{"id":35882,"date":"2017-12-28T19:35:26","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T00:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=35882"},"modified":"2017-12-28T19:35:26","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T00:35:26","slug":"fundraisers-lost-ark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2017\/12\/28\/fundraisers-lost-ark\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundraisers of the Lost Ark"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Newsweek:<\/em> \u201cExplorers Claim They\u2019ve Discovered Noah\u2019s Ark From Book of Genesis<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Every\u00a0year we get yet another recycling of this evergreen story. These stories all have several features in common: 1) The \u201cexplorers\u201d in question have not, in fact, found Noah\u2019s ark; 2) They claim to have new \u201cevidence,\u201d but will not allow anyone else to see this alleged evidence just yet; and 3) The \u201cexplorers\u201d desperately need more money to continue their \u201cresearch,\u201d and are asking good Christian people to send them some. To send them quite a bit, really.<\/p>\n

This is an evergreen story because it is an evergreen scam, and it\u2019s an evergreen scam because it never fails to prod the rubes into writing checks for the pious \u201cresearch\u201d of \u201cark hunters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea that a \u201cliteral\u201d Noah\u2019s ark is resting somewhere atop a 13,000-foot mountain in Turkey is another example of how so-called \u201cbiblical literalism\u201d often crosses over into sheer illiteracy. These are\u00a0people who don\u2019t know how to read. They may understand words and letters, and possibly even a few sentences, but they\u2019re incapable of understanding what it is<\/em> they\u2019re reading. Thus for them all sentences are the same and all stories are the same. The story of the (lesser, male) Noah is there in the Bible so it must be a \u201ctrue\u201d story \u2014 it must be a historical, factual, journalistic account.<\/p>\n

This is the same kind of basic illiteracy that leads countless American Christian tourists every day to ask the proprietor of the \u201cGood Samaritan Inn\u201d\u00a0if it\u2019s \u201creally\u201d on the site of the \u201creal\u201d inn from the \u201creal\u201d story of the \u201creal\u201d Good Samaritan. (The \u201cGood Samaritan Inn\u201d is not an inn, but a souvenir stand selling olive wood tchotchkes and the like. And also the\u00a0text never\u00a0claims there was an actual inn and\/or Samaritan.) If you\u2019re looking for \u201cevidence\u201d of the \u201creal\u201d Good Samaritan, then you\u2019re missing the whole point of the story.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a feature, not a bug. Missing the point is<\/em> the point \u2014 both for those simoniously filling their shopping bags at the \u201cGood Samaritan Inn\u201d and for those sending money to \u201csupport the vital biblical research\u201d of hucksters like Ken Ham and like the folks from the \u201cGeoscience Research Institute\u201d whose bogus claims sparked this Newsweek<\/em> report. This is what \u201cbiblical literalism\u201d does for its illiterate \u201creaders.\u201d This is the service it provides them.<\/p>\n

\"Such an event could have occurred.\"<\/a>
\u201cSuch an event could have occurred.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There\u2019s a lot to like about Kastalia Medrano\u2019s Newsweek<\/em> report but it also, unfortunately, includes this bit, which will be seized on by hucksters and their willing rubes alike as\u00a0fuel for the engines of \u201cbiblical literalism\u201d:<\/p>\n

The existence of the Great Flood itself is highly contested for obvious reasons, but there\u2019s evidence accepted by\u00a0both religious and secular scientists<\/a>\u00a0\u2026 that such an event could have occurred, even if the timeline differs a bit from what appears in the Book of Genesis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is colossally misleading. The link there \u2014 original to Medrano\u2019s article \u2014 takes us to another Newsweek<\/em> piece, also by Medrano, which eventually gets around to its actual subject of the discovery of a 280-million-year-old\u00a0fossilized\u00a0forest in what is now Antarctica (280 million years ago, Antarctica wasn\u2019t yet Antarctica<\/a>). Actual reporting on that discovery is buried in a piece that is mostly irresponsible click-bait-y nonsense. Just look at the headline: \u201cAntarctica: Can Ancient Flood in Bible\u2019s Book of Genesis Explain Mysterious Fossilized Forest?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

No. No it can\u2019t. And, also, the fossilized forest is not \u201cmysterious.\u201d It\u2019s only regarded as such by the young-Earth creationist bozo Medrano drags out to play his role in this script. He\u00a0asserts that science can offer no possible explanation for the existence of fossils that old, then he blinks and gapes\u00a0like Ted Crockett<\/a> when informed that, yes, actually, science can<\/em>\u00a0and does<\/em> explain that.<\/p>\n

Oh, and also, the pre-Antarctic forest in question wasn\u2019t drowned in a flood. It was buried in volcanic ash. So it wasn\u2019t a flood, it was a volcano, and it wasn\u2019t 4,200 years ago, it was 280 million years ago \u2014 millions of years before the dinosaurs. <\/em>That\u2019s a heck of a lot to gloss over with the phrase \u201ceven if the timeline differs a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

This absurdly misleading \u201csuch an event could have occurred\u201d\u00a0construct gets used\u00a0in all kinds of writing about \u201cNoah\u2019s flood.\u201d It\u2019s a dishonest bit of sleight-of-hand. When \u201cboth religious and secular scientists\u201d acknowledge that \u201csuch an event could have occurred,\u201d what they mean is a big flood. This is why they say the same thing when the subject is Atlantis rather than Noah. Sure, history is filled with accounts of really big floods wiping out cities and communities. And prehistory is filled with evidence of even bigger floods wiping out even more. So when these scientists and religious scholars say \u201csuch an event could have occurred,\u201d they\u2019re thinking of things like Doggerland<\/a> or the state fossil of Alabama<\/a>. Their idea of \u201csuch an event\u201d involves flooding, but it doesn\u2019t involve Noah. <\/em>It doesn\u2019t involve\u00a0 anything at all that would \u201cconfirm\u201d the idea of reading that Genesis story as history.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy to choose to\u00a0be dumb enough to make oneself a target for the kinds of scammers raising money for \u201cark hunts\u201d on Ararat. It takes a lot of stubborn effort on a lot of different fronts. You first need to choose bad literacy, bad science, and bad theology. And then, on top of that, you have to determine that you wish to live in a world that\u2019s far more boring than the world\u00a0that actually surrounds you.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the main problem with those young-Earth creationist articles\u00a0distorting scientific discoveries in an attempt to hijack them<\/a> in\u00a0service of their simplistic hokum, but it\u2019s an ugly feature of that ideology. It\u2019s boring<\/em>. It says there\u2019s nothing interesting<\/em> to be found beneath the ice in Antarctica, nothing amazing beneath the waves of the North Sea \u2014 nothing wonderful\u00a0in the heavens above or in the seas below. Feh<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every version of the perennial story about “ark hunters” shares three features: 1) They haven’t found Noah’s ark; 2) They won’t share their “evidence;” and 3) They’re trying to raise lots of money for more “research.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10,59,117,126,30],"class_list":["post-35882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-agnotology","tag-creationism","tag-genesis","tag-inerrancy","tag-science"],"yoast_head":"\nFundraisers of the Lost Ark<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Every version of the perennial story about "ark hunters" shares three features: 1) They haven't found Noah's ark; 2) They won't share their "evidence;" and 3) They're trying to raise lots of money for more "research."\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2017\/12\/28\/fundraisers-lost-ark\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fundraisers of the Lost Ark\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Every version of the perennial story about "ark hunters" shares three features: 1) They haven't found Noah's ark; 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}