I said “many”. Some believe in it, the so-called “fire and brimstone” types mostly.
Claims that Jesus is prefigured in the OT are quite common. The Gospels themselves play that game, taking Isaiah or Ezekiel and saying, “See? They meant Jesus.” One radio preacher gave a lovely talk about how Abraham and Isaac prefigure the crucifixion – leaving out the business where God spared Isaac but refused to spare Jesus. Not a very good resemblance.
That explains hat happened to the dinosaurs. Noah and family took the wrong eggs for breakfast one morning.
Or one of the other animals ate the eggs?
Considering how many species of dinosaurs are known, that would be a LOT of eggs.
One of my FBFs, who is herself a devout Christian and lives nowhere near this thing, posted a story about it and said, “I would love to visit this!” When I told her about the admission price and the employees getting fired, etc. she said she still wanted to see it but was a bit less enthusiastic about it.
(Her oldest daughter has had 3 kids with 3 different guys, none of whom she married, and has apparently battled a very severe drug addiction that was precipitated by the death of the first one soon after birth, when she was about 15 years old.)
Hey, it’s cool. As long as you BELIEVE. No need to be a good person or take responsibilities for your actions.
40 bucks to walk around a 100 millions dollar shoe box complete with animatronics and stuffed rugs - lifelike models of animals, including dinosaurs and a pair of unicorns.
Unicorns in an Ark. - That about sums it up.
On the other side of reality, NASA’s Juno mission has begun orbiting Jupiter.
well, I see two problems: the people who built the thing aren’t paying taxes to the local area because they have a religious exemption, yet they are using local resources like water, and second, the company running the thing is forcing their employees to follow certain religious doctrines about their sex lives or they get fired.
If someone just wanted to build a fun tourist attraction based on a book, well, people do that all the time. Using the “religious” card to get special treatment, no.
In response to:
Actually Skammer is correct and Czarcasm is not. First definition up:
You have to go down a few to get to the implication of falseness being part of the definition.
The point of a myth is not if it is true or not. The point of a myth is often that it is a story that helps a culture define itself and its values.
Bolding mine.
Yes common modern usage is one which pejoratively implies untruth, but such misses the value that myths hold for a culture. The truth of a myth is its symbolic value to the culture, whether or not it is historically accurate. The latter is indeed irrelevant.
Stone atheist here, but… you get that religious belief predates the invention of writing, right? People have had religious for as long as we’ve been people - maybe longer. We’ve only been reading for about 6000 years, and only really been literate for an even shorter period.
Biblical literalism just doesn’t make any kind of sense to me. What’s the point of God giving us a book that tells us exactly what wants us to do? Why not just make us so that we just know what to do instinctively? If God is interested in free will, why would he give us an instruction book? Does God want to know if we have the capability to tell good from evil? Or is he only interested in seeing if we can follow directions? Because that last one doesn’t seem nearly as interesting an experiment to me. Again, I’m not a Christian, so I don’t can’t present an authentic Christian perspective. But there’s a reason the four books of the Gospel are called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and not God, God, God, and God. It’s the New Testament. It’s a bunch of stories of people testifying to their religious experiences. It’s right there in the name of the book that this is a collection of human observations, and not a literal divine writ.
Now, as to why Christians accept these observations as having any validity at all? Well, if God did exist, and his existence was in some degree observable by humans, then it follows that anyone would also be able to perceive evidence of his existence, not just the ones who wrote the Bible. So a Christian might accept the parts of the Bible that comport with their own observations (“Love thy neighbor”) while disregarding the parts that don’t fit with what they’ve observed (“Stone the infidel”).
Of course, as an atheist, I know God doesn’t exist, and as such is not observable in the world. But people do have religious experiences, even if their origin is not actually supernatural. Look at people at a revivalist meeting, when they’re rolling around on the floor, speaking in tongues. They’re experiencing something there, even if it’s a form of mass hysteria, and not a brush with the divine. That’s an extreme version of it, but most people of faith will have a story or two where they feel they were in touch with some larger presence than themselves. There’s some evidence that these experiences can be replicated in a controlled environment by stimulating certain areas of the brain. Even if it’s a neurological quirk that people routinely misinterpret as supernatural, that still puts them in the same starting place as if they really saw God: they have an experience they’re trying to make sense of, and they approach the Bible (or whatever text is dominate in their local culture) as a source of observations that may or may not comport with they believe they experienced.
Either way, the point is the same: faith precedes religion. There is a sense that there’s a larger truth to the universe than is immediately observable, and specific dogmas are adopted that are compatible with their perceived experiences.
Yeah, I know the link is from Fux Noize.
Bill Nye was invited to tour it today, and took them up on it.
Of course you can fit dinosaurs on the ark.
Based on the Facebook comments (which I was unfortunate enough to see thanks to a young relative), most AiG supporters think that this means Nye is being called to Jesus.
None of them float or are even sea-worthy. They were built to biblical specifications, which pretty much guaranteed that.
Know why the dinosaurs went extinct? After 20 days, Noah & family got a little hungry. Think of the size of that omlet!
nm
A while back, I was at a fellowship event at my church, and we got to talking about Noah’s Ark. (Most of them agreed with me that it was a regional flood.) Anyway, the phrase “A small elephant takes up less room than a big elephant” was said by someone, and led to a lot of :smack: :o 
.
Most authorities believe that the animals he took aboard were juveniles and, in the case of mammals, weaned young.
If the flood as described in the bible was just regional, that doesn’t explain the evidence of sea shells found 100’s of miles inland from California to New Mexico.
No, but plate tectonics and continental drift does. Very well.
Yep: meanwhile, the global flood idea is contradicted by such places as Carlsbad Caverns, which, very obviously, have never been flooded by sea-water – because the delicate dripstone formations would have been destroyed.
Maybe they were sealed off at the time?
(j/k)