Somehow I came across the Oklahoma Forum on Topix. Right near the top is the subject “IS BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA THE ANTI CHRIST?” I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the question is broached. This is the internet, after all. What is surprising is that this topic has over 2800 posts! Apparently this debate has been raging on this forum since July of last year. Obviously a lot of people are having fun, and we’re missing out! Quick! Let’s jump in and see what we find! Let’s start with a few posts from the beginning of the thread:

Somebody named Yahaim writes:

Obama is the Anti-Christ. This is the evidence:
1.- He will come as a man of Peace (Obama promises peace in Iraq, defeat for the US)
2.- He will come mounted on a white Female horse (Obama mother is white who had 6 African husbands)
3.- He will come to deceive (Obama says he’s a Christian but in fact he was born a Muslim, practices the Islamic religion, prays Friday’s facing Mecca)
4.- He will make himself the most powerful man on earth, if elected
5.- He will try to destroy the Jewish People and Israel (Obama has said he loves the Arabs specially the Palestinians, hates Israel and Jews. Admires Hitler, Osama etc)
6.- He will present himself as good and righteous but in fact he’s Satan himself. Violence is in his heart
7.- Obama will help Al Qaida in its evil projects.
8.- Barack Hussein Obama is the “King of the South” predicted in the Bible.(Daniel .11, Kenya is south of Jerusalem)
9.- Obama comes to implant muslim Sharia Law upon America.
Obama is the Anti-Christ, beware of him.
Watch him and don’t let you be deceived by Him.
Supporters of Obama: 1.5 billion Muslims, Oprah, Louis Farrakanh, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and all American Muslims.
OBAMA’S GAME IS DECEPTION AND VIOLENCE
A VOTE FOR OBAMA IS A VOTE FOR OSAMA AND KILLER ISLAM!!

I don’t know how I missed all that. Thank you, Yahaim!

Brian of Mulberry, IN writes:

It is my personal belief that Obama is antichrist, my neighbor (long time christian) also believes that.

PROOF?
He talks real nice so will the antichrist
(sly devil)

He’s muslim - I heard that some muslims are calling for there version of “messiah” and that there God is called Allah and that the antichrist’s name Abbandan or something like that is the one and the same

I know that most muslims are good people just like most christians are
But there are a few radicals, and that is what I am talking about (woof in sheep’s clothing).

No, Brian. “Woof” is the sound it makes, not what it’s called.

Bud H of La Mirada, CA writes:

Did you hear that the Florida governor’s mansion burned down? ‘Yep. Prit’near took out the whole trailer park. The library was a total loss, too. Both books went poof, up in flames, and the govnor hadn’t even finished colorin’ one of em.’

OK, that’s a little off topic, but it’s probably accurate, considering all of the lunatic creationism legislation that Florida has been passing lately.

Jonesy of Nixa, MO writes:

I don’t know if he is the anti christ or not but why would we put our country in a situation where we have a president with muslim and atheist parents, who won’t put his hand on the bible but the koran (but attends and is a member of the Church of Christ), and has a muslim backgroud, that just spells out disaster…

What do you mean you don’t know if he’s the Anti-Christ? You said it yourself. His parents are Muslim and atheist. He must be the Anti-Christ!

Zach of Astoria, NY writes:

YOU F*#@NG FREAKS. I’M ASHAMED THAT I COME FROM THE SAME COUNTRY AS YOU. I’M ASHAMED THAT I BELONG TO THE SAME SPECIES AS YOU.

I know, Zach. Depressing, isn’t it?

Somebody named September 11th writes:

How quickly you forget that America was attacked by muslims on September 11th, and now you want to vote for one for president?

No, I want to vote for Obama.

In a later post, Mr. September 11th writes:

Obama refused to use a Bible when he was sworn into office, he demanded to swear in on a koran instead.

A Christian would NOT do that.

Obama is playing the “Christian Political Card” that fools those with strong delusion such as yourself.

It’s amazing that 9/11 is so convinced that he can spot people with strong delusions.

For those of you who have lost track of the score, it wasn’t Obama who refused to be sworn in on the Bible and instead insisted on using a Koran. That was Keith Ellison.

JoMama writes:

Then WTF did Obama refuse to swear into office on a Bible?

Obama insisted he be sworn in on a koran.

You need to stop smokin that cheep $hit and buy some good stuff, apparently your brain is rotting away into nothingness.

Well somebody’s brain is rotting away into nothingness.

Let’s jump to near the end of this forum and try to find something more current.

FencerGirl of Madison Heights, VA writes:

OMG, I can’t believe you guys are serious and SO shockingly stupid!

What folks need to fear is idiots like YOU religious fools! Have you no shame to post such nonsense?

You haven’t been around fundies much, have you FencerGirl?

Josh of Busy, KY writes:

whether Obama is the anit-christ or not, why would you elect someone that is a muslim as President. They have evidence that shows him wearing traditional muslim clothes, he went to a church for several years where the pastor was saying white people were anti-christ, he will not wear American flags. Plus his middle name is Hussane (spelling). Why on earth would you elect this man into office??? This country was founded on christianity, and we have got so far away from that that a MUSLIM is running for presidetn. It blows my mind.

What blows my mind is that despite years of watching the radical right, I can still have my mind blown. I don’t know what percentage of the population the people here represent. I fear it may be larger than we imagine.

An Article by Guest-Writer ParrotLover77

[Note: My life is momentarily complicated by a Michelle Duggar paternity suit. It’s going to take me a few days to settle up (ever wonder how they make ends meet?), so I won’t be able to blog. ParrotLover has graciously volunteered to help out. With his DNA, I should be able to get off the hook. In the meantime, please enjoy this article that he has written for us. Thank you, ParrotLover! You can also visit his own website. Buy some music. Look at parrots.

All of the artwork in this article is from the brilliant Heathen World. Visit them too.

—Ron Britton, editor-in-grief]

Ron has been very busy and asked me to submit a guest article on BoF to keep the content fresh.  I was honored that he would think a mere tech blogger could write for his amazing blog!  Then I was slammed with some of the worst writer’s block I’ve had in ages.  What the heck do I blog about?  Well, I had a few ideas about politics and religion, but nothing came to fruition.  The fingers just didn’t want to strike the keys.  So I decided to visit our old friends at the Answers in Genesis website for inspiration, and boy did I find some!  So today I will discuss an article written by Ken Ham (founder and president of Answers in Genesis–USA) called, Do I Believe in UFOs? Absolutely!

In his article, Ken is trying to convince the reader that life simply cannot exist elsewhere in the universe, because the bible says so.  Is there ANYTHING the bible cannot do?  It slices, it dices, it turns your brain to mush!

Let’s dig into his article and get snarky. *rubs hands*

Occasionally at conferences, someone will ask, “Do you believe in UFOs?”

What conferences would AiG attend where attendees ask that sort of question?  Maybe the alien abductee and literal creation kooks are cut from the same mold…

I usually answer, “Absolutely! Any flying object that can’t be identified is a UFO.”

Wow, that’s actually very intelligent… and almost snarky (me like)!  I almost didn’t expect Mr. Ham to start out so sensible.  Indeed, the word UFO has been, for quite some time, used in contexts it wasn’t meant to be used.  Unidentified Flying Object means just that: it’s flying, it’s an object, and it’s unidentified.  That doesn’t mean it’s from outer space carrying little gray men with big black eyes equipped with a variety of anal probes.

I then continue, “But do I believe in UFOs piloted by Vulcans, Klingons, or Cardassians? The answer is a definite no.” Sorry, Star Trek fans!

