This chapter has a lot of child abuse. So I’m going to put this right up front:

Content Note for severe physical abuse of a child.

In the Jessop household, showing any degree of spine to Barbara results in punishment. She thrives on it. So when all her sister wives do their best to keep things calm and peaceful after Merril’s heart attack, it’s only a few weeks before she escalates to get a rise out of them. She incites the children of the household to act up in hopes of provoking the wives to attack them, just so she’ll have a reason to discipline them. Carolyn’s turn comes when she calls some of the girls out for gossiping about a girl at their school who is being bullied. She snaps at them, calling them hypocrites for pretending to be shocked, considering the way they treat the wives.

She expects Barbara to come at her for it. But instead, Barbara attacks her son, Patrick.

Merril decides late one night to have impromptu family prayers. Patrick is sent to wake Carolyn, who is physically wrecked after the recent birth of her daughter Merilee. She tells him she’s too tired, and goes back to sleep. When Patrick reports back without his mother, Barbara takes him into another room, closes the door, interrogates him, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of him. She starts with slapping, then escalates to throwing him across the room and into the metal bars of a footboard. She keeps slamming him into those bars. Then she kicks him in the stomach.

He is a tiny little four year-old. She is a 200-pound adult.

And she knows she’s gone too far. She does that child abuser thing of telling him not to tell anyone what she’s done, or she’ll beat him worse. She shakes him until he agrees. Then she hands him tissues and sits with him until he’s too terrified to continue crying.

Yep. His father knows. And he doesn’t care.

Patrick goes and cries himself to sleep in a recliner in his mom’s room. Carolyn is appalled when she sees the bruises covering him the next day, and knows he’s lying when he tells her they came from roughhousing with his siblings, but she doesn’t force the truth from him. Instead, she comes up with ways to protect her kids.

Mind you, she can’t go to the local police: they’re all FLDS. They won’t do shit. She can’t go to Merril, because he’ll deny anything happened and do absolutely nothing. She would also be opening Patrick up to retaliation. She can’t go to CPS: “they had poor track records of protecting women and children in Colorado City. Victims routinely got sent back to perpetrators.”

All she can do is keep her kids with her at all times when they aren’t in school. She takes them to work with her. She feeds them in her room. Luckily, when she enlists her mother, she doesn’t get a lecture on obeying her husband this time. Instead, her mom gets her food she can keep in her room.

Patrick carries the secret of what Barbara did to him for nine years. He doesn’t feel safe telling her even after they’ve fled. He finally is able to tell her what happened over three years after their escape.

This is the kind of shit the police and CPS just allow to happen in the FLDS communities. There’s a horrible deference we as a society show to pious groups. We let religious people get away with far too much. We pretend we have no right to interfere with them. But believing in a god or gods shouldn’t give you the ability to physically abuse children and get away with it. Piety shouldn’t be a shield for child beaters.

It’s far past time to deny religion the power to let people hit children with impunity. This is one hope I have for the rise of the Nones: that we finally start doing the right thing.

The post (Repost) “He Couldn’t Breathe” – Escape Chapter 24: Patrick’s Abuse appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

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In our last installment, we learned that Warren Jeffs was busy making everyone believe their every ailment could be cured by faith alone, leading many people to almost kill themselves and at least one to maim herself in the effort to follow Warren’s God’s supposed will. Now we find out Warren in into survivalist shit as well. This allows some of the more concerning members of the community to indulge their sadistic sides.

Content Note for graphic animal abuse, brutal animal killing, spiritual abuse, ritual murder discussion, elder abuse, medical neglect.

Carolyn learns from Merril’s daughter Merrilyn that Warren has been running a series of survival classes at the FLDS’s private school in Salt Lake City. They mostly consist of Dee Jessop killing various animals in a variety of horrifying ways in front of the children. This includes ripping the heart out of a living pig as it screams in agony.

And no one says anything against it.

The more Warren gets away with without opposition, the stronger his hold on the community becomes. I wonder if these brutal “survivalist” classes were to see just how far people would go to comply with his orders. Was he using them to desensitize people? If you can get people to start doing more and more outrageous things, you can walk them into ideas that would’ve had them running away screaming if you’d thrown them straight in.

