Monday, March 5, 2007

A Curse of the Generations...

I'd like you all to say hi to my great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, the Reverend Jacob Kline.

Born in August of 1805, he is just one of the many, many "men of the cloth" that for centuries... centuries mind you... have propagated the myth of sky god in my family...

I actually get it from both sides. There are pastors, reverends, fathers, probably a pedophile priest or two, lurking around my family tree. He's just the one furthest back I can go at the moment...

And as I was going through some of these ancient family photos and histories, I came across a stack of books from the late 50s and early 60s from "The Gospel Hour." Deciding I needed a break from carefully handling the pictures of bygone eras, I thought I'd peruse the ominously titled "Russia, Israel, and the End." (It should be noted that "The End" is in all capital letters.)

One of the funniest passages in this "tomb of doom" comes near the end, when once more fundies were railing about the inevitable coming of their sky god's kid:

...it has been shown on T.V. (so I am told, I did not see it, but a friend who is trustworthy, and who is a radio and T.V. technician told me) that chemists and scientists have already manufactured brain tissue, and declare within a matter of months they will be manufacturing brains to use in repairing human brains when damaged in wrecks, etc.

JUST HOW MUCH FURTHER DO YOU SUPPOSE GOD WILL LET MAN GO BEFORE HE STOPS HIM? I wonder? It makes me tremble when I read of the things that are being accomplished in the laboratories of America today. And God only knows what the Russians are doing, and what they have???

"KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE INCREASED..."
LOL!!! Of course, someone who is prone to the propaganda of the sky god is also susceptible to the propaganda of what the "Russians" were doing...

I also wonder why he trembled at the thought of being able to repair brains damaged "in wrecks, etc." Much like fundies "tremble" at the thought of using stem cells to help in the healing of people today (stem cells specifically), they take this as just one more sign of the imminent return...

In this same book, Gloomy "Oliver Greene" Gus quotes a verse from Revelation (16:21: And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent [from 100 to 300 pounds].) and then cites a newspaper article from the Greenville News in which a 50 pound chuck of ice fell to the earth. They go into great length about how it couldn't have come from a plane, or from space, because it was "soft water, such as rain or water out of a well."

Gloomy Gus took this to mean that it was a sign from God...

I can only roll my eyes...

I spent Sunday evening with the parents, as they knew the "Tomb of Jesus" show was going to be on Discovery, so me and Rich spent the evening...

Luckily, they have TiVo...

My father, much like his and my mother's ancestors, still believe in the literal seven-day creation. My father thinks that all these bones of Ardipithicus, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens archaic, and Homo sapiens neandertalensis are all just "different kinds of people, like blacks, Asians, whites, what-have-you." In other words, they're just different kinds of people like you and me--not ancestors... Just all regular Joe Schmoe's whose bones just look a little funny due to microevolution (as apparently macro evolution is impossible to my father [even though, and this is important people, macro evolution is simply the cumulative effect of lots of micro evolution... think about it...])

He believes Noah actually built a wooden boat only slightly smaller than the Titanic, put two of every single creature on earth on it, and floated for 40 days and 40 nights, despite global evidence of no global flood, mounds of evidence that the story is older than the biblical time line ("You only heard them say what you wanted them to hear," my father claims, even though we were watching the exact same show), the physical impossibility of fitting 300,000,000 species on such a small boat ("Man can't rationalize the awesome power of God," says Daddy-O), and he still couldn't answer why most marsupials are found only in Australia... he changed the subject, but I tell myself maybe he didn't hear me as we were talking at the same time... He believes languages came about in the fabulous fable of Babel, where god "confused their language," not culturally through the years of living separately... ("That was during the age of law... This is during the age of grace, which is why we can now build tall buildings without these consequences," says Father Time)...

I shake my head in frustration...

My dad is a smart man! He has the brain, but he refuses to read about the answers, the facts, the knowledge science has provided. He still believes in the easily debunked early-1980s "Christian science" that says the earth used to be a greenhouse, and that it never had rained before Noah's time, and that's where all the water came from to flood the earth... Even the "Christian scientists" have made up new lies! Even they don't believe what they were saying back then!

I don't get it... The willful, purposeful denial of knowledge, facts, and working theories for a fairy tale...

I partially blame Jacob...

I mostly blame the people who continue to propagate these lies in the face of overwhelming evidence against the literal bible as fact...

My family continues to live under the curse.... Not a curse of "sin," but a curse of half-truths, lies, and outright naivete and ignorance...

No wonder Jesus wept... and then lied to all of you...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hello jason! not sure who looks like this man that i am supposed to be a grandchild to. anyway, i like looking at these old pictures and wonder what they were like and what they liked to eat and what not but i guess he will be in heaven with us heaven goers and i can catch up then. :) now i know you didn't blog about your mothers take on this whole thing so i will say AGAIN that for me that God is the creator and as a creator He can do it anyway He wants to and maybe the way you think He made it is the way you think but i will say again i do not put my trust in any man (when it comes to this stuff) since they can make mistakes. just look at weather men and women. they are always getting something wrong. now i am supposed to think that some person with some so called knowledge on mostly guessing should be trusted to tell me what happened way back before we had all these so called make it easy living gadgets? (the more buttons they have the more can go wrong and the more $'s the repair men/women make.) i guess that some on them might be closer than others in getting it right but i know who i believe in and i really don't think anything they might find to say it is so or not will shake anything i believe in since God did not tell me to believe in what people find but to believe in Him and He is the beginning and the end. well, this is what you are stuck with as parents and you can thank this great...grandfather to have a hand in it all. :)(he looked like he was a pretty good dresser.) we could be worse parents. i myself think i'm pretty cool. i could be a walk in freezer. thats how cool i am. :) :) snort snort :) well, i guess i will go since i have one of those repair men coming to my house to fix one of those so called make it easy living gadgets. i should of been in that business instead of the business of being a housewife and mother. its awful what people charge just to look at something to tell me that its broke. now i am shaking my head. love and prayers

DaBich said...

Your ancestor is handsome, I think you take after him ;)

Jason Hughes said...

LOL! Thanks...

(I look like a guy from the 1800's... Hmm...)

:D

fcsuper said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mom said...

hello jason! not sure who looks like this man that i am supposed to be a grandchild to. anyway, i like looking at these old pictures and wonder what they were like and what they liked to eat and what not but i guess he will be in heaven with us heaven goers and i can catch up then. :) now i know you didn't blog about your mothers take on this whole thing so i will say AGAIN that for me that God is the creator and as a creator He can do it anyway He wants to and maybe the way you think He made it is the way you think but i will say again i do not put my trust in any man (when it comes to this stuff) since they can make mistakes. just look at weather men and women. they are always getting something wrong. now i am supposed to think that some person with some so called knowledge on mostly guessing should be trusted to tell me what happened way back before we had all these so called make it easy living gadgets? (the more buttons they have the more can go wrong and the more $'s the repair men/women make.) i guess that some on them might be closer than others in getting it right but i know who i believe in and i really don't think anything they might find to say it is so or not will shake anything i believe in since God did not tell me to believe in what people find but to believe in Him and He is the beginning and the end. well, this is what you are stuck with as parents and you can thank this great...grandfather to have a hand in it all. :)(he looked like he was a pretty good dresser.) we could be worse parents. i myself think i'm pretty cool. i could be a walk in freezer. thats how cool i am. :) :) snort snort :) well, i guess i will go since i have one of those repair men coming to my house to fix one of those so called make it easy living gadgets. i should of been in that business instead of the business of being a housewife and mother. its awful what people charge just to look at something to tell me that its broke. now i am shaking my head. love and prayers