Floating naked ghoul alert

It's been a long while since we've had a good report of cryptid activity, so I'm pleased to bring you a doozy today.  This one comes from the town of Lithia (near Tampa), Florida, so if you come from near there, you might want to be on the lookout.

The (unnamed) source of this peculiar story, which appeared yesterday on the phenomenally wacky site Phantoms and Monsters, says he was out walking his dog late one night last week, when he saw (and smelled) something pretty peculiar:

I was walking late one night with my German Shepherd, when I smelled an overwhelming stench of road kill.  I looked over into the woods near my home and saw a naked pale white man-like thing crawling in the woods.  It was on its hands, feet and knees about 3 inches above the ground.

So, we're already put on notice that this is going to be a pretty bizarre story.  I mean, look at the features of this thing we've already had thrown at us, in the first three sentences:

• naked
• pale
• crawling on all fours
• floating three inches off the ground
• smells like roadkill

Let's do a little thought experiment here.  Picture yourself walking a backroad in Florida late one summer night.  Heavy, humid, still air, thick underbrush on both sides of the road.  Crickets singing, a stray mosquito whining in your ear.  The only other sound is your footsteps, and your dog's panting.  You see a naked white ghoulish creature floating in the woods, and it smells like decomposing flesh.

What do you do?

I'll bet you my next month's salary it's not what this guy did.  To wit:

I changed hands with my flashlight which my dog's leash prevented me from immediately shining it in that direction.  In the 2 seconds it took to change hands and shine the light on this thing, it had moved 20 feet to near a tree it was trying to hide behind.  It saw my light as it was swinging towards it and quickly crunched into a cannon ball like posture, and balanced on its toes & balls of its feet, hiding its face and held perfectly still.

So, let's add two more charming characteristics to our cryptic-of-the-week:

• can move twenty feet in under two seconds
• freezes and hides its face whenever you look at it

What we have here sounds like the love child of a zombie and a Weeping Angel.  If you needed something else to populate your nightmares.

But to me, the most amazing thing isn't what the guy reports he saw, but what he thought upon seeing it.  Not only did he not do what I would have done when he first spotted the thing, namely, piss his pants and then have a stroke, he calmly aimed his flashlight at it, and decided... that it must be a mime:

I got a overwhelming feeling that if I kept shining the light on it, that it would look up at me with glowing eyes and a weird face. So I continued on with my walk. I thought maybe it was a teenager doing a mime, but there was no one taking a picture and this thing had a oddly pronounced spine and was absolutely hairless.

Again, "Oh, hey, I bet that's a naked teenage mime" would have to be the very last thing I'd think of, in his situation.  Be that as it may, he thought that was a serious enough possibility that he calmly finished his walk with his dog (both of them got home unscathed), and proceeded to do an internet search:

I went home and looked on the internet to see if this is something kids are doing now (painting themselves white, shaving all hair off, rolling around in road kill and crawling around late at night in woods).

I teach teenagers, and I can say with some authority that no, this is not something that teenagers do.

But he did find a photograph from a cryptid report in Louisiana three years ago that looked like what he'd seen:

Then he asks if this may have been a cryptid called a "Rake," and if anyone knows more about it.

I didn't, so I did a bit of searching, and in short order, I found out that the Rake is yet another fictional entity of the same origin as Slender Man -- the site Creepypasta (here's their page on the Rake).  So whatever the guy saw, I can say with some authority that it wasn't the Rake, given that the Rake doesn't exist.

Of course, my suspicion is that the Lithia Floating Naked Ghoul probably doesn't, either.  Starting with the guy's bizarre reaction to an apparition that would have most of us screaming like a little girl and running for home so fast you couldn't see our feet, in the fashion of a Looney Tunes character.  Also, what about his dog?  I don't know about your dog, but if my dog scented a creature that smelled like roadkill, he'd be frantic to go make friends, because roadkill is basically doggie cologne.

So I sort of doubt the entire account.  But I would, of course.  Actually, I'm strongly suspecting that there were some mind-altering chemicals involved.  But if I'm wrong, and you're down near Tampa, keep your eyes peeled.  If you see any stinking naked ghoul mimes, be sure to let me know.

Demonic texting

It's an increasingly technological world out there, and it's to be expected that computers and all of their associated trappings are even infiltrating the world of wacko superstition.

About a year ago, we had a new iPhone app for hunting ghosts, called the "Spirit Story Box."  Early this year, there was even a report of a fundamentalist preacher who was doing exorcisms... via Skype.  So I suppose it's not surprising that if humans now can use technology to contact supernatural entities of various sorts, the supernatural entities can turn the tables and use our technology against us.

At least, that's the claim of a Roman Catholic priest from Jaroslaw, Poland, named Father Marian Rajchel.  According to a story in Metro, Rajchel is a trained exorcist, whatever that means.  Which brings up a question: how do you train an exorcist?  It's not like there's any way to practice your skills, sort of like working on the dummy dude when you're learning to perform CPR.  Do they show instructional videos, using simulations with actors?  Do they start the exorcist with something easier, like expelling the forces of evil from, say, a stuffed toy, and then they gradually work their way up to pets and finally to humans?  (If exorcists work on pets, I have a cat that one of those guys should really take a look at.  Being around this cat, whose name is Geronimo, is almost enough to make me believe in Satan Incarnate.  Sometimes Geronimo will sit there for no obvious reason, staring at me with his big yellow eyes, all the while wearing an expression that says, "I will disembowel you while you sleep, puny mortal.")

But I digress.

Father Rajchel was called a while back to perform an exorcism on a young girl, and the exorcism was successful (at least according to him).  The girl, understandably, is much better for having her soul freed from a Minion of the Lord of Evil.  But the Minion itself apparently was pissed at Rajchel for prying it away from its host, and has turned its attention not on its former victim, but on the unfortunate priest himself.

Apparently such a thing is not unprecedented.  According to an article about exorcism over at Ghost Village, being an exorcist is not without its risks:

[John] Zaffis [founder of the Paranormal and Demonology Research Society of New England] said, "You don't know what the outcome of the exorcism is going to be - it's very strong, it's very powerful. You don't know if that person's going to gain an enormous amount of strength, what is going to come through that individual, and being involved, you will also end up paying a price." 

Many times the demon will try to attack and attach itself to the priest or minister administering the exorcism. According to Father Martin's book, the exorcist may get physically hurt by an out-of-control victim, could literally lose his sanity, and even death is possible.

So there you are, then.  Rajchel, hopefully, knew what he was getting into.  But I haven't yet told you how the demon is getting even with Father Rajchel:

It's sending him evil text messages on his cellphone.

According to Rajchel, ever since the exorcism, the demon has been texting him regularly sending him messages like, "Shut up, preacher.  You cannot save yourself.  Idiot.  You pathetic old preacher."  On another occasion, he got the message, "She will not come out of this hell.  She’s mine.  Anyone who prays for her will die."

Which of course brings up the question of how a demon got a cellphone.  Did it just walk into the Verizon store and purchase one?  You'd think the clerk would have noticed, what with the horns and tail and all.  Probably, all things considered, more likely that the demon stole someone's cellphone, although it still does raise the question of how it's paying to keep the cell service going.

It also raises the much more pragmatic question of why Rajchel doesn't just see what number the texts are coming from, and report it to the police.  Odds are it's the girl that he exorcised, and she's not possessed with anything but being a kid and enjoying pranking a gullible old man.

Of course, that's not how the true believers see it, and once you believe in demons and the rest it's a short step to deciding that they can just magically manipulate your machinery.  So I doubt that all of my practical objections would call any of those beliefs into question.

But it does bring up a different issue, which is, if demons can infest cellphones, can they infest other sorts of equipment, too?  Because if so, I strongly suspect that my lawnmower is possessed.  It seems to realize just when my lawn needs to be mowed, and chooses that time to suffer some kind of mysterious breakdown that necessitates my calling Brian the Lawn Mower Repair Guy.  Given how often this happens, maybe Brian is in cahoots with the demon.  Something in the way of a business partnership.  Although you do have to wonder what the demon gets out of it, other than the pure joy of listening to me swear.

The enemy of my enemy is... wait.

I'm sure that most of you have heard of Boko Haram, the group of Nigerian extremist Muslim nutjobs who hate the secular west's culture so much that they have started preying on their own people.  These are the loons who have, according to Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, killed over 12,000 people, and who were responsible for the kidnapping earlier this year of 234 girls who were students at a government-run girls' school.  As of the writing of this post, the girls have not been returned to their families; Boko Haram leaders promised that they would be married off to devout Muslims.  The "Save Our Girls" campaign, which attracted international attention, accomplished (unfortunately) nothing but allowing Boko Haram to gain a spot on the world stage.

Even the name "Boko Haram" means "Western education is a sin."

So these people are, by any conventional definition of the word, evil.  And anyone who opposes them, by whatever means, is to be lauded.

Even if it's...

The Association of Nigerian Witches and Wizards.

According to an article on the site Bella Naija, the Association (called, from its name in Yoruba, "WITZAN") has issued an ultimatum to Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau; knock it off or face the magical consequences.

"Witches and wizards in Nigeria are deeply worried by what is going on in the country, especially Boko Haram insurgency," said WITZAN spokesperson Dr. Okhue Iboi.  "As stakeholders in the Nigerian project, we can no longer afford to fold our hands while the nation burns.  Enough is enough."  He added that "our fellow brothers and sisters from the three northeastern states pleaded for the emergency meeting, to help cage Shekau and his blood-thirsty lieutenants."

And now that the magicians have gotten involved, Shekau's days are numbered.  He will be captured before December, Iboi said, and will be "paraded on the streets of Abuja and Maiduguri for the world to see."  As for the missing girls, their parents should smile, because "those girls are coming back home.  They will be rescued."

So... yeah.  This puts me in the odd position of being in support of a wizard and his woo-woo pals.  I mean, the WITZAN folks clearly aren't in very solid touch with reality themselves, but for pete's sake, they're preferable to Boko Haram.

On the other hand, maybe this is the right way to go about it.  The Boko Haram folks are themselves deeply superstitious.  The Nigerian government has been fighting these lunatics since at least 2002, using conventional tactics, without much success.  If anything, the radicals have gained strength and confidence; there have been 43 deadly attacks in 2014 alone, and over 2,000 dead.  Maybe if WITZAN can convince the members of Boko Haram that they're being ritually cursed, enough of them will get spooked that they'll desert.

Fight fire with fire, you know?  Maybe they should give it a try.  Nothing else has seemed to work.

Arguing by agreement

My job would be easier, as a skeptic, if humans were basically rational beings.

The fact is, though, we're not controlled solely by the higher-cognitive parts of our brains.  We are also at the mercy of our emotions and biases, not to mention a set of perceptual apparati that work well enough most of the time, but are hardly without their own faults and (sometimes literal) blind spots.

This is why the backfire effect occurs.  A pair of psychologists, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, found that most people, after being confronted with evidence against their prior beliefs, will espouse those beliefs more strongly:

Nyhan and Reifler found a backfire effect in a study of conservatives. The Bush administration claimed that tax cuts would increase federal revenue (the cuts didn't have the promised effect). One group was offered a refutation of this claim by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it. The percentage of believers jumped to 67 when the conservatives were provided with the refutation of the idea that tax cuts increase revenue.  (from The Skeptic's Dictionary)

As a blogger, this makes it hard to know how to approach controversial topics.  By calmly and dispassionately citing evidence against silly claims, am I having the effect of making the True Believers double down on their position?  If so, how could I approach things differently?

A study published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the answer.  To convince people of the error of their ways, agree with them, strenuously, following their beliefs to whatever absurd end they drive you, and without once uttering a contrary word.

Psychologists Eran Halperin, Boaz Hameiri, and Roni Porat of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel were looking at a way to alter attitudes between Israelis and Palestinians -- a goal as monumental as it is laudable.  Given the decades that have been spent in futile negotiations between these two groups, always approached from a standpoint of logic, rationality, and compromise, Halperin, Hameiri, and Porat decided to try a different tack.

150 Israeli volunteers were split into two groups -- one was shown video clips of neutral commercials, the other video clips that related the Israeli/Palestinian conflict back to the values that form the foundation of the Israeli self-identity.  In particular, the clips were based on the idea that Israel has a god-given right to exist, and is the most deeply moral society in the world.  But instead of taking the obvious approach that attacks against Palestinians (including innocent civilians) called into question the morality of the Israeli stance, the videos followed these concepts to their logical conclusion -- that the conflict should continue, even if innocent Palestinians died, because of Israel's inherent moral rectitude.

And attitudes changed.  The authors of the study report that members of the experimental group showed a 30% higher willingness to reevaluate their positions on the issue, as compared to the control group.  They showed a greater openness to discussion of the opposing side's narrative, and a greater likelihood of voting for moderate political candidates.  And the attitude change didn't wear off -- the subjects still showed the same alteration in their beliefs a year later.  Hameiri writes:

The premise of most interventions that aim to promote peacemaking is that information that is inconsistent with held beliefs causes tension, which may motivate alternative information seeking.  However, individuals—especially during conflict—use different defenses to preserve their societal beliefs.  Therefore, we developed a new paradoxical thinking intervention that provides consistent—though extreme—information, with the intention of raising a sense of absurdity but not defenses.

So apparently, Stephen Colbert is on the right track.

I find the whole thing fascinating, if a little frustrating.   Being a science-geek-type, I have always lived in hope that rational argument and hard data would eventually win.

It appears, however, that it doesn't, always.  It may be that for the deepest, most lasting changes in attitude, we have to take those beliefs we are trying to change, and force them to their logical ends, and hope that after that, the absurdity will speak for itself.

The firestarter

It is the nature of the world that sometimes we have to look at all of the available evidence, and not come to a conclusion.

It's tempting to think that science, and the skeptical approach, will always result in answers, but the sad fact is that sometimes we have to admit that (barring the uncovering of further data) we will never have an explanation.  This is something that often doesn't sit well with people, however.  We like understanding, we like everything to be tidy and clear, without loose ends, and the result is that we will sometimes settle for a bogus explanation simply because it feels better than saying, "We don't know."

Such, I believe, is the strange case of Carole Compton, the Scottish nanny who almost ended up spending decades in jail because of an accusation of attempted murder by pyrokinesis (starting fires with your mind) and witchcraft -- but only forty years ago.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Compton is from Ayr, Scotland, but had fallen in love with an Italian man she'd met there and followed him back home.  While waiting for him to complete his military service, she took on a job as a nanny for a wealthy family near Rome.  The Riccis welcomed Carole into their home to look after their children, and all went well until a small religious picture fell off the wall as Carole walked by, prompting a maid to make the sign of the cross and raise her eyebrows about what it could mean.

That event was recalled several weeks later when Carole accompanied the Riccis on their annual vacation in the Alps, and a fire broke out in their vacation home, destroying the second floor completely.  Firemen said that the house had a history of electrical problems, and that was undoubtedly the cause.  But the Riccis began to question that explanation when two subsequent fires began in Carole's presence -- one in a trash can and the other in the bedroom of the Ricci's two-year-old son.

Shortly afterwards, the Riccis fired Carole.

Carole was rehired by another family, the Tontis, once again as a nanny.  The grandmother of the family, however, took an instant dislike to Carole, which was intensified to hatred and fear when once again Carole seemed to be the epicenter of bizarre occurrences -- a fire in a mattress, a vase falling from a table and breaking while no one was near it, and objects (including a religious figurine) flying off shelves and walls.  At this point, the word strega (witch) was used, and the talk started in earnest.

But it was all talk until a fire started in another mattress, this time in the room of three-year-old Agnese, the child Carole had been hired to care for.  The grandmother demanded that it be stopped, and the authorities intervened, and arrested Carole for attempted murder.

The media went wild about "the nanny they call a witch."  Some people claimed she was psychotic, and had engineered the incidents; others that there was a poltergeist following her around.  The consensus, though, was that she was possessed, and the demon was visiting its evil on the people she lived with.  It took over a year for her to come to trial (in December 1983), and she was found innocent of the attempted murder charge, but guilty on two counts of arson.  She was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but was released on time served and immediately left Italy to return to her native Scotland.

What really happened in the Compton case?  It hardly bears mention that I'm doubtful about the "poltergeist" and "demonic possession" explanations, not to mention the phenomena of telekinesis and pyrokinesis in general.  According to an article about Compton and other similar cases in The Scotsman, Compton now is living quietly with her husband, Zaroof Fazal, in a town in Yorkshire, and they have three school-age children.  Nothing further in the way of quasi-supernatural events have happened to her.  "What happened to me is something that never goes away," she told reporters.  "It was a dreadful ordeal...  I have a happy life now.  I try not to think about the past."

Not the sort of thing you'd expect if she suffered from Münchausen's-by-proxy, which is another explanation that has been put forward -- that she deliberately attempted to injure her young charges in order to garner attention and/or care.  Compton seemed horrified at the attention she was getting right from the beginning, and even she denied that anything supernatural was going on, although she didn't have an alternate explanation.  During her trial, noted supernatural investigator Guy Lyon Playfair (the man who did the study of the Enfield poltergeist) offered to look into the case, but Compton didn't want him to get involved, claiming that there must be a rational explanation and surely the Italian legal system would realize that.

No such rational explanation has ever been found.

Of the non-paranormal solutions to the case that have been proposed -- Compton being psychotic or suffering from Münchausen-by-proxy, the fires having a natural cause (nearby electrical shorts, for example), and the falling objects being due to the fact that objects fall down sometimes -- none of them explain the entire story, nor why those events seemed to follow Compton around.  Even the people who accused Compton -- the Tonti grandmother, for example -- steadfastly claimed that the fires erupted and objects fell and broke without Compton touching them.  No one in the Tonti household said that Compton had gone around breaking things and setting fires deliberately; it was only after it got into the courts that this explanation was settled on, because no 20th century European judge would be willing to risk his or her reputation by seriously considering a charge of witchcraft.

So we're left where we started; some weird things happened in Carole Compton's presence in Italy in the 1980s, and no one knows why.

Not a satisfying explanation, by a longshot.  But as skeptics, we have to go as far as the evidence pushes us, and no further.

And in the Compton case, as far as we can get is "we don't know."

Irrationality, insanity, and the teachings of J. Z. Knight

One of the problems I face in selecting stories to highlight in Skeptophilia is that it is often difficult to tell the difference between a crazy idea that merits ridicule, and claims coming from a person who is mentally ill, and therefore deserves sympathy (and help).

Put another way, when does espousing an essentially irrational worldview cross the line into an actual psychosis?  There are millions of people who subscribe to belief systems that are profoundly irrational, and yet the people themselves are otherwise sane (although how a sane person could adopt an insane model for how the universe works is itself a question worth asking).  But there are clearly times where you've gone beyond that, and crossed into more pathetic territory.

As an example of the latter, consider the ravings of YouTuber Dave Johnson, who contends that the Civil War, World War II, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq never happened.  All of them were "media events" with manufactured battles and casualties, designed by political leaders to achieve various goals.  I'm not sure I can really describe the content of the videos -- and I'm also not sure I can, in good conscience, recommend that you watch them -- but he seems to be enamored of symbolism and numerology (he calls the attack on Fort Sumter "a 9/11-style attack on a pentagon") and then just denies everything else without stating any evidence.  "They went on to tell you that over 600,000 people died in (the Civil) War," he says.  "Untrue.  There's zero evidence of any battlefield footage of any death that I can find."

Well, the absence of "footage" may be because the Civil War happened before the invention of motion pictures.  But even forgiving that as a slip of the tongue, is he really discounting all of the photography by Mathew Brady?

Aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, by Mathew Brady

I'm sure he'd call them all modern fakes.  He seems to have a profoundly paranoid worldview, which (by the way) includes believing that the Moon is a hologram.

The whole question comes up because of a much more public figure than Dave Johnson -- J. Z. Knight, better known as "Ramtha."  Knight has run her "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" since 1988, wherein she and her followers share the teachings of "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old being from "Lemuria" who claims to be the "enlightened one."  Knight "channels" Ramtha, and then offers his pronouncements to the masses.

Up until recently, the whole thing has seemed to me to be an enormous scam -- a way to bilk the gullible out of their hard-earned money.  But just in the last couple of years, Knight/Ramtha has left behind her bland, "find-the-god-within" message, and has apparently gone off the deep end.

According to a story this week at AlterNet, Knight is no longer promoting "enlightenment" in Ramtha's voice; she is going off on drunken homophobic and racist rants.  Video and audio recordings of Knight that have been made covertly and then smuggled out of her compound in Yelm, Washington have revealed that the cult has moved into decidedly scarier territory of late.  The article states:

During the 16 or so hours... Knight will disparage Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, and Jews. 

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she says as members of the audience snicker. There are also titters when she declares Mexicans “breed like rabbits” and are “poison,” that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.

Add to this the fact that this ritual involves the drinking of huge amounts of alcohol -- they're called "wine ceremonies," and audience members are supposed to take a drink of wine every time Knight does -- and this begins to take on some of the characteristics of a meeting of the Aryan Nations instead of some quasi-religious ceremony.

And, of course, this is fuel to the fire to the neo-Nazis.  Knight/Ramtha is quoted at length on the race hate forum Stormfront, for example.  The two cults, different as they appear at first, both espouse a lot of the same ideology -- survivalism, an "elect" who will be protected when civilization falls, and a sacred message that needs to get out to the people -- at least the right people.

But she also likes to take pot shots at the Christians, and one of the recordings that has come to light begins with, "Fuck Jehovah!" and goes on to state that Jesus is "just another alien" who is on equal footing with Ramtha, and who came to the Earth to teach the same things that Ramtha did, but failed when power went to his head.