His father, the prophet Rulon Jeffs, begins having strokes in 1996, and Warren uses them to usurp his power. The community is told that Rulon’s mind is intact, but no one’s allowed to see him. This allows Warren to pretend his father is still mentally competent enough to perform his duties. He acts as Rulon’s mouthpiece. He gives the orders. And, with the community firmly in his grasp, he begins to squeeze. He tells the community that immoral men must be banished. And then he goes further:

Men were given pamphlets that spelled out the new moral code. All sex in marriage was forbidden except that which was for procreation. Immoral acts for which there could be no forgiveness were also named. Any person who committed these sins, such as fornication and adultery, would have to pay for them with “blood atonement.”

I had never heard of blood atonement before. Blood atonement is a murder. Warren claimed the ordinance of blood atonement dated back to the beginning of the Mormon Church. But he said that blood atonement could only be practiced in a temple that he said we would build in the near future.

I’m surprised Carolyn had never heard of blood atonement. It, along with polygamy, was one of Joseph Smith’s worst ideas. Brigham Young expanded on it, and too many Mormons in the early years of the faith treated it as a license to kill. It informed the death penalty options in Utah, which until early this century included the firing squad, and originally beheading as well. Like so many other hinky doctrines, the mainstream LDS Church loves to disavow any knowledge of it, but judging from the fuss kicked up when legislators first tried to do away with the firing squad, plenty of rank and file members believed in it. And since the FLDS was so keen to hold on to traditions like polygamy, I’m rather shocked that blood atonement doesn’t seem to have been a thing until Warren.

So things are getting rather bizarre and bloody already. Then Dee Jessop decides to bring his survivalist classes to Colorado City, complete with a demonstration at Centennial Park.

Carolyn suspects he’s going to get up to shenanigans and doesn’t want her kids anywhere near him, so she doesn’t go. Others who do aren’t suspecting anything particularly graphic – after all, children have been invited. And Dee’s going to demonstrate how the women folk can take care of themselves when FLDS prophecy comes true and all the men are gone. So the crowd gets treated to Dee’s wife tying up a cow. So far, not so outrageous.

But once the cow was restrained, she took out a handsaw and began sawing off the cow’s head.

The cow’s screams sounded like a woman’s. Children shrieked in terror. Those closest to the cow were sprayed by blood. Stunned parents grabbed their kids and started to run away. Some stayed, frozen in shock and unable to move.

People are outraged. Of course, they don’t turn their wrath on Warren, who was in charge of this stuff and knew exactly what Dee had been doing in his school up in Salt Lake City. Nor are they mad at Fred, the bishop of Colorado City. They scapegoat Dee, who is a twisted fucker but sure as shit wasn’t solely responsible for this fiasco.

Of course, the leadership doesn’t act against him. Nothing happens to him – until Ruth, in the throes of a breakdown that Merril has once again been ignoring, goes running down the road with her accordion one day, and Dee tries to grab her to bring her back home. She bashes him in the face with her instrument, and then starts raining kicks on him. Plenty of passers-by watch the show, happy to let Ruth deliver the justice they’ve been denied.

Poor Ruth still isn’t given any treatment. The most Uncle Rulon does is sends her daughter (and his wife) Merrilyn home to take care of her, which Merrilyn resents.

We get an appalling look at the family dynamic:

One morning Tammy came down for breakfast and heard Ruth screaming like a child. She walked into Merril’s office and saw Merrilyn beating her mother. Ruth finally sank into the corner of the office, sobbing and hugging herself.

Tammy was shocked. “Why are you slapping your mother like that?”

Merrilyn shrugged. “That’s the way Father handled her ever since I was a little girl. When she gets out of control, he beats the hell out of her until she comes to her senses.”

Needless to say, this is not how you treat mentally ill people. Beating them does not fix the problem.

Ruth eventually gets hospitalized, but I guarantee you, with a family and community like that, her life doesn’t improve. And Warren only makes it worse.

