murder to God, according to Matt 5:21-22.
2. Now then the Bible records several instances of Jesus being angry (Mark 3:2-7; John 2.13-22; Matt 23:13-36).  Therefore Jesus must have been guilty of several instances of murder in the eyes of God.
3. Therefore His execution would have been just and He could not have been the sinless Lamb of God who bore our sins in our stead and impugned his perfect, sinless life to us. 

Presto, the entire Christian faith is invalid, all because you just had to have the thought crime stick to beat people with!  Thing is, you don’t need the weapons of guilt and shame to win converts – you would be hard pressed to find examples of anyone in the Bible doing that and Christianity somehow spread just fine back then.  However, some people just can’t do without it.  They have to make people feel as rotten about themselves as possible, they have to make them feel ashamed and since people are rarely as evil as they need them to be, they need thought crime to do it.  They never stop to think of the logical consequences, they just have to have guilt as a weapon.  It reminds me of how baboons get trapped.

See a popular way to trap a baboon is to anchor a pumpkin securely to the ground and to then make a hole in it just large enough for the baboon to squeeze his hand through.  When a baboon then reaches inside and grabs a handful of tasty pumpkin flesh he can’t pull his stuffed fist back out of the hole and so becomes stuck.  The thing is, the baboon can be free at any time, he just needs to let go of the stuff in his hand, yet they never think that far.

It’s exactly the same with many Evangelicals.  There is a world of freedom out there but they cannot enter into it because they are stuck holding on to the notion that God will damn you for your emotions and thoughts.  Even though it traps them in a religion that cannot – by their own rules – exist.

Who wants to be a Christian?

It seems that everybody hates Christianity.  Weirdly enough, this includes a whole lot of Christians.  I was just struck by that again after reading Anne Rice’s resignation from Christianity:

Gandhi famously said: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." When does a word (Christian) become unusable? When does it become so burdened with history and horror that it cannot be evoked without destructive controversy?

For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten ...years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

Now I know that her words gave a sizable number of believers a bad case of the vapours, I thought it was really Christian of her to renounce Christianity.  I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve come across who insist on being called “King’s Kids”, “Christ Followers” or “Disciples of Jesus” rather than “Christian”.  See, whether you agree with her or not, it’s hard to deny that she was spot on regarding the baggage attached to the name “Christian”.

Of course you are far more likely to hear Christians simply claim that all the Christians who do bad things are not real true Christians.  Now this approach is not without merit.  It is after all very easy for anyone to belong to a Church and to call themselves Christian without actually believing (or practicing) any of it.  However, this does not mean that all Christians who say and/or do horrible things are fakes.  It is entirely possible to be passionately and sincerely wrong.  People have being doing bad things with good intentions for as long as there have been people after all.  You can be so convinced that you are in the right that you don’t even realize how wrong you are.

I think this is worse than simply refusing the label of "Christian".  Redefining “Christian” to be “someone who is always at all times perfectly like Christ” is an impossible standard.  You may as well renounce the label then because if that is how you define “Christian” then you are pretty much admitting that there are no Christians on this earth. Maybe that’s why no one wants to be one!


Honestly, is it that hard to simply own up to our mistakes?  Is it that important to always be rigth and perfect?  I prefer honesty and repentance over whitewash and faked perfection.  Why not just own your baggage and that of your group?  It can be therapeutic!  It may even make the whole group seem a bit more hospitable

6 Videos that will make Jesus bring a whip to church

With imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I decided to emulate my favourite online humour website – Cracked.com – and do some list style humour.  After seeing some pretty crazy Christian videos online lately I thought about doing something along the line of a “The 6 most ridiculous things done in Church”.  However after pouring through the many many offerings of Youtube I found myself less amused and more saddened.  After watching the 6 videos I chose I started to feel that a more appropriate title would “6 Videos that would convince an outsider that Christianity is a scam”.  You may not agree with that assessment my gentle reader but to me, these videos all point to some serious problems within the Body of Christ.  It is then juxtaposed between satire and sorrow that I present the following in no particular order:

