hobbit-humanist

Creationist Propaganda

Whilst collecting and sorting my mail from a basket that catches it at the main door at the bottom of the stairwell  I noticed a neighbour had mail from a christian organisation named ‘Creation Ministries International’. It was bound in transparent cellophane and thus easy to see through and read. I couldn’t help but notice that it had a picture of Charles Darwin overlaid with a no entry sign.

The Article was written by a man called Gary Bates who heads it with ‘Pressing on with questioning evolution’. Ok, so it’s not really my mail to read, though as neighbours the first one to the mail tends to sort through it and leave peoples letters in respective piles on a nearby shelf. I quickly perused the article for a moment and the content was contradictory from the beginning. The author opens with ‘Can we imagine living in a world devoid of christian influence (well I can actually), where compassion is regarded as a weakness and abortion is acceptable because babies aren’t wanted or just the wrong sex?’

We then get some biased paraphrased world war two history lesson of sorts, Hitler’s regime killing millions of Jews and around 70,000 handicapped German people. We get mentions of German people being duped by propaganda, eugenics programmes all culminating in the fact it was social Darwinism to blame. Near the foot of the page it states ‘Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it’. I didn’t read on, as I’ve stated though it was clear to view it wasn’t my mail and what I was reading was only making me feel angry.

It’s almost like creationists have created an alternate christian reality for themselves, a different world with their own take on history, so let’s address a few facts mentioned in the article I briefly read.

Let’s begin with the holocaust Gary mentions and I will refer him to letter wrote to the Pope Pius XII during the war by Ukrainian metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to ‘bear adversity with serene patience.’

Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII refused.

And lastly when advised by his own clergy such as Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, who wrote to him and said, ‘The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms.’ Pope Pius simply said there wasn’t enough evidence to verify the rumours. Though to be fair there is examples the pope did covertly intervene on some occasions such as the deportations in Hungry though the vatican largely remained silent throughout the war to the atrocities when it could have raised its voice and made a difference.

Let’s also mention his predecessor Pope Pius XI who said ‘Mussolini is a wonderful man. Do you hear me? A wonderful man’. This was the same pope that blessed Italian bombers as they went to bomb Ethiopian villages in Mussolini’s war of Imperial conquest.

I want to end this little segment on the holocaust and Gary’s alleged Darwinian influenced eugenics programme by quoting Hitler himself;

‘I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the almighty creator; by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord. I would like to thank providence and the almighty for choosing me of all people.’

Of course looking back in ancient history and events in the bible you soon find it in spades, Moses ordering his people to kill all of the Midians, in Numbers 1:7 in the bible it states;

‘They fought against Midian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and killed every man. 8 Among their victims were Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur and Reba—the five kings of Midian. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. 9 The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10 They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps.’

But it gets better, not content with the above, when women, children and other captives were taken along with the war booty Moses says in part 15 ‘Have you allowed all the women to live?’ he asked them. 16 They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” Notice how they keep the dames for themselves?

There’s many other such examples in the bible, god it seems doesn’t really have a problem with ethnic cleansing at all, in fact he actively encourages it. So, Hitler from his above quote would seem to be acting on divine inspiration, of course we also know he did want a pure Aryan race but his theory and take on it wasn’t about the many in Germany, it was about the whim of the few in power that facilitated it.

And before we move on let’s not forget Noah’s Ark and gods own mass genocide and ethnic cleansing of the world, it don’t get any bigger or better than that!

If we look at the closing line I read and quoted above ‘Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it’ then we only have to look at later regimes in Cambodia and Serbia or the Kurds in Iraq to know that people who DID know history DID in fact repeat it. Mankind has always been a tribal creature and sadly through history has always fought amongst itself being the Red Indian tribes of American, to the Aztec tribes among countless others. Add religion into this mix and mans desire for control and power becomes heightened and atrocities become justified because they become a God’s or Allah’s will and command. Religion has been used to justify many wars and slaughter throughout history as we all know.

Let’s move onto the disabled and abortion bit he mentions. Well with the above we can only conclude pregnant women of opposing tribes in biblical areas were killed but there’s more specifics in the bible too. The Book of Leviticus, Chapter 21, says that if you are a disabled person you can’t be a priest or take communion; in the New Testament, it says renounce sin and you can ‘take up thy bed and walk’ (Luke, Chapter 5); and disability is seen as a punishment from God, ‘be cured if you sin no more,’ in John, Chapter 9.

Or we could move onto Leviticus 21:17-23 which states ‘Whosoever … hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous, a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbacked, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken; No man that hath a blemish of the seed’…. it goes on some more but I’ll spare you.

As with the other stuff there’s more examples I could quote, religious apologists I’m sure could add their own ‘nicer’ biblical quotes to the debate but this only serves to demonstrate how the bible is a contradictory fractured affair, rewrote and badly edited over the ages.

As for abortion, well it’s not nice but sometimes necessary in the world of today, if I was told an unborn child a partner was expecting was deaf, blind and dumb then what would be the point of them being in a world they couldn’t interact with, see or hear? Taking the religious drivel above into account there’d be no point them being here anyway because if there was a heaven they’d not be welcome.

I really don’t know why it comes to Darwin or natural selection what creationists are afraid of, or why they seek to disprove it or eliminate it from enquiring rational minds? There’s more resounding evidence and proof for it than there ever has been for creationism. Francis Collins, the American physicist/geneticist who was the leader of the human genome project and is also a christian puts the mankind’s age at around 100,000 years old, other scientists differ on it being older or younger but many say older. That said, when we look at the creationist side of things happening about 6 or 7 thousand years ago we could say over a time line and on what Collin’s says that mankind was here for 99% of the time regardless. During that duration he had to forge his way in the world enduring war, famine, resettlement and natural disasters. It’s only in the last percent of Collin’s time frame that god actually gets interested in mankind and sets up shop in a hot arid backwater of the world and his created crew get busy doing his work (Adam and Eve rubbish to one side here). We all know though through archaeology and recorded history that civilizations had risen and fallen, people such as Alexander the great had crossed most of the known world and the ancient Greeks had been talking some degree of sense about democracy and philosophy. Gods of course had been created in abundance before the alleged main dude entered the fray to explain of course what mankind couldn’t explain back then.

I find it sad to see that organisations such as the Creation Ministries International would post such blinkered one sided rubbish to people. To refer to your own article Gary, you and the organisation you are in are duping people with propaganda of worst kind.