The post (Repost) “Blood Atonement” – Escape Chapter 23: Ruth’s Nose appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

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My conservative Christian former best friend used to say that too much prayer rots the brain. Earth Science 4th Edition provides clear evidence of this right from the blurb at the start of the “Oceans and Seas” chapter. They begin talking about desalination by saying wow, there’s more people on Earth than ever! Yay! “God didn’t place a limit on how many people should inhabit the earth.”

I really wish the Bible had a verse placing strict limits on the total population, and ordering dominionists like the BJU believers to adhere to a strict “One child, no conversion, no evangelizing, and for My sake put a condom on that thing!” policy. Because it seems they believe that God wants as many people stuffed onto the planet as possible, limited resources be damned. They acknowledge the fact that a huge population makes things like having enough drinking water for everyone a serious issue. But they pretend that’s all fine, since we invented desalinization plants. Breed away! God placed no limits on population, so let’s have humans stacked a dozen deep over every square inch of the planet! Fuck logic and sense, yo!

Fools like this are why I’m one of those atheists who thinks we really need, as a species, to do away with the idea of holy books* all together. We can’t be trusted with it.

Dominion is a strong theme at the beginning of this chapter. “Oceans for Man’s Use” is the very first section. After giving us lots of facts about the oceans, like their size and how they help regulate the earth’s temperature, and how most of our oxygen “comes from photosynthetic organisms living in” them, they tell us it’s important to exercise dominion over them.

Oy. These people are massive control freaks. Instead of caring for or partnering with things, they want to exercise jackbooted thuggery over it all. In a “good and wise” manner, they hasten to assure us. Considering they think it’s a bonza idea to fill Earth with people until there’s no room for anything else, I’m not believing they’re qualified to judge what’s good or wise.

And they’re encouraging students to pursue careers in oceanography in order to exercise said dominion.

Their description of what oceanographers are includes engineers. NOAA, on the other hand, is under the impression that oceanographers are scientists. I know engineering comes under STEM, but let’s get real folks: I’m pretty sure the BJU folks are including marine engineering under oceanography because there’s faint hope for a faithful creationist BJU grad to get a job as an honest scientist. But you can design useful boats and things even if you think the book of Genesis is a science treatise.

Next, we’re told about ocean basins. They’re very excited that oceanographers say that technically there’s only one ocean, since all oceans are connected. A little text box to the side informs us that Genesis 1: 9-10 totally called it, yo. Yes, very wow – aside from the fact it also implies there should be only one continent. Much impressive.

Another text box attempts to define parts of an ocean. A public school sixth-grader could probably do better than “Bays are generally smaller than gulfs.”

Let me just take a moment to remind you that this is an 8th grade textbook. Supposedly.

The patented BJU “both sides” method of playing old-earthers against young-earthers comes next, as they tell us what everybody thinks was the “Origin of the Oceans.” I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn they don’t really know what scientists think. “Old-earth geologists believe,” we’re told, that the oceans may have even formed “right after [Earth] condensed from the solar nebula.” Ha ha ha no. Earth at birth was too bloody hot for oceans, folks. Whether our oceans formed from water already present within the rocks, or whether it was delivered later by comets, we can be pretty confident based on the evidence we have that Earth didn’t have oceans until it was around 300 million years old at the earliest. I’ve never, in all my copious science reading, seen a geologist claim oceans were fully formed from the start.

For some reason, probably due to obstinate ignorance, they believe we secular scientists think that “the current Atlantic, India, and Arctic Ocean basins began forming 300 million years ago.”

How they can fuck that up, and yet understand that we know the “Pacific Ocean basin is all that remains from an earlier global sea called Panthalassa,” is beyond me. This info isn’t obscure, and yet they apparently couldn’t peek at Wikipedia or Britannica to get the appropriate ages. Three hundred million years ago, Pangea was just formed: there was only one continent and one ocean, and it would stay that way for nearly 100 million years. The Atlantic and it’s companion Arctic are 180 million years old. The Indian is around 125 million years old, although its history is a bit complex. Really not hard to get right – unless you’re a creationist, in which case the facts mean bupkiss to you.

Of course, the BJU writers have their own history of the earth’s oceans, pulled in part from Genesis, with the rest extracted from their asses – which sure as shit ain’t Biblical:

Young-earth geologists believe that the earth began as a water planet. God created what was probably a single supercontinent on the second day of Creation (Gen. 1: 9-10) around 7000 years ago. That supercontinent was wrenched apart during a one-year flood and its catastrophic aftermath around 5500 years ago. The shapes and sizes of the present-day ocean basins are the result of that single event in Earth’s history.

Fine, creationists. That’s your story, you feel free to stick to it despite the endless lines of evidence that say the old-earth geologists are right. But answer me a few things, here:

1. Why didn’t God bother to mention dates when he was dictating Genesis? He could have said, “I told Noah to build the Ark cuz I was pissed at people. That was 1428 After Creation. Can you believe it took that incompetent ass nearly eighty years to finish it and get it stocked? Sheesh. Anyway, I was finally able to start the Flood and the mass murder in 1504. Good times!”

Instead, we get people at Answers in Genesis making all sorts of assumptions and tables trying to figure out how long it took Noah to build the Ark, and none of you can seem to agree on just when all of this happened – despite the fact you claim to have an omniscient and infallible eyewitness!

2. Ya’ll claim there was some super-accelerated, wild-n-crazy tectonic movement going on during the Flood years. Why didn’t god say so? I’ve read Genesis 6, 7, and 8 in both the KJV and NRSV, and I can’t find a single hint all this was going on. God couldn’t fit a line in about a supercontinent breaking up? At least suggest something more than just a flood (and genocide, not to mention ecocide) was going on? Noah didn’t notice anything different about the topography? Really?

3. If the animals all come from one continent, and there were now several when they got off the boat, how’d they know which continents belonged to whom? How’d the ones who were now supposed to live on other continents like North and South America and Australia get there? Do you think they swam entire oceans? Even the sloths?

4. Did you calculate the amount of heat that would’ve been released by all that tectonic activity? All that mountain building, volcanic eruptions, ocean crust formation, subduction? Tell me, how do you think a bunch of critters, eight humans, and a wooden boat survive without boiling or bursting into flames?

5. Why did God find it necessary to make every single bit of evidence – from the ages of the ocean crust, to continental sutures where bits of Pangea came together, to the distribution of rock layers and fossils, to evidence of even older supercontinents that existed long before Pangea, to the age of asteroids, even to the cosmic microwave background – match an old earth/ancient universe interpretation, rather than making a young earth an inescapable conclusion?

I have plenty more questions, but I’ll let ya’ll ponder those for a bit. Good luck with ’em.

*Not the books themselves, mind. Just the idea that they’re sacred messages direct from god or gods, infallible and so forth.

The post (Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education VIII: Two Salty Tales of Ocean Origins appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

All righty, then. Where were we? Ah, yes: when last we delved Earth Science 4th Edition’s pages, the authors were trying to tell us about their One Magic Ice Age Wot Explains Away the Physical Evidence and that Job Really Probably Lived Through Cuz He Mentions Snow a Few Times. Next on their agenda: they’re gonna tell us about The Diluvial Geologic Column.

We know that there was at least one continent where everything lived when God created the earth. Creationary geologists think that the continent foundation or basement was probably the rock we call granite, which makes up the deepest rocks under the continents today.

Hoo nelly. So much evidence here they don’t at all understand how rocks or continents work. Folks: continents are heavy. The roots under the thickest crust run deep. What happens when rocks are under tremendous heat and pressure? Well, they don’t stay cheerfully unaltered. Granite is not the deepest rock, kids. I don’t think these folks even grok what basement rocks are.

They yammer about how they can totes see the “key geologic phases of the earth” if they just look at the strata “from a biblical viewpoint.” They think they see the vast majority of rocks either forming in or being redeposited by the Flood. They have no real idea how minerals precipitate from a solution to form masses of rock. They don’t know how consolidation happens. The things they think happened in a single Flood year don’t happen that fast and/or in those kinds of conditions (here’s one example). We’ve studied this. We’ve done experiments. We know.

