The Christian group that spread the initial rumor that Steve Irwin had been “born again” shortly before his death has retracted the claim.
But as encouraging as it might be for Christians to know they
may share heaven with Irwin, the group now concedes there is reason
to doubt the conversion. The unverified story was sent out by an
exuberant staff member, said the group’s managing director, Carl
Wieland. “Though we are able to substantiate our suggestion that
Steve’s wife, Terri, was a church-going Christian, the stories of
Steve coming forward can, at this stage, not be substantiated,” he
said in a statement on the group’s website.
Note the name: Carl Wieland. The Australian co-founder of Answers In Genesis, the creationist group. I am not surprised.
Good. Perhaps the publicity over this idiotic episode will encourage at least a few peeople to question the whole foolish notion of heaven and hell.
“well-meant urban legend”?
I suppose from a twisted point of view it could be “well-meant” but from my jaded perspective it seemed more like opportunism.
From what I saw of the Crocland ceremony for his death I feel that it was tacky enough to qualify for the intellectual levels and practices that are the hallmarks of “born again” christianity.
Crikey!
His last words?
These people are just pathetic.
Sometimes I think the Internet is a bad thing because it give utter morons a megaphone they never would have had otherwise.
While they are at it, maybe they should ask whether their stupid fantasy god can be substantiated.
Bunch of demented fuckwits. Listen to meeeee! I believe in God! I’m important! Meeeeee! I love my God! Meeeee!
Was there any mention of whether or not “Lucy’s Baby” accepted Christ before being drowned in that flood 3.3 million years ago? I’m really worried about her.
And Uncommonly Dense hasn’t mentioned her at all. Why do they hate Ethiopians?
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Yeah, me too. Since she lived 3.3 million year BC, that would have been a little difficult.
Of course, apologetics supposedly can explain how people could be saved before Jesus died on the cross, but what puzzles me is when the crossover (no pun intended) happened. I mean, if a faithful Jew living 200 miles away from Jerusalem, was on his death bed at the time Jesus was dying on the cross, did he miss the “Old Testament dispensation” cut-off if he managed to hang on until Jesus died first? (“No-one comes to the Father except through me”, etc, etc).
Ask this type of question and the usually cocksure fundamentalist Christians suddenly get all vague and woolly with their answers.
Thank God.
I’ve been keeping a list of all the people I’m going to meet in hell. I’m glad I don’t have to scratch Irwin off. Hell is so going to rule, man. All the cool people are going to be there.
Thank God.
I’ve been keeping a list of all the people I’m going to meet in hell. I’m glad I don’t have to scratch Irwin off. Hell is so going to rule, man. All the cool people are going to be there.
If heaven is full of creationists, how the hell is that heaven?
arrrgh. stupid “ignore the italics tag after a line break” devils.
…..Ask this type of question and the usually cocksure fundamentalist Christians suddenly get all vague and woolly with their answers.
They always seemed pretty sure to me. “Worry about your own salvation. Jesus will be fair to those good people who never heard of him. I don’t know for sure what will happen, but I’ll find out in Heaven because my salvation is assured”.
Of course what they are saying is that it is not necessary to believe in Jesus in order to be saved; which calls into question the whole frackin’ point of Christianity.
Fundies; a never-ending source of amusement. (As I can say from the safety of a Buddhist country)
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That’s usually my answer to conversations that start with the evangelical asking me, on the topic of my atheism, “What if you’re wrong?”
arrrgh. stupid “ignore the italics tag after a line break” devils.
My personal theory? Religion is God’s way of weeding out the dorks. God’s going to be there in hell with me, you, Irwin, Gandhi, Darwin, Dawkins, Einstein, Nietzsche, Roddenberry, Clemens, Edison, Paine, Freud, Hume, and all those gayboy Greeks and we’re going to have a lot to talk about.
Heaven is where the self-righteous will have all their dreams fulfilled. Because God is such a cool dude. He wants them to be happy too. And out of the way.
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I’m thinking maybe I should hire a hitman, with orders to erase anybody who says I renounced rationality and converted to Christianity on my deathbed.
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How to debase the death of someone widely loved into a Christian “Me! Me! Me!” moment.
Smug asshole.
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“… All the cool people are going to be there.”
Yes but we’ll have to wait… I suppose hell and heaven are empty since the Judgement Day has not happened yet !
Don’t worry… in a few months the retraction will be long forgotten, but the conversion fable will be well alive for as long as someone will remember who steve irwin was. :-(
Isn’t is ironic how these born-agains only like to use it in reference to people living.. Just bring up some Hindu dogma and boy do they get upset about people getting “born again”.
Before people get too upset at the promotion of nonsense by fundies, can anyone point me at the original source of this quote that’s doing the rounds at the moment:
“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence” – Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam.
It’s a great quote, of course, and it’s been repeated widely on many blogs run by the impeccably liberal. It’s just that it may be _too_ good – and I can’t find the original. I did find this on AP:
“Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said that anyone who felt that Islam was intolerant or Islam spread through use of force showed ignorance.
“Statements of this nature are very unhelpful in the efforts that we are making to bridge the gap and promote understanding between different religions,” he added.”
which is similar in some ways but very different where it matters.
I suspect the first quote either a genuine mistake or a deliberate misquote – but if it’s either, it’s a good reminder that the habit of repeating things you want to be true without checking them isn’t limited to people you don’t like.
R
“Oh no! Our theology has doomed someone famous to hell! This isn’t going to play well.”
“Let’s just claim that he converted before he died!”
“Yes, never mind the underlying barbarism of the concept and the fact that we damn most of the people on earth, at least now we can claim you will meet (Insert famous stiff) in heaven.”
They always seemed pretty sure to me. “Worry about your own salvation. Jesus will be fair to those good people who never heard of him…”
That’s not what any of the fundies I know say…the position I’ve heard articulated consistently is that if you haven’t accepted Jesus as your Personal Lord and Saviour that you are gonna burn, baby, no matter how good you’ve been.
That’s not what any of the fundies I know say…the position I’ve heard articulated consistently is that if you haven’t accepted Jesus as your Personal Lord and Saviour that you are gonna burn, baby, no matter how good you’ve been.
Well this Jesus thug can go screw himself then. I don’t give in to threats.
“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence” – Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam.
Wow, you could fly the space shuttle though the hole in that logic. I saw nothing on the Pakistani Foreign Ministry website with that quote. However, ABC News has it quoted in an article.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2447600
I don’t know if that was quote mined out of a longer statement or what context it was originally used in. But as printed it is pretty funny.
No, no, Craig! You’ve got it all wrong! He’s condemning you because he loves you! See, God is like this great Toymaker in the Sky, and one day this snake knocked all his toys off the bench and broke ’em, and so now he’s gonna throw ’em away ’cause what craftsman accepts shoddy quality, but because he loves even his broken toys, he’ll keep all the ones that say “I love you back!” before they reach the wastebasket. But not after, because, uh, he loves those toys too, and…um…his love can’t reach into the wastebasket…uh…no, wait, those toys hate him and you’re not supposed to love those who hate you when they’re in wastebaskets…um…they’re more broken! Yeah, they don’t love him because they can’t and so that means they’re really really wrecked and not worth keeping unlike the other toys who were fixed by his love…uh…
Rupert,
I just googled that specific quote. The results came up
1) ABC news
2) Associated press
3) Jimmyakin.org (A blog)
4) Fox News (A propaganda outlet)
5) Little Green Footballs (A hate crime in the planning stages)
6) http://www.breitbart.com (A news mirror site)
7) Andrew Sullivan’s website.
I didn’t however see the quote on Eschaton, Sadly No, Crooks and Liars, Daily KOS, or Firedoglake. So, specifically which “impeccably liberal” blogs are you talking about?
You know, this entire episode, if related correctly, has been horribly cruel to Terri Irwin. If AIG is now correct that Terri is a Christian (and the type of their persuasion), then it would have had to tear her apart to think that Steve died without the “heaven card” – that’s bad enough without AIG then relating falsely that he did, thereby making her have to tell people over and over again when they asked that no, he didn’t. Way to rip open the wound fresh a few dozen times, Wieland.