Why is he apologizing?  Are there Trek fans that would actually be offended by that statement?  I’m a fan of the Trek, but I certainly don’t believe the aliens made up on that show are real nor have any possibility of being close to real extra-terrestrial life.  After all, Trek’s bastardization of the concept of evolution really doesn’t fit into reality (every planet has a humanoid—what are the odds!).  But I understand that it’s a lot of work just to get a different looking humanoid alien.  One that is TRULY alien would be well over budget and difficult to script.  But I digress… Skipping a little…

A good friend of mine, Dr. Clifford Wilson, author of the million-copy bestseller Crash Go the Chariots, did a lot of research on UFOs. He once told me that he concluded that by far the majority were either misunderstood natural phenomena or misinterpreted manmade objects.

That’s a very reasonable conclusion.

However, he did conclude there was a very small percentage that couldn’t be explained, and he allowed the possibility of some supernatural origin—albeit evil. But regardless, he, like me, does not believe in intelligent physical beings on planets other than our earth.

Fascinating.  So, intelligent life originating on planets other than Earth is far-fetched, but evil supernatural spirits—why, that’s completely plausible!  Very Chick.   So, Mr. Ham has some amazing evidence to back up this very broad conclusion he has come to, right?

A number of leading evolutionists, like the late Dr. Carl Sagan, have popularized the idea that there must be intelligent life in outer space. From an evolutionary perspective, it would make sense to suggest such a possibility. People who believe this possibility contend that, if life evolved on earth by natural processes, intelligent life must exist somewhere else in the far reaches of space, given the size of the universe and the millions of possible planets.

Okay, first of all, Carl Sagan was an astronomer, not an evolutionist (whatever that is; I guess I’m a “gravitist” since I believe in gravity).  Also, evolution has nothing to do with whether or not a planet can support life and whether life can begin to exist out of the biochemical building block precursors to life (as is speculated to have happened on earth billions of years ago).  That process of the origins of life is known as “abiogenesis,” NOT evolution.

All that said, evolutionary theory does seem to postulate that if life arises, it will eventually become clever if given the correct external pressures (at least if it is similar to life on Earth).  As for intelligent life capable of using radio communication (as per SETI)—that’s just mathematics (again, not evolution).  There seems to be a pretty good probability of there being intelligent life out there somewhere.  Whether or not we will ever communicate with them, nobody really knows because we don’t have enough information.  We listen for them because we don’t think they’ll land here like Stan Romanek’s aliens.

One can postulate endlessly about possibilities of intelligent life in outer space, but I believe a Christian worldview, built on the Bible, rejects such a possibility. Here is why.

Remember that amazing evidence I wanted?  Yes.  I was let down.

During the six days of creation in Genesis, we learn that God created the earth first. On Day 4 He made the sun and the moon for the earth, and then “he made the stars also” (Genesis 1:16).

Far be it from me to criticize a deity, but why did it take three days to make the earth when it only took one day to make all the other matter in the entire universe?  Talk about a learning curve!  I guess when you begin by making “day and night” before you make the planet you are making the day and night for; you are starting out on the wrong foot.

From these passages of Scripture it would seem that the earth is very special—it is center stage. Everything else was made for purposes relating to the earth. For instance, the sun, moon, and stars were made “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” (Genesis 1:14).

It seems a little bit inefficient to make the great majority of the universe (which is unimaginably vast) just as sign posts and time keeping devices for the inhabitants of this little blue planet.  But this is what one truly believes when one’s reason hitchhikes its way to a dive bar, drinks too much, and drives its car into the river.

Okay, so Mr. Ham goes on and on about how the bible clearly says that the Earth is very very VERY special because the bible says so.  Let’s skip down to the part about aliens.

Now here is the problem. If there are intelligent beings on other planets, then they would have been affected by the fall of Adam because the whole creation was affected. So these beings would have to die because death was the penalty for sin. One day their planet will be destroyed by fire during God’s final judgment, but they cannot have salvation because that blessing is given only to humans.

