As promised, I saw this crappy movie last night. I’ve got a pile of notes, and will provide a more thorough review this weekend, but just to quickly summarize:

• There’s no story here. It’s built around the 6-day creation myth with a deep-voiced sonorous slow-talker telling the story of Genesis 1, but it’s almost like an afterthought. It’s a framing device that isn’t actually used effectively as a narrative structure.

• The real story is that they interviewed a bunch of creationists, who sit alone in different rooms and who rant at the camera, saying stupid, familiarly tiresome things. They then sliced up these interviews into tiny snippets, interleaved them with each other and with some CGI, and then tossed them in a large mixing bowl with some vinaigrette. This is called “editing”.

• The CGI is terrible. Seriously cheap. Everything from dinosaurs to humans has a kind of rubbery, plasticky surface in shades of brown — although Adam is a notably pale shade of brown.
  It’s very low rez, too. There are a couple of scenes where they’re showing off hominid skulls for comparison, and the detail is pathetic — they look like the kind of cheap plastic skulls you’d pick up from the Walmart Halloween decorating section.

• They had a dodge for when the CGI was egregiously bad: defocus! They were constantly blurring everything, which I suppose they thought was artsy, but was clearly to hide the fact that they couldn’t render convincing detail worth a crap. They also did this with the creationist interviews: they’d occasionally blur the person, or slowly move the camera around, and then you’d end up with this segment of the interview where the subject was drifting off to the right side of the screen.

• One of the reasons they’d move the subject out of the center was that they had these cheesy, 3-D animated titles that would rotate and also drift — so you’d start with camera on the subject, then you’d see these bronzey metallic letters appear on the left, like “ENCE”, let’s say, and you’d be wondering what that was about, and the camera would wander over to the floating keyword as the speaker was ignored, so that you could finally figure out that the magic word was “EVIDENCE” or whatever. It was painfully gimmicky.

I’ll go through some of the actual content this weekend, but for now, let it suffice to say that there was nothing new here, they were creationists making the same old tired assertions from ignorance that they’ve been saying since the 1960s — dating methods are circular, there are no genetic mechanisms for increasing the amount of information in an organism, we can explain all of geology with the Great Flood catastrophe, if you don’t accept Genesis then you’ll reject the Gospels and burn in Hell, you know, the stuff you can get in a Chick tract. It was nothing but old creationist arguments presented in a particularly incoherent manner with irrelevant computer graphics.

Oh, and it ends with so much Jesus. All the interview subjects babble on at length about salvation and God and Our Lord Jesus Christ and how God clothed himself in flesh in order to redeem our sins by dying a horrible, painful death, and that shit never makes any sense.

But I’m going to The Genesis Movie tonight. I figure this is my only chance before it is relegated to church basements around the country. I’ll be at the Parkwood 18 theater in Waite Park if anyone wants to join me in misery.

Just so you know, though, I do follow the Prime Directive in these events — no interference with the primitive, crude, barbaric civilizations that put on these ignorant demonstrations. I’m there to observe; I might ask questions of citizens who are open to that sort of thing, but otherwise, only respectful behavior while I take notes on the foolishness on display. If your intent is disruption, no no no, stay away from me.
There is a good chance I’ll get thrown out even if I’m quiet and polite, so I don’t need need any assistance from rowdy compatriots.

This day is just done. I’m at the MnSTA conference on science education today, speaking about the state of evolution education this afternoon (there is bad news, and there is good news, but the bad news is surprisingly manageable). Once I’m done babbling, I’m rushing off through rush hour traffic to catch a plane to Skepticon, sorta. In my quest for a cheap flight that was compatible with my awkwardly full schedule, I’m catching a flight to Baltimore (?), with a connection to Atlanta, and from there to Springfield, Missouri. This is too complicated. I’m already scheduled to not get in until tomorrow morning, and I have a feeling that something is going to break and who knows when I’ll arrive. Everyone will be all partied out by the time I drag myself in.

Anyway, you know the drill. Behave yourselves while I’m out of touch, spit venom at the trolls, and I’ll clean up the mess tomorrow morning.

Ken Ham is one of them. He has been invited to speak at a homeschooling conference in Calgary, because homeschooling is infested with the rot of religious bullshit (yes, I know, some homeschoolers are dedicated to teaching well, but if you’re in it because you don’t like that there sekyoolar sciencey stuff, you aren’t qualified). He knows nothing about education or science, but he pretends to in order to sell more lies, and then he gets the unwarranted respect of mobs of ignoramuses.

It should also discredit the homeschool organization, which is demonstrating no sense of discriminating judgment or respect for science standards.

Calgarian Paul Ens says he walked away from his Christian faith after reading Ham’s creationist literature and started a YouTube channel dedicated to debunking Ham’s teachings.

“As a citizen of Alberta and a father, I’m very concerned that Ken Ham is being brought in on multiple levels — primarily that he is a science denier. He denies evolution, he denies the age of the Earth,” Ens said.

He says the fact Alberta’s Home Education Association has booked Ham to speak raises questions.

“It signals to me that this homeschool group is not serious about following provincial curriculum or proper science education for their children,” he said.

I think this person has the right idea.

#KenHam invited to keynote speak for Alberta homeschooling convention in 2018. Hey #Alberta #Atheists maybe it's time for a demonstration at the convention. #ExChristian #atheist https://t.co/c8FGYwm3km

— ((Wendy McClelland)) (@wendyweb47) November 8, 2017

Yes, atheists of Calgary, get out there and protest. I think, though, that this is also the perfect opportunity to cooperate with Christians and other religious groups to protest — Ken Ham is doing a phenomenal job of tainting the entirety of Christianity, so I would hope there are a lot of mainstream religious groups who ought to be eager to distance themselves from him. This is a situation where a united front to oppose bullshit would be advantageous.

Remember that very promising Global Atheist Conference to be held in Melbourne in February? Sadly, I just got word that the event has been canceled. I hope you didn’t reserve your flight already!

I was reading this thing by Hans Fiene — you know, this Hans Fiene:

Hans Fiene is a Lutheran pastor in Illinois and the creator of Lutheran Satire, a series of comical videos intended to teach the Lutheran faith.

He’s writing about the latest mass murder in which a gunmen slaughtered people in a church. He’s explaining that this is not the time to be criticizing religion for the failure of prayer to protect them.

However, we should all recognize that pointing to a couple dozen warm corpses and saying, “Fat lot of good your Jebus-begging did you” is an act of profound ugliness.

OK, OK, I can see his point. This is a tragedy, and it’s a little unfair to chastise the dead for the failure of their faith. I could agree that maybe this is an appropriate time for empathy, rather than mockery. But wait…that isn’t his point at all.

When those saints of First Baptist Church were murdered yesterday, God wasn’t ignoring their prayers. He was answering them.

Say what?

It may seem, on the surface, that God was refusing to give such protection to his Texan children. But we are also praying that God would deliver us from evil eternally. Through these same words, we are asking God to deliver us out of this evil world and into his heavenly glory, where no violence, persecution, cruelty, or hatred will ever afflict us again.

So those dead church-goers were praying for God to kill them? Dude, that is fucked up. If it’s bad for atheists to mock the sincerity of the faithful, it’s also bad to pretend that the deceased were praying for their demise, and God was being nice by sending a gunman to blow them away.

Next, he talks about how Jesus was mocked by the priests and then killed.

Yet God proved his son’s divinity by, three days later, lifting him up out of the death those men gave him. Despite the chief priests, elders, and scribes doing all they could to silence the one who claimed to be the savior of the world, God turned their hatred into the catalyst of the world’s salvation.

Twenty six people were killed on Sunday. So we can expect them to rise from the dead on, oh, Tuesday?

Despite the horror that madman made the saints of First Baptist endure, those who endured it with faith in Christ have received his victory. Although the murderer filled their eyes with terror, God has now filled them with his glory. Although he persecuted them with violence, God seized that violence and has now used it to deliver his faithful into a kingdom of peace. Although this madman brought death to so many, God has used that death to give them the eternal life won for them in the blood of Jesus.

Dude. Fucked up. Was the terror a necessary part of their ‘rescue’ into heaven? The blood and pain and fear? This Jesus guy is one evil, nasty character.

And, hang on, they had to endure it with faith in Christ to get this glorious reward of a terrible death. What about the ones with no faith, or who lost faith in this moment of unjust torment? If they’re burning in hell, then this was an awful and futile exercise. What about the people who weren’t delivered into heaven, and instead just watched loved ones die? Are the survivors hellbound and undeserving of the sweet, sweet release of a bullet plowing through their lungs so they drown in their own blood?

Those who persecute the church and those who mock Christians for trusting in Almighty God rather than Almighty Government may believe that the bloodshed in Texas proves the futility of prayer. But we believers see the shooting in Texas as proof of something far different—proof that Christ has counted us worthy to suffer dishonor for his name and proof that no amount of dishonor, persecution, or violence can stop him from answering our prayer to deliver us from evil.

We already know that God’s aim is terrible, but now you’re telling me someone could pray to get over their cold, and God will interpret that to mean he should deliver them out of this evil world and into his heavenly glory with a bullet to the brain? STOP PRAYING, everyone — you might be wishing for a puppy, and God will think you’re begging for bears to eat you.

Jesus, Hans. I hope the Lord answers your prayers soon, and that your ascent into heaven is preceded by truly majestic quantities of dishonor and violence. You deserve it. Keep on prayin’, buddy.

I hope your little essay about groveling before the savage cruelty of your god wasn’t more of your version of “satire”, though, because that ain’t funny or enlightening.

All you have to do is wind him up and watch him go. Michael Shermer won’t shut up even when he’s threatening someone with lawsuits. Phil Torres received a nastygram from him, and paraphrased him in a public post.

What makes it especially amusing is that Shermer then joins in the comments, repeats his bluster at length, and goes on and on about how awful he finds Torres.

Anyone remember this ‘interview’ by Ian Murphy with Shermer? He is so predictable.