Carlie, given as how Wieland and Ham are holy hypocrites of the slimiest caliber, I strongly doubt that neither unctious bastards care what they’ve put Terri Irwin through, so long as they get attention and money in their coffers.
My grandfather had it written in his will that after he died, he didn’t want anyone “trying to preach him into Heaven.” Of course, my aunt hired a preacher for the wake who tried to do just that. Why can’t people just leave the dead alone?
Not the wake, the funeral service. d’oh!
Obviously you two know nothing at all about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, AKA LDS, AKA Mormons. They baptize dead people by proxy in their temples so that those who are converted to the “truth” of the church after death (in limbo, awaiting Final Judgment Day) can pass the Baptism Bar and be allowed to hang out with God, Jesus and pals.*
So you don’t have to worry about Lucy or Selam. Assuming their little hominid souls have accepted the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, they’ll be covered when some dutiful Mormon gets baptized for them.
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* I absolutely, solemnly swear I am not making that up.
PZ, come on now. This point is way too biased. We all know that xians don’t lie…
How on earth is Jason resisting the urge to respond to this?
George, I’m guessing that he took a good hard look in the mirror, decided that being an obsessed vindictive cyberstalker meant he was being a poor representative for Jesus and a worse role model for his two purported children, and committed to spending the time he had previously been stalking scientists to teaching his children how to function in the world, based on a foundation of love, joy, and acceptance of others.
Or not–hell, it *is* Jason, after all.
…..Ask this type of question and the usually cocksure fundamentalist Christians suddenly get all vague and woolly with their answers.
The Calvinists would answer with predestination. That faithful Jew living 200 miles away from Jerusalem on his death bed at the time Jesus was dying on the cross is going to hell because God put him on his deathbed at that time for a reason. God’s all knowing, all powerful, and eternal, so it wasn’t an accident that certain people were, say, born in a town a thousand miles away and never heard of Jesus. They were never meant to hear the Gospel.
I didn’t say it was a good explanation.
It’s probably because there are too many vowels in Australian.
I wonder if they would merely describe it as a “well-meaning urban legend” if people spread rumors about well-known Christians “coming out of the closet” on their deathbed. (I am not advocating actually doing this.)
Listening to Calvinist apologetics regarding predestination always makes my head hurt. I think it’s a deliberate ploy to bamboozle anyone trying to refute their arguments into giving up in frustration.
The heaven/hell explanation I find the most amusing (which is not Calvinist) is the “God would not want to send anyone to Heaven who doesn’t want to be there”. Yeah right, any sane person would prefer an eternity of anguish, utter pain, and boundless suffering over perfect paradise.
Okay, that’s it. When James Dobson finally comes to the end of his life, I’m starting rumors that he grabbed the priest’s ass with his dying breath and asked to be ‘molested once more, like in the good old days.’
So I’m a broken toy? That’s some5thing I actually can believe.
I read one that hell is justified because if God made people go to Heaven against their will it is forced love and forced love is rape.
Now a sane person knows rape has nothing at all to do with love. I found this analogy particuarlly depraved and disgusting.
Not all forced love is rape. Some of it is stalking.
LOL – that’s a good one! Where do they get this stuff from?
Of course, it’s the “against their will” bit that’s insane. I am an atheist. I don’t believe there is a heaven or a hell. But what if, when I die, I find out that I’m wrong? Am I going suddenly going to despise the idea of spending enernity in paradise? Not likely, given the alternative.
So perhaps the safest course of action is to be a non-believer after all. At least that way there’s no chance of coming to hate God, since you don’t believe he exists in the first place!
Putting the fun back into fundamentalist “logic”.
Yup, Craig, that was the argument as related to me. Without, of course, the elaborations I tacked on at the end.
I think the point the person was attempting to make was that we are all inherently worthless, quite literally “broken” by original sin, and that God is doing us a stupendously enormous favor by offering us any possibility of salvation at all, so we’re in no position to protest that it’s a rather clunky and bizarrely arbitrary way to do so.
I obviously have a lot of problems with that idea, such as original sin being both no fault of ours (thanks Adam & Eve!) and yet somehow simultaneously entirely our fault, because no matter how we became broken, the end result is that in our brokenness we now want to commit all these horrible sins.
I can only imagine that the xian heaven would be a hell to Steve Irwin. Only humans (or whatever the unbodied souls are called) and angels; no crocs, no snakes, no sting rays. The man loved the real world too much to be satisfied with some silly other world.
Although it is cool to imagine him stalking an angel and then jumping on it and saying, “Crikey, angels get very upset when you stick your thumb up their an(gel)us. Or do angels have those?
I obviously have a lot of problems with that idea, such as original sin being both no fault of ours (thanks Adam & Eve!)…
Scroll to the bottom 2 paragraphs of this page for the Islamic take on original sin. Trust me, it’s worth it.
I’m thinking maybe I should hire a hitman, with orders to erase anybody who says I renounced rationality and converted to Christianity on my deathbed.
Now that would be a funny, but probably not enforcible clause to add to ones last will and testament:
“And I hereby declare than an account will be opened, into which will be deposited up to $10 million dollars, or a minimum of $1 million, if the total intended sum is not available, in increments of $1 million. Said money will be awarded to the person(s) that eliminates those who make “any” claim about my having a death bed conversion to any religion, in an amount of no less than $1 million each, or devided as necessary, dependent on the number of fools that make such a claims and the number of people that must thus be awarded. This clause is void if at the time of my death my net worth is less than the minimum required to form the account.”
Did I miss anything? Other than it probably being completely illegal that is? lol But it would, I think, get the point across quite well.
Hmm. This whole episode tells you A LOT about the psychological profile of the AIG people. They just couldn’t keep their hands off the Steve Irwin story. First, in a wildly out-of-context obituary story they essentially attacked the beliefs of a dead guy;then they embraced, on very flimsy evidence, an account of his conversion; then, as this was questioned, they backpedaled without admitting any wrongdoing.
That would be bad enough, but the fact that they seem compelled to do all this to Steve Irwin, a beloved figure in Ham’s home country, speaks volumes about how small these people really are….SH
I realize this is a terribly late entry to this thread, but as a “fundie” myself, let me (assuming the person who did so is, in fact, a Christian,) apologize for the ridiculous idea that someone would feel compelled to start the Irwin rumor in the first place. The story and video details of his death were at the time so compelling, and in this day of instant communication, perhaps the rumor was a bad case of “telephone,” where someone (Christian or otherwise) made the comment in jest thinking theirs was a private conversation, but another overheard and wanted to be the first to spread the news to the world via the WWW.
So, again, if in fact some ill-intentioned or “well-intentioned” Christian brother or sister of mine actually started this rumor, please accept my apology. It’s obviously also possible that someone completely unassociated and unfamiliar with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ started the rumor to have exactly this sort of verbal “hand grenade” effect. Either way, Thanks for listening!
David, if you actually read the article, and the statements originally made by Answers In Genesis, you would know that Carl Wieland, a Christian, started the rumor of Mr Irwin’s deathbed conversion to Christianity, right on the heels of Ken Ham’s assurance that, because Steve Irwin did not believe in God in the exact same way Ken Ham believes in God, Steve Irwin was suffering eternal torment in Hell, as will every man, woman, and child who did not believe in God in the exact same way Ken Ham believes in God.
Oh, I did read it. The problem is that not everyone who is introduced as a “Christian” is actually, in fact, a Christian. Often, we see that members of Congress (just as one small example – could say the same for mega-church pastors, Catholic priests, athletes, etc.) who WANT to be known in the media and their personal circles as “Christians” do not actually live their lives in submission to Christ and His commands.
So since I do not personally know Mr. Wieland or Mr. Ham, nor would I definitively be able to assess the validity of their Christianity based on this one reported incident, I was only hoping to provide my viewpoint as a Christian that 1) sometimes, true Christians say and do stupid things that do not honor Christ, and; 2) sometimes people who fraudulently call themselves “Christians” do incredibly evil things (or just stupid things like starting the Iwin rumor.) This only serves to open a door for those who haven’t really examined Jesus Christ as He presented himself to scoff out of hand at the fact that He is our Savior.
My heart always breaks when a true or a fraud Christian’s actions or misdeeds have the side-effect of drawing unsaved people away from the clear and saving message of Christ.
Thanks for the response.
David