Screw you, aliens!  You didn’t know about a religion on a planet billions of light years from you, so you are screwed for eternity!  No matter that you didn’t have anything to do with “the fall.”  The deity of the cosmos is going to create you, throw a temper tantrum, and punish you, because of what the first human did.  And there is NOTHING you can do!

When Jesus Christ stepped into history, He became the God-man. The Bible calls Him “the last Adam” and the “second man” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47). He became the second perfect man (Adam was perfect before he sinned)…

Hold on here, Hammy.  Isn’t that basically saying Adam was perfect until he wasn’t?  If Adam was perfect, he would never have sinned!  Oh wait, I forgot.  It’s all womankind’s fault for tempting poor innocent Adam.  And as a result, we’re all paying for it (even those innocent space aliens).  Talk about a bad temper!

…and He took the place of the first Adam by dying for the human race. As the first Adam was the representative head of the human race, so Jesus became the new head, the last Adam. So there can be no other Savior, only Christ. Jesus now sits in the heavens, still in human form, sitting on His throne next to the Father. If Jesus stepped out of His human form, we would no longer have a Savior. He remains the God-man forever.

Okay, that last bit of babbling made no sense, but I wanted to include it just for its laughableness.

But note, Jesus didn’t become a “God-Klingon,” a “God-Vulcan,” or a “God-Cardassian”—He became the God-man. It wouldn’t make sense theologically for there to be other intelligent, physical beings who suffer because of Adam’s sin but cannot be saved.

You are correct; theologically it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Now, regarding animal life and plants, we cannot be so dogmatic because the Bible does not state whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. Based on the passages about the heavens and earth, however, I strongly suspect that life does not exist elsewhere.

Okay, so let me get this straight… Animals and plants (wait—aren’t humans animals?) can exist elsewhere in the universe, because, heck, the bible is mute on that issue.  But intelligent life certainly cannot exist because that would mean God would have to punish them for eternity for not being around when Jayzus came to save us all from the first human’s mistake.  This is draining the batteries on my logic-meter. 

So the next time you hear someone talking about UFOs, think on the Scripture passages quoted above, and use them to segue into a presentation of the gospel: “For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22).

Remember, UFO abductee loons are just confusing alien anal probes with the pleasure that is the holy spirit.

I’m trying to get caught up on a couple of things from last week. Here’s one of them. You may have seen this on Pharyngula. As PZ Myers explains:

A couple of college students in Toronto…took offense at the patent absurdity of the “Bible and Bible Studies” section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult.

I actually did something similar on a much smaller scale last year. One of the culprits of the Toronto incident describes the event in more detail at his blog, Phaedron Rising.

What I wanted to bring to your attention, though, was his follow-up article:

Many comments on Pharyngula suggested that Science shelves should be bereft of such gems as Michael Behe’s intelligent-design manifestos, or any book on new-age pseudoscience.

It’s with this that I must take issue. When, in my email to Dr Myers, I referred to the democratic marketplace of ideas, I was not paying lip service. It is a fundamental tenet of western democratic society that as long as nobody is literally hurt, every opinion has a right to be heard. I’m not saying that every opinion is worth the paper it’s written on, just that anyone has every right to make their case. This is especially the case in the rigours of the scientific process, where any theory—new or old—is continually vetted by a process of peer review and critique.

In the case of Behe’s ID idiocy and New-Age acupressure guides, they belong squarely in the science section. The questions that they address (Who are we? How did we get here? How can the flow of Chi affect my basement grow-op?) are fundamentally scientific ones. Just because a particular author’s answer to a real scientific question is completely insipid does not mean that it does not belong on the Science shelf.

Call me Naïve, but I truly want to believe that in the great marketplace of ideas, theories will ultimately rise and fall on their own merits.

If you want to rid your local science section of wastes of wood-pulp like Behe’s books on Intelligent Design, here’s how to do it.

Let his opinion be heard.