Of course, they admit the Flood didn’t create the entire geologic column. There was that mythical post-Flood ice age, carving valleys and dumping glacial detritus all over the place. Never mind that we have evidence for multiple ice ages – just put on your Biblical Blinders, kids, and you’ll see there’s only one!

Gah.

Anyway, then they give us Tasman Walker’s idea of a geologic column. It’s microscopic compared to the geologic column those icky secular scientists have put together after centuries of research. It goes, from oldest rocks to youngest:

• The Creation Event. You know how the stuff at the bottom of our column has no fossils because life hadn’t evolved yet? Creationists handwave that absence by saying there was no death. Also, Tasman Walker seems to be completely unaware of metamorphic rocks, since he says those strata are mostly “the basement granite rocks and any original soils that remained undisturbed and covered during the next two phases, then turned to rock.”
• The Lost-World Era. So, this is after Adam and Eve partook of the wrong produce. So yeah, shit was dying, but there are still no fossils cuz “sediments rarely collected fast enough to rapidly bury dead things to form fossils.”
  
• The Flood Event. The Top Galah of the creationist column. They think the vast majority of the geologic column formed here. Yep. Most of those miles upon miles upon miles of sandstone, limestone, mudstone, coal beds, volcanic rocks, and more all were deposited and lithified in less than a year. And they claim most of the fossils come from these layers “because all land animals and plants alive at the time of the Flood (and not in the Ark) were killed and many were quickly buried.”
• The New-World Era. They think most of the rocks after the Flood were formed “by local catastrophic processes such as volcanoes and local flooding.” And there are “very few fossils,” which will shock the shit out of paleontologists who keep finding abundant fossils of things like Pleistocene mammals that even creationists claim existed only after the Flood.
• Recent Sediments. Modern loose sediments. Oh, hey, there are fossils in it! Whoops! They forgot to mention that volcanoes are still catastrophically creating rocks.

Which is embarrassing, because that was one of their big points on the previous page:

I’m so sorry. I should have warned you to remove liquids from your mouth before viewing. I hope no one’s keyboard was destroyed. Look, now that you’ve already got that out of the way, let me quote their coup d’état before you take another drink:

The Bible provides a much more logical and orderly explanation for a changing Earth, rather than describing an endlessly changing planet with no direction to its history.

You poor silly creationist gits. It does have a direction: forward. Everything’s moving from the past to the future. I’m sorry you can’t deal with the fact it hasn’t got a particular destination in mind, but that’s not reality’s problem.

Anyway. You may have noticed that Tasman Walker’s work bears no resemblance to a professional geologist’s. That’s because he isn’t one. He’s an electrical engineer. Now, geology is quite friendly to laypeople, and plenty of folk whose degrees are in other fields have made important contributions to it, but if you’re intending to overthrow the entire established geologic column, you’d best be doing some serious studying in the discipline first. Otherwise, you end up with nonsense like the above.

I’m not going to debunk it in detail. That’s been done by a really-real geologist. And I’m not going to point out all the ways even creationists with professional degrees in the geosciences fail to make their models work. It’s all right here in this lovely paper, where you can sit back and watch Flood Geology get defeated by… Flood Geology.

Better Christians than these have already shown how the fossil record can be reconciled with creationist claims. They’ve already shown how these rocks couldn’t possibly all form in that Flood. I don’t have to do a damned thing except point and laugh.

Next, they’ll be telling us what they think we think of tectonics. Oh, joy.

The post Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XLIV: Wherein We’re Layered in Nonsense appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Like many cult leaders, Warren Jeffs is busy gradually cementing his hold over everyone in the community by fucking with their health care. His father has already convinced everyone that vaccines are a government plot to make children sterile. Considering previously-vaccinated FLDS women are pumping out children at a brisk pace, it’s amazing anyone believes him. But he’s their leader, the man in charge of their eternal salvation, so they trust him. Warren then comes along to see the ground his father has plowed, telling everyone that the only reason they’d ever need medical treatment is a lack of faith. If they’re truly in harmony with God, he says, they’ll be healed by prayer and fasting.

Content note: medical neglect, spiritual abuse, maiming, physical abuse of a mentally ill person.

Carolyn watches many people in the FLDS end up nearly dead from Warren’s claims. Thankfully, most people are still resorting to the hospital when faith doesn’t heal them. But some have faith in Warren. Ruth, her mentally unstable sister wife, develops skin cancer on her nose, and Carolyn gets to experience the consequences of Warren’s nonsense quite closely.

Merril apparently hasn’t yet fallen for Warren’s crap, because he sends Ruth to the clinic when a sore on her nose won’t heal. It’s cancerous, but very treatable, her doctor says. But Ruth wants to do it Warren’s way. She won’t entertain Carolyn’s idea that maybe GOd was healing her by placing her in the hands of a competent dermatologist. She wants to go the faith route. In addition to fasting and praying, faith also apparently includes questionable caustic chemicals from the health food store. God has revealed a new way of healing her cancer to her! It’s herbal, so it must be safe, despite the fact the caustic part of her concoction is illegal to sell! And while she’s been told to only use a pinhead-sized amount, she slathers it on, turning the entire end of her nose green in the process. God said to go for it.

When the burning pain keeps her up all night praying for mercy, she still doesn’t lose faith. And she won’t wash it off. “If this is what God wants me to go through to be healed from my cancer,” she tells Carolyn, “then I will do it with a humble heart.”

It’s about here I must pause to Paul out.

Fuck faith and the charlatans who prey on it. Fuck the people who spread this nonsense and end up causing vulnerable people to harm themselves.

Carolyn finally gets Ruth to wash the muck off, but the damage has been done. She’s still in terrible pain. But when Carolyn tries to get her medical treatment, she refuses. She can’t admit her faith has failed her.

On the third day, with Ruth crying in pain, Carolyn has had it. She threatens to call “911 and the National Guard if that was what it took to get her medical care.” This is where she learns about the health food store selling an illegal chemical. Ruth is trying to protect them, but Carolyn insists on getting her treatment. When the clinic tells her to go to the ER, Carolyn calls Merril to get him to agree to let her take Ruth in. But he won’t give permission, even after Carolyn tells him Ruth’s “nose is beginning to stink.” He accuses her of getting all excited over nothing. And when he gets home that night and actually sees Ruth’s nose, part of which is literally falling off, the most he does is tells her to see the dermatologist.

Have you noticed what a classic abuser Merril is? He’s a gaslighting pro. And he can’t under any circumstances admit he may have been wrong about something – if he’s downplayed his wives’ concerns and then later discovers they were right, he doesn’t apologize and correct the situation. He goes right on pretending he was right all along.

I don’t believe that violence solves everything, and I really, really try hard not to have violent fantasies about people even when I feel they deserve it, but I can’t help fantasizing about stuffing Merril into a cannon and shooting him into the sun. The world would be improved by a non-trivial amount.

There’s good news and bad at the dermatologists’ office. Ruth did indeed manage to burn off the cancer. However, she’s also burned off many healthy portions of her nose in the process. She has to have plastic surgery to fix it, but it’s a bad job and leaves her poor nose mangled.

Carolyn, happily, refuses to obey Warren’s medical orders. She defies Merril on that front: when her kids get sick, straight into the doctor they go, Warren be damned. She’s not willing to risk their lives and health for the mens’ religious beliefs.

But the medical fuckery is not the half of what Warren’s getting up to. And Carolyn is about to learn just how extreme his beliefs are.

The post (Repost) “A Person of Little Faith” – Escape Chapter 23: Ruth’s Nose appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

The post Protected: “A Man Who Has Inspiration” – Escape Chapter 30: Harrison’s New Port appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Take your seasickness prevention pills and weigh anchor, my darlings. We are embarking on a long voyage, and I’m afraid it isn’t the lovely salt sea, but an ocean of creationist bilge we be sailin’. BJU has got a lot to say about oceanography. A good portion of it is utter bunkum. And there’s three bloody chapters of this shite.

Here. This meme may help us survive.

The wrong starts out strong with Dr. Emil Silvestru, a creationist speleologist from Romania. He started his career as a secular scientist, then jumped into Christianity with both feet and became a young earth creationist. The quality of his “reasoning” can be assessed by the following explanation:

After becoming a Christian he quickly realized that the ‘millions of years’ interpretation, so common in geology, was not compatible with Genesis. ‘Once I became a Christian,’ Emil says, ‘I knew I had to “tune up” my scientific knowledge with the Scriptures.’

‘Although philosophically and ethically I accepted a literal Genesis from my conversion, at first I was unable to match it with my “technical” side.’

Eventually, after soaking in creationist claptrap, he concluded that the Flood (which totes happened and must have been global because the Bible never exaggerates for poetic effect) made things that normally take ages happen superfast, yay, problem solved! Which is probably why the vast majority of the papers he’s got on Google Scholar are babble printed in creationist publications: next to no papers printed in mainstream journals appear, and most of his citations are him citing his own work. I suppose that’s only to be expected for someone who works for Creation Ministries International (formerly Answers in Genesis).

To be clear: I don’t get the sense Silvestru is aware he’s lying to himself and others. He strikes me as a True Believer who, when he converted, honestly figured the Bible must be 100% literal and true, and after a frantic search, grabbed the first straw he could find to shut the cognitive dissonance up.

That doesn’t make him any less wrong. Or ridiculous. Observe the tomfoolery he unleashes upon the unfortunate pupils using this textbook:

The present is not the key to the past! More than 75% of all known rocks are sedimentary rocks, most of which are believed to have been formed in the oceans. Over 90% of the rocks formed in the oceans were laid in shallow oceans. But only 10% of present-day oceans are shallow. The sediments the oceans hold are insignificant compared to the millions of tons of sedimentary rock. These facts clearly show that present processes of sedimentary rock formation are not the key to rock formation in the past!

Uniformitarianism clearly unhinges the poor man.

Wading through all that bullshit: yes, sedimentary rock is roughly 75% of the rock we see in continental outcrops. But it’s not “75% of all known rocks.” It’s more like 8%. It’s like icing spread haphazardly on a cake, glopped on thick in places, in other places thin, and some pretty extensive bits missed altogether. We know from outcrops, drill cores, seismic studies, and other methods that igneous rock makes up the bulk of the Earth’s crust, with a healthy chunk of metamorphic rock rounding out the mix. These are “known rocks” by anybody’s definition but a creationist’s.

Now, it’s true that lots of those sedimentary rocks were laid down in shallow seas. I don’t know if his percentages are right, but it doesn’t matter if they are. Sea level changes as glaciers melt and freeze, and as plate motions open and close ocean basins. When sea level rises, shallow seas flood the continents. Rock gets eroded, critters contribute their shells and skeletons of calcite and silica, and new sedimentary rock gets deposited. You can go to the Paleomap Project site and watch those seas rise and fall over deep time. With global warming going as it is, Emil might even get to witness the beginning of new shallow seas himself. No bets on whether that’ll light his bulb or not.

I don’t even have the stomach to quote the rest of his inanity. If I did, we’d be here til the seas advance. He thinks “most caves formed toward the end of the Flood, created by hot and very aggressive fluids called hydrothermal solutions that ate away the limestone in a matter of months.” Now, aside from the fact that by creationist reckoning, most if not all limestone formed during the Flood, but could hardly have done so in such “aggressive fluids,” he’s just boiled Noah & Co. and dissolved the Ark in order to get some holes in rock that couldn’t exist. Brilliant.

Want to know how all those cave formations which take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to form managed to happen in about 4,000 years? Don’t ask Emil. He just skips right past that problem. What an expert.

The poor schmuck thinks that the Flood “is by far the most logical source of rock-forming and rock-eroding processes.” He fails logic. Don’t take logic lessons from him unless you thrive on derisive laughter aimed squarely at you. He thinks the Flood formed all those deep canyons under the ocean. Never mind all those scientists with their silly mechanisms for submarine canyon formation like turbidity currents, underwater landslides, mass wasting, slumping, and, in special cases, rivers merrily carving into the beds of evaporated seas until said basins are flooded by seawater once again.

Do you see the amount of egregious wrong packed into three short paragraphs by one single fool? This does not bode well for the rest of this unit. I’ve peeked ahead, and it appears the nonsense-to-science ratio remains absurdly high. I’m afraid we’re going to end up like Odysseus, stuck for 10 years on a voyage that should have taken a few weeks.

We’d better make a stop for extra grog, just in case. We won’t survive this journey if we have to ration it.

The post (Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education VII: Awash in Creationist Nonsense appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Fucking magnets, how do they work? Well, Science of the Physical Creation is about to ‘splain, or at least sum up. We should invite Mssrs. Bruce and Utsler to attend the lesson. Pretty sad when creationists know more about a well-understood scientific phenomena than a couple of pathetic white boy clowns, innit?

Tell you what, I’m real sick of white people pretending they invented all the things, when people of color had actually been doing them a lot longer. And yes, I will demand better of even white evangelical creationists. The Vikings were no more Christian than the Chinese at that point, so I know the SPC folks are capable of giving credit to non-Christians.

There’s a delightful introduction to magnets, which explains that electrons, planets, and even galaxies can act as magnets. They tell us how we can detect magnetic fields with a compass, and visualize them with iron filings. Several illustrations show us what the fields of disk, bar, and horseshoe magnets look like. And they not only tell us, but show us by using more filings, that opposite poles attract and same poles repel. The law of magnetic force is shown. We learn that even magnets can “overcome the gravitational force of the entire earth” at close range. They finish up this first bit by talking about magnetic permeability, which would probably make ICP heads explode, because it’s a little weird.

Now it’s time to talk about the earth as a magnet, and they’re kind enough to finally mention that the “magnetic compass appears to have been invented independently in China and Europe in the 10th [sic] Century,” which is a little better than ignoring the Chinese altogether. But they still don’t want to give the Chinese credit for inventing it first (which we have solid evidence for), or that the Arabs likely introduced compasses to Europe after picking them up in China (which many historians think, but we don’t yet have proof of). No, they need the Europeans to be at least as clever as those non-white folk, if not more so, so they twist facts. Shame.

Sir William Gilbert reappears to discover that “the earth itself is a magnet.” Facts about the magnetic field are presented, such as that its North Pole is actually an S-pole and vice versa, and those poles are not only hundreds or thousands of meters from the geographic poles, but also wander. The writers explain that the poles of a magnet are named for the direction they seek, which is why the North magnetic pole is actually an S-pole.

Then their Eurocentrism strikes again, as they give explorer and genocidal brute Christopher Columbus credit for discovering magnetic declination (“the angle that a compass needle deviates from true north”). But the Chinese were over 700 years ahead of the Europeans on that.

They seem a bit obsessed with William Gilbert, because they circle back and give him credit for investigating magnetic dip and inventing the first dip needle, when actually an instrument maker by the name of Robert Norman had been making them first, and in fact did the first formal study of magnetic dip. I think they got so excited reading Gilbert’s book that they forgot to look any further.

Anyway, I’m sure y’all know that magnetic dip is rather important to paleomagnetism. So it’s quite neat knowing more of its history.

Now, I’m aware that creationist claptrap has been remarkably thin on the ground in SPC lately. My darlings, I promise you that dry spell is about to end in a deluge. But we are going to save that for next time, because I want to give it a post all to itself. It’s so dense and concentrated in its nonsense that I believe it deserves an actual sporking.

This will be so deeply satisfying.

And then we’ll have the unparalleled joy of watching the A Beka folks explain exactly how magnets work, thus proving creationists are less ignorant than ICP.

The post Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XLIII: Wherein A Beka Outsmarts Insane Clown Posse appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.