Posted by:
anybody
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)
Date: March 21, 2024 01:16PM
Mormons, Evangelicals, hard core Catholics, ultra Orthodox, Puritans, etc. (and I would add the quasi-religious ideologies of Nazism and totalitarian Soviet-style totalitarian Communism and Stalinism and Juche) all have this problem: They have to force the entire world to become an extension of their imagination.
It doesn't matter what the issues are -- heteronormative patriarchal Christianity, white nationalist monochronism, anti-science or anti-intellectualism -- no other way of living can be acknowledged or even allowed to exist. Differences cannot be tolerated.
Is it because they know in the back of their minds that what they believe is really a lie and therefore they must be constantly reminded that their fantasies are "real?"
Here's a review of one of the most monstrous follies of non-reason: the KY Ark Park.
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https://bittersoutherner.com/2020/the-ark-at-the-end-of-the-worldAs the daughter of a Methodist preacher from Memphis, I’ve always been fascinated by evangelical Christianity: its newness, its certainty, and its urgency all seemed so foreign from the quiet, painfully moderate tradition I’d been raised in. My husband, Colin — a native Kentuckian who was raised in an evangelical church housed in a former shopping mall — nearly broke out in hives when I asked him to visit the Ark Encounter with me.
We’ve both drifted from the faiths of our childhoods, but as I’ve lost my footing in any particular tradition, I’ve cultivated a growing obsession with religion in general. It would be easy to dismiss this massive boat as an extreme but essentially goofy version of white conservative evangelical Christianity, but I felt determined to suspend my own judgment, to try and discover whatever it was that appealed to the people all around us, cheerfully making their way toward the boat.
Depending on which roadside attraction you choose, you’ll be presented with opposing visions of the world: one in which the world is billions of years old and the product of constant, ongoing change; and another in which the world is 10,000 years old, at most, and was created in only six days. In this second worldview, evolution remains, at best, just an unsubstantiated hunch, an improbable inkling. At worst, according to Henry Morris, one of the founding fathers of young-earth creationism, evolution is a “tool of Satan to destroy belief in God” and “the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice.”
At the opening of the Creation Museum in 2007, Ken Ham referenced the 1925 Scopes trial and promised that the Creation Museum would serve as a reversal to the humiliation suffered by creationists when Clarence Darrow grilled William Jennings Bryan on the stand. The Scopes trial “was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America,” Ham said, and made a promise: “We are going to undo all of that.” In the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, Ham aims not only to rewrite history, but to create a future in which modern science is suspect and creationists are no laughing matter.
But the Scopes trial of 1925 was a particularly galvanizing moment for white evangelicals who felt increasingly alienated: “The ignominy surrounding the Scopes trial convinced evangelicals that the larger culture had turned against them,” Randall Balmer writes in The Making of Evangelicalism. Evangelicals “responded by withdrawing from the culture, which they came to regard as Satan’s domain, to construct an alternative universe, an evangelical subculture.”
These first subcultures included Bible colleges, publishing houses, and seminaries, but soon expanded beyond the explicitly religious realm. In The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson describe the growing (and increasingly lucrative) “parallel cultures” of the contemporary evangelical world: in addition to Christian music, books, and movies, evangelical leaders and organizations produce “in-house versions of natural science, history, social science, and views of the end-times.” The efficacy of these parallel cultures enables evangelicals to “reject the non-Christian world around them.” In a 2010 speech, Ken Ham echoes this sense of a definitive binary, arguing that there was “no neutral position” between biblical literalism and atheism.
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Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2024 01:25PM by anybody.