There is only one appropriate response to a ridiculous proposition, and that response is thorough ridicule. Give Behe and his ilk a seat at the table. Engage him. Expose his ideas for the unscrupulous shams that they are. I’m not advocating that anyone treat fools with kid gloves—far from it. All I’m saying is, give these people just enough intellectual rope to hang themselves with, then help them build their gallows.

That article sums up some of what we do here at BoF. It’s great fun pointing out how foolish the “freedom fighters”, Concerned “Women”, and Family “Researchers” are, but our fun has a very real purpose. These people want to pull our society back to the Dark Ages. Ridiculing these ideas is one of the best ways to expose them for the frauds that they are.

Possummomma calls our attention to Kent Hovind’s blog. As you’ll recall from the last time we discussed this creatard, not only was he committing crimes against education (by telling people the Earth was only 6000 years old and poofed into existence by a magical sky daddy), but he was also committing crimes against the government. Specifically, tax evasion. He is now serving a ten-year sentence for the latter crime. He’s gotten off scot-free on the former.

Apparently being locked up isn’t good for this guy’s mental health. He was obviously crazy before, but now even more so. A lot of his posts are his fantasies of talking to God. OK. Lots of theists think they talk to God. But Hovind’s are clearly the mind of a crazy man.

While I was torturing myself by actually reading the blog, I came across this gem in the comments. (You can find it in this thread.) It’s by somebody calling himself “for Jesus’ name: Phillip-George (c)1974”:

…the bible got it right. basically there is no biblical distinction between planets and stars:_ the modern distinction between a planet and a star is arbitrary and scientifically useless.…

the modern distinction between planets and stars has yielded nothing useful.

Sane Blog says it best:

As reported in this CNN article, the pope has reaffirmed the catholic position on birth control. It is difficult to imagine a single policy which has been responsible for ensuring more poverty of women, disease and the blocking of development in Africa and other impoverished nations of the world. The catholic church does not love preventing suffering - the catholic church actually loves suffering.

Go read this post at Violent Acres. It’s hysterical!

Church services always started off quiet enough with the organ playing and parishioners quietly whispering greetings and shaking hands. But among the kids, there was a kind of electricity in the air. Half of the time, we could barely contain ourselves. We knew that if things went well, it was likely we’d see some crazy ass shit.

(via Pharyngula)

This week’s Cectic illustrates common fundie logic:

I found a good blog called Playing Chess with Pigeons, by Troy Britain. He mostly focusses on evolution and creationism. He has a lot of good articles. You should check it out.

What really caught my fancy was his explanation of the blog’s title. I’m going to reprint most of it here, with my comments:

The title comes (apparently) from a very amusing description of what it is like to debate creationists about evolution Scott D. Weitzenhoffer made in a comment on Amazon.com regarding Eugenie Scott’s book Evolution Vs. Creationism: An introduction (2004):

Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

I love it! That’s a great description. My blog has received its share of creationists, and the metaphor is pretty accurate. Troy continues:

Man, have I been there. It’s not just that antievolutionists are often completely ignorant of evolutionary theory, the state of the evidence, and the history of science. There have also been numerous times where I have been debating an antievolutionist or responding to their claims that I would have to take time to explain their own arguments to them. [emphasis added]

“No, you meant to say ‘Piltdown Man’ was based on a human skull and an orangutan jaw, not on a pig’s tooth. That was ‘Nebraska Man’ and it was based on a peccary tooth.”

That sure sounds familiar! Not only do they get it wrong, but they all seem to get it wrong in the same way!

Troy finishes with:

Add to this their constantly moving goal-posts, their tendency towards scatter-shot (keep throwing stuff against the wall and hope that something sticks) mode of argument, their constant digressions to irrelevancies, non sequiturs and other logical fallacies, and it gets pretty breathtaking.

I was going to flag a few examples of that from my blog, but that pretty much covers every creationist who visits us.