https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/08/31/christians-against-dinosaurs-target-arizona-mcdonalds-t-rex-replica/

It’s never good when a website that’s almost certainly satirical posts something silly… and has the local news media chasing after the story.

The site is “Christians Against Dinosaurs,” which for years now, has lashed out against depictions of dinosaurs anywhere and everywhere under the premise that dinosaurs are obviously fake and that scientists planted fossils to convince people to ditch religion. (For what it’s worth, even Creationists accept that dinosaurs are real; they just believe dinosaurs existed a few thousand years ago.) The Facebook page for the group is meant to be entertaining, not serious. It’s a perfect example of Poe’s Law at work because commenters come off as sincere.

A couple of weeks ago, however, a post to the private group focused on a large dinosaur replica that sits outside a McDonald’s in Tucson, Arizona; it’s been there since the restaurant’s opening in 1994, not long after Jurassic Park came out, and it’s so distinctive that they never removed it.

The post in question said:

Please help! This McDonald’s has this dinosaur and refuse to remove it! This is in Tucson, Arizona. Call the manager and demand the removal of this blasphemy!


The actual phone number was posted and people actually called.

So the Arizona Daily Star got in touch with Josh Brown, the person who posted about the dinosaur (and whose personal Facebook page is nothing but memes and the tagline “who gives a shit?”):

… CAD poster Josh Brown insists he isn’t joking around. Reached through his Facebook page Tuesday night, he said he lives and works in Tucson, and he doesn’t see anything funny about “lying to our children.”

“It seems to me that every dinosaur story and display or dinosaur themed event is furthering the myth that the Earth is much older than the Bible says it is,” Brown said via Facebook Messenger. “Yes, the dinosaur should go unless they’re willing to compromise with a plaque of some kind stating that it’s a fictional character.”

…

In a later post to the CAD community, Brown took aim at a different drive-thru dinosaur, this one in front of the McDonald’s off I-10 in Benson. He called it a “conduit of lies and dinoporn that are corrupting our children’s minds.”

He’s almost certainly joking around. Also, it takes a real troll to insist the Bible is real but dinosaurs are fake…

In any case, the restaurant isn’t taking down the dinosaur. But the trolls got the attention they wanted, and they made Christianity seem even more absurd than usual. So… success?

I sending these people to the creation museum so they can duke it out with dinosaurs.

In one sense they're right, the dinosaurs are fake. The dinosaurs we tend to think of are completely different. Real dinosaurs appear now to have been colored and feathered.

You have a strange definition of "completely".

Some were feathered. We don't know how prevalent that was. The colors we've been using were guesses based on what reptiles tend to look like now. Possibly inaccurate.

These are cosmetic errors, especially the color part. The basic representation of the dinosaurs is in fact accurate - size, limbs, eye placement, teeth, etc etc.

Erm, no I don't. The modern understanding of a T Rex is that it looked like a psychotic parrot. The popular representation is more like a two legged iguana.

These aren't "cosmetic" errors, they're fundamental differences in appearance. About all old and new T-Rex have in common is two legs, a long tail, scrawny arms and big teeth.

No one can decide whether T Rex had lips or not for example.

There is even some debate about whether certain dinosaur species are in fact juvenile forms of others and not separate species at all.

>>The modern understanding [T-rex] is it looked more like a psychotic parrot

I've never seen that one before in fifty years of reading Nat Geo. Parrots have beaks, wings, and feathered tails.

>>The popular representation is more like a two legged iguana.

Because you say so? BTW, iguanas are vegetarian. T-rex may well have been a scavenger; we simply don't know.

You might find this critter interesting:

http://www.reptilesofaz.org/Lizards-Subpages/h-g-wislizenii.html

>>At top speeds it lifts the forelimbs off the ground and runs on its hind limbs.

They live in the deserts west of here, BTW.

Actually, from what the paleontologists tell us, dinosaurs never went extinct. They survive as today's birds.

Dinosaurs are a facinating topic, I've been reading Jeffrey Mammoths history of the kings of England which is a translation to Latin in the 1100s of a more ancient book that is currently now out of existence, but is supposedly all true and not made up. At present I'm somewhere in the 3-4 centuries, and the Brits are dealing with dragons and giants of all kinds. Apparently they were all sharing the Island together in those days. There's a story I read yesterday about a giant who had kidnapped a damsel and Arthur had to go and fight it to save the dame.

So in my estimation mythical creatures were still around until the Dark Ages.

By definition, how can a mythical creature “still be around”, anywhere, anytime?

bobofitz Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> By definition, how can a mythical creature
> “still be around”, anywhere, anytime?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoan_Kiem_turtle

Your ability to reject science and swallow mythology whole continues to impress.

Was this giant-fighting and damsel-saving before or after he fought the invincible Black Knight, or delivered the shrubbery to the Knights of Ni?

If you are buying that, you really need to google "Ooparts".

Do you mean Geoffrey of Monmouth? https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/geoffrey_thompson.pdf

Yes.

.


It's like this ...


https://growingintothemystery.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/jesus-sarah-palin-dinosaur-tour-polar-bear-hunt.jpg

The degree of Creationist idiocy is apparently limitless.