Knight, for her part, refuses to issue a retraction for any of her drunken screeds, claiming that all of the ugliness on the recordings is just a matter of Ramtha's words "being taken out of context."  She also accuses two ex-followers, Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, of spearheading a smear campaign started because of a love triangle involving Coverdale, Knight, and Knight's significant other.

But back to our original question; is Knight still, on some level, rational, or has she simply become psychotic?  Certainly her message now clearly qualifies the Ramtha School of Enlightenment as a hate group; but I'm more curious about Knight herself.  Before, she has just been classified as a religious version of P. T. Barnum, a huckster, suckering in the gullible and relieving them of their cash in exchange for a more-or-less harmless message.  Now?  She shows every evidence of insane paranoia.  So personally, she's more to be pitied than censured.

The difference, though, between a J. Z. Knight and a Dave Johnson -- the war-denier we started this post with -- is their relative reach and influence.  Johnson's YouTube videos, when I watched them, had on the order of a thousand views each.  Knight's message has reached millions -- her followers include some famous names like Salma Hayek, Linda Evans, and Mike Farrell.  Her New Age nonsense wrapped up as an educational video on quantum physics, What the Bleep Do We Know?, grossed ten million dollars and was in movie theaters for a year.  Knight herself lives in a 12,800 square foot French-style-chateau next to her school, can earn up to $200,000 for every speaking engagement, and has a net worth estimated in the tens of millions.

Which means that regardless of the cause of her crazy rantings, the damage she can do is very real.  Her home town of Yelm is full of her followers -- non-Ramtha-ites call them "Ramsters" -- and the Ramtha symbol appears on many businesses in town, telling RSE members that it's okay to do business there.  Local churches have started anti-RSE campaigns.  Ordinary citizens, caught in the middle, are scared.

For good reason.  Whatever Knight is now, her teachings are now no longer merely New Age pablum, but ugly, racist, homophobic invective.  And you have to wonder when she'll cross another line -- into saying something that induces the authorities to intervene.

Considering her followers, we could have another Waco on our hands.

Damned aliens!

I wonder sometimes how outrageous public figures have to become before people will stop following them.

Just last week, we had Rush Limbaugh claiming that the media coverage of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was a deliberate attempt to distract us from the problem of how President Obama is handling illegal immigrants.  "I don't want appear to be callous here, folks, but you talk about an opportunity to abandon the Obama news at the border?" Limbaugh said, in his radio show last Thursday. "And, no, I'm not suggesting anything other than how the media operates."

To which I have two responses:  (1) Trying to do anything at this point about your "appearing callous" is a bit of a lost cause.  (2)  Why haven't you lost your entire audience yet, you bloviating blob of blubber?

I had a similar reaction when I read yesterday about the latest pronouncement from Ken Ham.  Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, is best known for having his ass handed to him in a debate with Bill Nye last year.  But that didn't stop him from moving forward with his project called "Ark Encounter" wherein he intends to build a life-sized model of Noah's Ark and demonstrate once and for all that there's no way it could have held pairs of every species on Earth.

Just a couple of days ago, however, Ham showed that he had not yet reached the nadir of his credibility, by offering up the opinion that we should give up the search for extraterrestrial life because any alien life out there is going to hell regardless.

Here's the direct quote, from an article he wrote over at AiG's website on Sunday:

I’m shocked at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life.  Life did not evolve but was specially created by God, as Genesis clearly teaches...   

Christians certainly shouldn’t expect alien life to be cropping up across the universe.  Now the Bible doesn’t say whether there is or is not animal or plant life in outer space. I certainly suspect not.  You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe.  This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation.  Jesus did not become the ‘GodKlingon’ or the ‘GodMartian’!  Only descendants of Adam can be saved.  God’s Son remains the ‘Godman’ as our Savior.

Once again, I have two responses:

(1)  You're spending millions of dollars to build a replica of Noah's Ark, and you have the balls to criticize NASA for wasting money?

(2)  So in your view, a loving and all-powerful god might have created intelligent extraterrestrial life, but in his infinite mercy, he's making certain that they are all tortured forever in the Lake of Fire for something some dude and his wife did here on Earth?

I don't know about you, but this makes his pronouncements on why we should all abandon science and become young-earth creationists seem lucid and rational.

So, my advice: shut up, Ken.  If your ignominious thrashing at the hands of Bill Nye wasn't humiliating enough, you're now becoming a laughingstock.  I'll end with a quote that has been variously attributed to Will Rogers and British politician Dennis Healey: