Apparently the reanimated corpse of HP Lovecraft is saddened by his departure. You can watch the short video for why.
(Love this guy’s work, BTW.)
The ignorance of the guy was limitless.
The first one I saw was put in my dept. mail slot at the college I worked at. Of course it was one of Jack’s classic “All profs are Jews* who hate religion and are trying to proselytize their students.” tracts.
Usual plot, horribly racistly done. Prof is ranting against religion and the pure and perfect student stands up and rebuts It All.
It including such gems like the “fact” that Neanderthal Man was really just one old arthritic dude. Right, we have only one Neanderthal skeleton.
The final point the student makes (which causes the whole class to march out singing a hymn) was how the protons in a nucleus repel each other due to their charge and therefore all of Nuclear Physics is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Which is why the Hiroshima bomb was a complete dud. :rolleyes:
This idea is so incredibly common about True Believers. Clearly Scientists never saw anything odd about such-and-such and have no explanation. Someone else being being wrong magically means the True Believers are right.
I tried looking for this tract online a few years back. I found one that was very similar but the proton things was done differently. Implying that Scientists just made up stuff to explain it away.
Again. Hiroshima.
I think Scientists know what they’re doing.
- All the Jewish profs I knew in the building at that time were very religious, BTW.
I don’t know if I was just lucky or lived in a part of the country where there weren’t many hardcore fundamentalist Independent Baptists but I never really encountered any of Jack Chick’s work until the late 80s when I was in college.
That said, did Jack Chick ever do any comics that dealt with political rather than religious matters? Around the same time I saw my first Jack Chick comics (late 80s), I remember seeing a couple right-wing political comics on AIDS and illegal immigration that were written and drawn in a style very much like Chick’s. Like many Chick tracts, they were distributed by being dropped off at supermarket magazine racks without the apparent permission of the store manager.
That’s one of the most twisted, saddest things I’ve read. Sad, in the sense of ‘Do people really see this as some sort of inspirational or helpful message’?
One Chick tract, “Lisa”, was so disgusting, that Chick himself repudiated it and it doesn’t show up on his website. In this odious piece of prose, a father is abusing his daughter, but he gets to go to Heaven because he repents, and everything is fine at the end because he tells his daughter that he’s never going to do it again.
I usually find Chick Tracks funny but that one is really bad (and not in a good way).
I had never expected him to engage in a disquisition about subatomic particles.
However, the point had come up with me many years before I ever saw that tract or contemplated any religious connection with the topic.
I had read a rather elementary book on chemistry (a favorite subject of mine even before high school), in which the atomic structure of the nucleus of the U-235 atom was taken up. This nucleus contains, of course, 92 protons and 143 neutrons.
The article noted how the large number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus causes a kind of stress, which is only relieved when particles are expelled from the nuclei of individual atoms–i. e., radioactivity. (I never figured out how isotopes of technetium [No. 43] or promethium [No. 61] could be invariably radioactive, as they are, or how certain isotopes of other elements [all the way down to tritium] could be radioactive.) And I have no answer for why the protons in a nucleus do not repel each other–and I don’t rely on Jack Chick’s hypothesis.
That’s in the present tense. You’re saying you don’t know now why the protons in a nucleus do not repel each other?
IIRC the correct answer was even in the Chick tract (though dismissed for no reason at all)
Strong nuclear force (holding nuclei together) first hypothesized 1932.
Weak nuclear force (radioactive decay) first hypothesized 1933.
Jack Chick wasn’t even 10 years old then. No one could produce multiple writings dismissing these unless they are deliberately avoiding learning about them.
The validity of a theory can be judged based on its ability to make predictions that are later verified. As in nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs, etc. If these ideas were at all wrong, we wouldn’t have anything like those.
How could someone realize these things exist and yet deny the very basis for the ideas that created them?
It’s like believing that airplanes can’t fly since they are heavier than air.
I discarded the tract “Big Daddy?” years ago, so I couldn’t verify that. It would be interesting to see where he showed documentation for that!
You have to understand, to this faction of the Ultrafundamentalist, modern scientific theories are nothing but “just so” stories the eggheads made up to shoehorn in a materialistic explanation for what happens while perversely denying the obvious truth that it’s all God and Satan and whatever happens does so because God makes it so that we will behold his glory. There is no reason to them why objectively the theories of planetary formation, plate tectonics and evolution would be any more credible than Genesis on their face, and Genesis came from God!
This is greatly helped by how many people in the target audience are of the mentality “I don’t understand it and I’m not stupid… so it must be a line of bullshit.” From their religion-centered POV there has to be such thing as THE answer, Eternal Truth, and it should be self-evident and understandable at the reading level of the KJV. Relativity and quantum physics are particularly contrary to this. And that a theory can continue to be debated a century later is only evidence that the scientists are pulling it out of their asses. Nuance and uncertainty are Satan’s smokescreens.
(That audience are also the heirs of a populist American culture that celebrates “inventors”, not theoretical scientists. CLEVER boys that had a bright idea and made it work, because, God-given American moxie. )
Am I being whooshed now? If you remember the name of the tract it’s trivial to google for it, and indeed here it is.
I don’t know if I should be pleased that my brain has retained an accurate memory of this tract. Gluons are mentioned but basically ridiculed as being based entirely on faith. And this staggering feat of logic is what finally defeats the professor :smack:
I liked this Jeet Heer piece on Chick and how he inspired admiration (even fandom) from unlikely people. All while serving a cruel and poisonous ideology.
Jack T Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of American Cartooning
I believe the gluons are a late edit to the tract. I don’t think they were in the original version. But that’s just my memory.
I looked up the work “consist” (the basis for the student’s argument) in Colossians 1:17; the definition given in Chick’s tract is not consistent with that given in Strong’s Concordance.
Wow, I hadn’t seen that one, before! Weird, wild stuff!
I have mentioned the topic of this tract–a fatal overdose of LSD–elsewhere on this message board: the tragic death of the brother of a girl I knew in high school; I was close to the family for years after graduation. I am not amused or impressed by the Chick tract, for this reason. (FWIW, the family was Episcopalian.) To make matters worse, the sister, who won a local beauty contest–one look at her and you would not be surprised in the least 
--got a write-up in a newspaper in Ensenada, Mexico, as being ‘fanatically devoted to astrology.’ THAT was nonsensical and insulting.
I think this was the basis for one of my favorite parodies, “The Uppity Drunk.” I can’t seem to find a copy online, but I have one saved to my hard drive.
Ah I see, that would make sense.
It is somewhat weird that the student essentially says “OK clever-clogs, what holds protons together in the nucleus…you…you’re going to say the strong force, aren’t you? That…my question isn’t actually difficult to answer at this time, right?”
:eek: