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Saturday, 22 May 2010

A pain in the ark

It's a title that I'd have loved to come up with first, but British journo Adam Rutherford got there first. Writing in The Guardian he also coins a term I've never heard before, but may be tempted to adopt, "duff theology."

"Christian fundamentalists are of course silly people. This primarily 20th-century phenomenon uses James Ussher's silly biblical generation calculation to assert duff theology and literal truth to Genesis, which while quite elegant in its prose, is also quite silly. The story of Noah is not just silly but hateful, and impossible... I just don't understand why anyone would want to hunt for physical proof of a story that revealed your God to be a bit of a genocidal arsehole."

Oh come now Mr Rutherford, aren't you overstating the hateful and genocidal bit. Haven't you seen those cute kiddie illustrations of the animals placidly going in two-by-two? Just look at this delightful illustration from the Gustave Doré Bible. Anything hateful or genocidal here?

Oh, uh, wait a minute, um, er, scrub that last comment...
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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous23 May 2010 at 07:23

    The Bible explains the whole sad situation thusly:

    "The LORD saw how great man's WICKEDNESS on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only EVIL all the time" (Genesis 6:5, NIV).

    Furthermore,

    "Now the earth was CORRUPT in God's sight and was full of VIOLENCE. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, 'I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them'" (Genesis 6:11-12, NIV).

    Good thing that society today is not as WICKED, EVIL, CORRUPT, and VIOLENT as the people back then!

    Oh, uh, wait a minute, um, er, scrub that last comment...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous23 May 2010 at 08:53

    "Just look at this delightful illustration from the Gustave Doré Bible. Anything hateful or genocidal here?"

    Pfft. Gustave has nothing on Basil's version.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous25 May 2010 at 01:38

    I thought it was a bus stop near the zoo in Nashville.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Baywolfe25 May 2010 at 05:24

    Purple Hymnal beat me to it.

    Give me Basil Wolverton, for the actual horror we all demand in children's religious literature.

    What better way to say to a child, "God is a freaking nutcase so, whatever you do, don't p*ss him off!"

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous26 May 2010 at 11:07

    "Give me Basil Wolverton, for the actual horror we all demand in children's religious literature."

    Yep, yep.

    ReplyDelete