1 – The Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey




This video clip really caught me by surprise.  It’s not that I’ve never seen church folk retool secular music into worship music before.  No, despite often declaring Satan to be a copycat who is forever offering counterfeits to the great things of God, Christians have often and without a blush of irony, brought “worldly” things into the church.  The thing is though, they usually at least attempt to (awkwardly) “Christianize” it first at least – for a great example see this worship leader’s rather painful attempt to squeeze the word “Jesus” into the lyrics of “You spin me round”.  Not here!  The motto at Morningstar Ministries must be “Go big or go home”* because they don’t even opt for one of those songs that is about someone’s girlfriend but could sorta be about Jesus too.  No, they whip out the freakin Hokey Pokey and they do it with a straight face (though I’m not ruling out that this was some sort of elaborate prank on the congregation).  My problem here is not simply with the practice of lamely copycatting secular media in the church.  I really hate the way that things that are clearly not spiritual are treated as if they are deep wells of spiritual wisdom.  This video demonstrates incredibly well that you can get away with anything in church, no matter how obviously ridiculous, as long as you claim it has spiritual significance.  After all, who can prove you wrong?  It’s not as if anyone can actually look into the spiritual realm and call shenanigans.  It kind of reminds me of this one time in church when there was a fashion show on stage.  Only it was presented as “Not a fashion show but a parable told by prophets”.  To me however it just looked like all the good looking people on the worship team strutting their stuff to Number One Crush by Garbage (there were some Bible verses on in the background at least, but still…).  Of course, I acknowledge I could be mistaken.  Maybe the Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey really does have magic healing powers.  If I ever saw the HGHP heal anything other than non-specific aches and pains – like say blindness or pneumonia for instance – I will take it all back.

2 – The Christian Side Hug




This video is why I hate Poe’s Law.  Everytime someone posts this video there is always some debate whether this is meant to be a joke or not.  Honestly how could you tell?  Either way it shows conclusive proof why Christian Ministries need to stop attempting to be “cool” and “relevant” because they tend to end up being neither.  Whoever wrote the lyrics to this travesty obviously didn’t have a clue what a “roughrider” was for one thing…  I for one tend to think that this was not meant as a joke.  After all, the side hug is a very real Church phenomenon.  But let’s say for the sake of argument that this was only a misguided attempt at humour by some Christian Youth Ministry.  It really changes nothing.  As the proverb goes, “Many a truth is spoken in jest”.  Even if this was done jokingly, it still highlights some of the incredibly unhealthy attitudes in some churches regarding relationships and sexuality.  Notice how in that song it is the girls with their dirty sexy bodies who are to blame for dragging virtuous young men into the seedy world of hugging?  As a student I also saw first hand the damage such all-touching-is-bad dating policies could do.  You tend to end up with either a church full youngsters riddled with deep shame and guilt for the imaginary sins of hugging and kissing or thanks to a strong “Christian courtship” program you could end up with a church full of single 30-somethings who are too dysfunctional to date anyone. 

3 – Tokin’ the Ghost




Now while this video may seem like an obvious joke, the unfortunate truth is that the “New Mystics” are very real and draw a sizable following.  I would like to state categorically that while my profile description mentions my leanings toward Christian mysticism, I am in no shape or form affiliated with these guys nor would I wish to be associated with them.  While these guys may seem like an extreme fringe what they do here is something you may find in a great many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, namely the practice of taking one or two (or half) verses from the Bible and then using that to build a teaching/theology completely different from all orthodox doctrine.  Makes for some very entertaining, albeit nutty, sermons!

4 – The Holy Ghost enema



I considered using some footage of Benny Hinn here as the man is a goldmine for strange Christian videos.  He even has some videos of his ministry mixed to “Let the bodies hit the floor”!  But then I thought that was just too darn easy and I went with this video of his wife instead.  “What is wrong with that video?”, you may ask me.  (If you did, I guess my follow up question would have to be “Are you kidding me??”)  This video – as well as most of the rest here – shows a very disturbing attitude that reminds me a bit of the story of the Emperor’s new clothes.  What Mrs Hinn (and the others here) is doing is making her words reproof proof.  See if you think what they are doing or saying is ridiculous then the problem is you.  You aren’t spiritual enough, you are too cerebral, too religious, too uptight, you are the one who is out of touch with the Spirit of God.  If what they are saying seems senseless then it is only because you are the one that lacks sense.  Maybe it’s just me but I see a very obvious problem with having an attitude like that…

5 – The Piano Prophetess



Where does one even start on a video like this?  It kinda makes you miss the Old Testament days when there was actually a penalty for making BS claims and passing it off as the Word of God.  This is a problem I have with a lot of what passes for prophecy in the church today.  There are lots of ecstatic utterances, wild, completely unrealistic promises are made and then…  Well then nothing tends to come of it but that doesn’t even slow these prophets down.  They get to carry on consequence free.  I always wonder why no one ever seems to follow up, why no one ever calls them on all the promises (from GOD remember!) they proclaim that come to nothing.  This one is actually worse than most, she is asking for money (lots of it) based on this alleged “word”.  Again, if it turns out I am wrong about this and Christians really do become the Lords of all Media™ (media, media, media, media, media, media) I will apologize most humbly.

6 – The Cancer Pastor



As you can see I saved the worst for last.  This whole incident was just a new level of reprehensible.  However I don’t think it happened because Christians are too gullible or too easily emotionally manipulated.  Honestly, I believe any group could have been taken in by a guy like this.  After all, he wasn’t some sleazy conman who worked his way into their ranks, he was a trusted member of the group since childhood.  He had everyone fooled, who could have seen this coming?  But really, it was because of porn?  Porn made him do it?  Seriously?  James Dobson would be proud I guess but honestly you can’t blame porn for every bad thing you do.  On the other hand, remember what I said earlier about the unhealthy attitudes in church toward sexuality and the damage it can do? 

This little sampling reminds me of a Woody Allen movie quote:
“If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.”






*It may be an unofficial motto but still.  They didn’t just get a building for their church, they got themselves the old PTL compound!  When Rick Joyner allegedly went to heaven he didn’t just get an anointing from God, he got the mantle of the Apostle Paul!  These guys don’t screw around!

Lee & Me

The idea of writing this blog post has given me some pause.  See I have on many occasions mentioned that I find former journalist and current Christian author Lee Strobel to be deeply dishonest and I thought a short post to clarify my motivations for that was in order.  However, I really don’t want this blog to become just another cog in the great internet hate machine with post after post about how much everything and everyone sucks.  I decided that this blog was worth writing for two reasons though.  Firstly, to simply call someone dishonest and never explain why makes me no better than those anonymous online commentators who seem to think that simply calling something “gay” is a fully formed argument.  Secondly, I am very strongly against groupthink; and that is the main reason I have the “The Christian I am not” tag on this blog.  If someone in your group – albeit family, ideological, religious or political – does something you strongly disagree with and instead of voicing your disagreement you keep your head down and go with the crowd then you lose all right to complain when a critic tars you with the same brush.

So why Lee Strobel?  He seems like a nice enough guy after all.  Looks like the kind of man who pays his taxes, obeys the law and he is probably a good husband and father, the kind of man who (and this is just a wild guess) doesn’t kick puppies.  Yet this man – nice fellow as he may be – manages to be more dishonest than all the other Creationist speakers out there.  See a Creationist like Kent Hovind (even though he is in jail for tax evasion) will tell you right off the bat who he is (a Young Earth Creationist), what he believes (The Earth was created 6000 years ago in 6 literal days) and why he believes it (because that’s what the Bible says).  Not so with Mr Strobel.  He pretends to be a skeptic, a man of science just looking for some truth.

Now let’s say I make that very same claim.  I tell you I’m a skeptic regarding the efficacy of so called Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM).  I tell you that as a skeptic, I am going to do an investigation to see which side has the proof – Science based medicine or CAM.  However, in my investigation I do something really weird though.  I don’t speak any medical professional who disagrees with CAM.  I don’t visit any medical schools or pharmaceutical labs to speak to the many experts there who are supremely knowledgeable in the field.  In fact I ignore pretty much all doctors, surgeons and pharmacists and the only person with a medical degree I actually speak to is someone like Dr Oz who is fully and vocally in support of CAM.  For the rest of my investigation I speak only to shamans, acupuncturists, herbalists, reiki masters and homoeopaths and report their claims uncritically.  In fact in lieu of actually finding out for myself, I instead let the CAM crowd tell me what the scientifically based medical community believes and why they are wrong to do so.  At no point in my investigation do I give actual medical professionals a chance to respond to these claims.

Now if at the end of my investigation I claim that after thoroughly investigating the matter I have learned that CAM is actually the best possible way to treat illness and that the science based medical community is actually a sham designed to keep you sick, would you take me seriously?  I hope you don't!!  Why should you, its clear that I started out already convinced about CAM and that the whole “investigation” was just a sham since I clearly only picked “experts” who were guaranteed to give me the answers I wanted!  So no, you shouldn’t take hypothetical medical investigator me seriously at all and you shouldn’t take Lee Strobel seriously either.

In his series of “The Case for ….” books he does pretty much exactly what hypothetical medical investigator me did and nowhere more outrageously than in “The Case for a Creator”.  In this book he pretends to play a skeptic looking into Creationism and Evolution but exclusively talks to those in the “Intelligent Design” community and presents their views uncritically.  See I could still make excuses for hypothetical medical investigator me – maybe I’m really gullible, maybe I have no idea how to properly investigate something – but there is no way to excuse Lee Strobel.  He used to be a very successful journalist before he became a pastor, he knows how to investigate, he knows how to properly report in a balanced fashion but he chose not to.  That is what makes him so immensely dishonest in my view.  See I'm not calling him dishonest because he has a view that differs from mine.  I call him dishonest because he knows how to properly investigate a viewpoint to see if it's true but despite pretending to do so, in reality he bends over backwards to ensure that he does no such thing.  No wonder he gets nominated for the Golden Crocoduck award (awarded for the biggest breach of the Ninth Commandment in pursuit of the Creationist cause) every year!

For anyone interested in a piece by piece dissection of The Case for a Creator, there is a very informative one here.   For those who are interested but don’t like reading and with about 2 hours to kill, here is an excellent critical analysis of the Case for a Creator video:

Persecution is all about you

My previous history blog reminded me of a bit of personal history.  Shortly before starting this blog I was watching the "That the World May Know" series by historian Ray Van der Laan.  I was watching this one section relating to the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire and there was this very emotionally stirring part where the group is sitting in a cave fugitive Christians once hid in.  One girl in the group survived some pretty brutal religious violence in North Africa and she was telling her story.  It was a very poignant moment - not a dry eye in the house.  As touched as I was at the time, there was an annoying voice in the back of my mind with an uncomfortable question.  At that point in time, there were fresh reports in the news about the religious violence against Buddhists in Thailand.  The question that would not leave me alone was this - would the people now weeping about the persecution of Christians shed any tears at all about the persecution of Buddhists?

Now, I don't know the answer.  I honestly like to think that these good people would care about persecution not their own.  There are large groups of Christians though who I have serious doubts about though.  Often times when I hear Christians talk, I get the impression that they believe religious persecution is only a bad thing when it happens to Christians.  Any sane person should be able to see the problem with that but I think the most ironic part is the fact that these Christians are missing is that all religious persecution concerns Christians.  Whenever someone is persecuted, jailed, beaten or discriminated against  simply due to their beliefs then it concerns you directly.  If it can happen to anyone else then it can happen to you.  Persecution is always wrong, no matter who it happens to.  How is this not obvious?

You would think that due to everything Christians have had to suffer in their history they would have truckloads of empathy for everyone else suffering the same tragedy.  Instead you find them acting like it is not a tragedy at all!  Whenever Christians act as if they are the only people on the planet who ever suffered persecution, or worse when we try to pretend we are being persecuted when that is clearly not the case (recent case study here) it just makes me sick.  But it gets far, far worse when we act as if people of other faiths deserve to be treated badly.  There seems to be this pervasive notion that Christianity should be fully protected by the might of the law from anything that makes it even mildly unhappy while all other beliefs should only be grudgingly tolerated by the law - provided they never do or say anything that a Christian disagrees with.  That is stupid and evil and the fact that otherwise intelligent people can act that way frightens me.

Did Jesus not teach that we are to treat others the way we would wish to be treated?  Did the founder of the Christian faith not say "in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you"?  Does it not stand to reason then that if you are a Christian you should oppose all persecution on the basis of belief?  If you don't oppose it when it happens to others, what right have you to cry foul when it happens to you?  If you act like it doesn't matter when others are persecuted, others may act like it does not matter when you are persecuted.  If you think persecution of other faiths are deserved then perhaps you deserve it too.

Persecuting someone simply due to their beliefs is always wrong, no matter if the person being persecuted is Atheist, Baptist, Catholic, Hindu or Muslim.  It doesn't matter if you disagree with their beliefs.  It doesn't matter if they persecuted you in the past.  It doesn't matter if they never spoke up for you.  All that matters is that is always wrong to persecute someone for their faith.  Always.  If it is true for you then it is true for everyone.

Persecution of others always concerns you.  Martyrs matter.  If it can happen to anyone then it could happen to you.  If someone else is a victim then so are you.

Verily I sayeth unto thee, the world shall be thy urinal!

OK so when I ended my previous blog with the words:

“Honestly, who in their right mind would just base their behavior purely on some arbitrary thing they read somewhere?”

That was supposed to be a rhetorical question.  For serious.  But noooooooo.  Someone just had to step up (or is it down?) to meet the challenge like an acid tripping Don Quixote:

“Are male gynecologists professionals or perverts?

Jeremiah 17:9 reads, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”  What kind of a man would go into a profession of examining women’s private parts?  Don’t tell me that he is not made of the same sinful flesh that every other man is made of.  No man can look at pornographic images and not be affected.  This is why God commands us repeatedly to set no wicked thing before our eyes.

Because of years and years of looking at and touching scores of women inappropriately, the male gynecologist no doubt has a seared conscience and a perverted mind (I will not go into detail of what goes on in the doctor’s office for decency’s sake, but any woman who has been there knows what I am referring to.).  His view of women and the marital bed has certainly been warped by his indecent involvement with countless women. 

May God help preachers in this generation to make the Bible their authority, not tradition, and call this ungodly practice what it really is – sin.  Any doctor that looks upon and touches a woman’s private parts in his office “hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”  Sir, if you let your wife go to a male gynecologist, you need to get right with God.”

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking “he got that from The Onion or some parody site, no way is anyone in the real world that dense.”  Yes gentle reader, you would be forgiven for thinking that but no, sadly for us as a species this is totally legit and what is more, it is only one section from a longer article.  Read it at your own peril here.

with thermonuclear fire

After running into this over at Fundies say the darndest things I felt glove slapped.  This is the kind of statement that manages to push almost all my buttons (not the good ones, the flashing red ones behind the glass with the sign that reads: DO NOT PUSH).  In one short sermonette this guy managed to mix legalistic religion, braindead literalism and complete ignorance and then boil it down to a thick sludge of toxic stupid which he then proceeded to pour out all over a group of people I have a world of respect for – doctors.

See unlike the reality challenged Pastor Steven I have some experience in this matter.  To be fair, I’ve never been to a gynecologist (for reasons I would hope are obvious) but I did have to go in for not one but two lifesaving surgeries.  Now seeing as how I am without medical and can’t afford a private hospital I had to go to a state hospital which happens to be a teaching hospital.  Both times I went my entire surgical team (except for the Professor) consisted entirely of young, attractive female surgical interns.  Now when they wheel you into surgery wearing nothing but an ill fitting little robe thing that doesn’t close at the back you may choose to cling to some vague hopes regarding modesty.  However when you wake up naked and catheterized you have to deal pretty quickly with the fact that a whole group of attractive twentysomethings just saw you naked (and clearly not at your best…).  You know what was awkward about that the next day?  Nothing!*  These ladies were barely out of med school and they were completely and utterly professional with not a trace of weirdness regarding the human body.  How much more then the men who spent years as practising OB/GYN's??

So then, to not only spout a bunch of ignorant BS wrapped in Bible verses but to call these people I owe so much gratitude to and have so much respect for a bunch of sick perverts was like talking trash about my dead mother.  Them’s fightin’ words!  It was going to be on like Donkey Kong!  I was ready to go off big time and point out that if this is representative of what Independent Baptists believe then exposing children to Independent Baptists should be considered child abuse.  But then I realized why the name Pastor Steven L. Anderson sounded so familiar.  You may remember him as a minor viral video star from not too long ago:





It was kind of a surreal Wizard of Oz type moment when I looked behind the curtain and realized the guy I was about to unleash the blogging fury on was the guy who thought that a verse saying:


Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone., 1 Kings 14:10

Was a command from God for him to go forth into the land of the Germans and stand up for sheer manliness by standing up to pee!  LIKE A MAN!!!

and yet somehow Past Steven manages to fail even stronger...

After realizing who I was dealing with my rage subsided and (after a whole lot of snickering) I realized that my rhetorical question was indeed still a rhetorical question.  See I would bet all my lands and livestock** that Past. Steve here didn’t believe one thing, then one day opened his 1611 King James Version Bible and then totally changed his beliefs on it all based on what he read.  No he always believed the way he did – clearly he remained stuck on the picture 12 year old boys have of gynaecology – and then just found whatever justification he could scrape from the Bible.  This is clearly a man with some serious issues and the Bible had nothing to do with it.  Because that is how things work in the real world.
    




*Well there was the pre-op prostate check which I daresay was at least a little bit awkward for everyone involved.  But I’m talking post-op here.
** Disclaimer:  I don’t actually own any lands or livestock

Deep Madness

Pop quiz:  You call yourself a Bible believing Christian.  You belong to a mainstream evangelical church and you have strong conservative values.  You are a family values kind of person who knows their right wing from their wrong.  You love nothing more than Jesus, Capitalism and Patriotism (though not necessarily in that order).  Just to reiterate, you are not in a fringe sect of some kind at all and furthermore you are very insistent that you base all your morals and values on a literal reading of the Bible.  Now, lets say you – the conservative, Bible based Christian – come across certain things in the Bible that doesn’t quite mesh with your ideas about society and politics.  Do you:

a) Change your political and societal ideas in order to be in line with Biblical teaching
or
b) Rewrite the Bible so that it better reflects your opinions

If you chose option a then you must be some kind of liberal, left-wing, baby killing, tree hugging, freedom hating, Nazi communist.  Well you are as far as the fine folks over at Conservapeadia are concerned at least, because these good Christian folks have decided to save us all from all that “liberal bias” the Bible seems to be full of.  Instead they are publishing a new improved Bible with all that liberal hippie nonsense removed.  Here are some of the problems with the Bible that desperately need fixing according to the Conservative Bible Project:

“Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.”

"Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians.
For example, the conservative word "volunteer" is mentioned only once in the ESV, yet the socialistic word "comrade" is used three times, "laborer(s)" is used 13 times, "labored" 15 times, and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") is used 55 times."

Makes sense doesn’t it?  You can’t have all these loopy ideas about forgiveness and fairness and caring for the poor and destitute in the feakin Bible!  I mean surely waarglh baraaghe laaagne graaahgelaht…

OK, I’m sorry but try as I might I can’t really hope to ridicule this.  I like to think of satire as weaponized laughter and normally it is perfect for defeating bat guano insane wackaloons like these but this has gone way too far.  When they came up with The Conservative Bible Project they shattered the WTF-barrier and didn’t even slow down.  It is so ridiculous that I honestly don't think it can be ridiculed.  It’s officially beyond satire as there is nothing left to exaggerate or mock.

Poe's Law states:
“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.”

Methinks it would be fair to say that Poe’s Law has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt here.  This seems like the kind of thing you would read in The Onion but alas, this is really happening and it’s no joke.  Actual Christians have actually gone this far off the reservation.  I have been trying to come up with words to joke about it for weeks now but after a while it all just becomes gibberish as the absurdity of it all overwhelms me.  So since words fail me, I’ll have to resort to posting a picture of my WTF face:

 I think what gets to me is the fact that these people would most probably proudly state that Protestant Christianity is superior to Catholic Christianity due to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.  These are probably the same people who denounce Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses for trumping the Bible with secondary writings.  The hypocrisy of it all astounds me!  How irony deficient do you need to be in order to call yourself “Bible believing” while you are altering the Bible?  How oblivious do you have to be to claim with a straight face that you base your opinions on Scripture while you are changing Scripture to fit your opinions?

Exorcising the demons of sheep fear

It's amazing how long really bad ideas can stay with you. It seems to me what when you considered some ideas to be true for long enough, even finding out that they were false and/or really bad things to believe somehow still fails to rid you of those notions completely. You reject them, you disbelieve them, you try to move on and yet they continue to sit in the darkest pools of your subconscious like warty toads, ready to leap up when you least expect it. I could be wrong but I would wager that ever semi-enlightened adult carries a few of these ugly ex-truths around, whether it be some latent bigotry, unfair stereotypes, utterly false pieces of pop psych or urban myth. I think I carry a bit of all of those in the dark clammy recesses of my mind and recently I became newly aware of the need to clean out these toads, these tenacious demons of ignorance.

On second thought, it hardly seems fair to call these toady remnants "demons of ignorance" because ignorance seems to be the wrong word. These are at at best remnants of former ignorance. Ignorance implies not knowing any better, but the things I'm referring to are instances where you most certainly do know better but you still have these ideas that you know are false tenaciously refusing to give up ground. A good example would be when I was recently doing some essays on various world religions and was surprised to find that a lot of my opinions regarding them were still based on what I read in various Chick Tracts as a child. There I was reading the fascinating tale of the birth of Islam and suddenly I recall the Chick "facts" about how Islam (as well as communism, World War 2, the American Civil War and pretty much every bad thing ever) was actually founded by the Catholic Church! I was stunned by my own mind, I just couldn't believe my (inner) ears! I knew Chick tracts were full of oversimplifications, misinformation and outright lies and yet some part of me still held on to the idea that the Great Catholic Conspiracy as revealed by Jack Chick could be true. Why was that?

I think it would be more accurate to call these toads "demons of double-think" because they entail exactly what George Orwell described - the ability to hold 2 conflicting facts in your mind and accept them both as true. The other shoe finally dropped when I started reading the brilliant page by page analysis of the Left Behind series on The Slacktivist. I was shocked to realise that I was reading in that blog the conclusions I should have come to while reading those books but just never did. I remember vividly that while reading the Left Behind series I kept thinking that "this makes no sense, this is not how the world works, this is not how people are, things simply can't realistically happen this way" AND YET at the very same time I was also thinking "wow, this is exactly how the end time events are supposed to be, these guys are setting it out perfectly, how can anyone doubt this?!" If that reaction makes no sense to you then imagine how I felt when I read someone discussing the books and making the same observations but instead drawing the correct conclusions - that the fact that these books seem so wildly unrealistic proves that all the ideas regarding a premillenial dispensationalist rapture is also unrealistic. If people don't act like that and if the world doesn't work that way and if it is entirely divorced from reality then that renders the entire premise flawed. Scratch that, it renders it impossible. That is the conclusion I should have come to myself, so why didn't I?

I guess one reason could be because these ideas are so incredibly deeply rooted. I grew up as a premillenial dispensationalist and I received endless amounts of Rapture porn from the pulpit for well over a decade. I remember one visiting preacher who taught exclusively on the end times (and we had many of these over the years) who had a giant end times chart that took up the entire front of of the church. I remember it well because amongst other things it clearly explained that Jesus would return for His Church in 1977. Somehow despite the fact that I was born in 1977 and was probably around 13 at the time, I still had no issues believing everything he taught. Honestly its because of things like these that I want to go back in time and smack myself for being so uncritical and naive!


It may seem as if I am overreacting to something small - after all what is the harm in believing these things, its not like it's hurting anyone. Ah, but it is not so simple. See when these toads of ignorance and these demons of doublethink set up shop they create a ripe environment for all their friends to come live in. For instance once you start buying into all the convoluted exegesis about the Antichrist being a man of peace then before long you have the demon of sheep fear in your life. You start disregarding everything that Jesus taught about "turning the other cheek" and about peacemakers being blessed and instead you start mistrusting everyone who actually turn the other cheek and want to make peace. Instead of heeding the Bible's warning to watch out for wolves in sheep's clothing you start watching out for everything that remotely looks like a sheep which usually (and absurdly) leads you to embracing the wolf instead! After all, you start to reason, when one candidate wants peace and the other wants war then surely the guy who wants war is the only one who can't be the Antichrist and so you end up supporting the guy who wants war!! Suddenly it is as if Jesus actually said cursed are the peacemakers!

Don't even get me started on the demon of demon spotting where you start ascribing everything that happens in your life to the work of some demon with a highly specialized name...

Oh crap...

Rick Warren should grow a pair

I get now why Pastor Rick Warren feels so at home among politicians and why presidential candidates seemed so at home in his church . They are cut from the same cloth. Dishonest peas in a pod. Like a true politician he will have an opinion for exactly as long as it makes him look good and then do a complete 180 (and lie through his teeth about it) if that opinion starts making him look bad. Unfortunately for the good pastor this is the information age and if you love seeing yourself on TV its going to make it a little harder to pretend you never said the things you did:



At least he didn't go on to act all unfairly persecuted by people calling him on it! Oh wait, he did and ended up with even more egg on his face:



Look, I am all for freedom of speech. I also firmly believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Therefore my issue isn't really with what Rick Warren believes it's with him not having the balls to stick to his beliefs. I have an even bigger issue with the fact that he will look you straight in the eye, smile and lie about it later. If you have an opinion then have an opinion. You want to change your mind then by all means please do, but don't then go around pretending that is what you always believed to begin with (How is that for straight out of 1984?). Most of all don't lie about it, especially when you are trying to set yourself up as the smiling overweight face of protestant Christianity - because that way we all get painted with the dishonest hypocrite brush. Like we needed any more of that...

I may dislike Fred Phelps with every fiber of my being but I respect him a lot more than Rick Warren.

The Christian I am not - Part 3

Ron Wyatt and Wyatt Archaeological Research Inc

If I told you that I have discovered:

• The sunken city of Atlantis
• El dorado – the legendary city of gold
• The fountain of youth
• The Holy Grail
• Excalibur
• And the Kruger millions

What would you say? My guess is that unless you are beyond gullible you would immediately call shenanigans. But let’s say I insist that I’m being serious and that I really did discover all of these things. Well I would hope that at this point you would be asking me to prove my claims. So then, I offer you the following proofs:

1. My word in the form of a sworn statement
2. Some photos of the environment where I made these discoveries (showing things like rock formations that may or may not prove anything)
3. A few blurry photos of the items I claim to have found (that don’t clearly show anything)

Would you believe me?

I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t! After all I have just made some absolutely extraordinary claims and I failed to provide the extraordinary evidence required to prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. You would then (correctly) assume that I made the whole thing up. After all, anyone in his/her right mind would be suspicious of such wild claims. Or would they?

See, here’s the thing – someone actually came along and told the world that he has discovered:

Noah’s Ark

• The Ark of the Covenant (with the sword of Goliath next to it and the blood of Christ sprinkled on the lid)
• The actual site of the crucifixion (Hint: It was right above the chamber holding the Ark of the Covenant)
• Sodom and Gomorrah (what’s left of it)
• The site of the Red Sea crossing
• The real Mt Sinai

(Not to mention the fact that he also claimed to have figured out exactly how the pyramids were built. See for yourself at http://www.wyattmuseum.com )

Even more amazing than all these claims is the fact Christians worldwide threw out every bit of critical thinking they had and wholeheartedly embraced these claims as totally true. This, even though the only evidence this Holy Indiana Jones (Ron Wyatt) provided was:

1. His word that he really did find these things (since for a lot of these he was the only one to actually see it)
2. Some landscape photo’s featuring far away mountains and rocks – one rock formation was vaguely boat shaped so obviously it was Noah’s Ark!
3. A few bad photographs of the alleged artifacts

I would hardly call that convincing evidence, but that didn’t stop untold numbers of Christians to fall for this story hook line and sinker. The claims of Ron Wyatt have since been shown to be fraudulent – not by some Atheistic Conspiracy of Lies (inc) dedicated to hiding the truth about God, but by evangelical, Bible literalist Christians - people who actually wanted it to be true - who simply dug a little deeper. You can read a good article about that here and see a full index of investigations done here. Here are some of the highlights:

When news agencies paid him a lot of money to take a camera crew to these discoveries he could never show it to them – but that didn’t stop him from asking for more money.

His son later admitted that the coins and chariot wheels that proved the Red Sea crossing were planted by them.

As for his photographic evidence of his findings, well you be the judge:

There is Noah's Ark in the background. Right?












Here is a picture of the Ark of the Covenant - but I shouldn't have to tell you that, I mean it's really obvious from the picture right?













(All of his pictures can be seen here)

When considering all this evidence it's hard to believe that anyone could believe these claims and yet, I used to be one of the people who believed it. I did not know who Ron Wyatt was until very recently yet I have known about his "discoveries" since childhood. Even though I never saw any of these pictures or knew much about the story behind the discovery, I believed it because pastors that I believed in and trusted told me these discoveries were made from the pulpit. This is exactly why I am including Ron Wyatt and the W.A.R in the "The Christian I am not" series. As I have often explained in this series, this is not about me throwing rocks at people I don't agree with for whatever reason. Rather this is about people/groups who - under the banner of Christianity - do incredible damage to Christianity. From these people I feel the need to distance myself, to go on record as being against lest I (by my silence) be thought of as one of them. W.A.R Inc most certainly fits this description. Even with Ron Wyatt long dead, even though all of these claims have been thoroughly debunked, they are still being shared as truth from pulpits, internet discussion boards and via emails. And people are still falling for it.

In a way I can't really blame them - after all we don't expect our fellow Christians to be this deceitful. To be fair, the vast majority of people who spread this disinformation are doing so in the sincere belief that it is the truth. It is for this reason that anyone who knows the truth needs to stand up and expose the deceit.

Honestly, what does it say about the Christian faith if we are this willing to believe claims that (as I tried to demonstrate in the beginning of this post) if they concerned anything else we would have immediately thought them to be fraudulent! This goes beyond wanting to believe in the Bible, it creates the impression that we have serious doubts regarding the veracity of the Bible and therefore have a need to believe in the Bible. Is our faith really so weak that we would let go of all critical thinking and grasp at any straw just to attempt to vindicate our faith? If it is, then we are in big trouble. Maybe we should first work on our (apparently fragile) faith, maybe then we can be free from this horrible need to be proven right. Until then the scam artists will continue to prey on us at will. Until then the people at Wyatt Archeological Research Inc and the Wyatt museum will continue to fleece the faithful.

In the meantime, I for one plan on opposing these wolves in sheep clothing wherever I find them.