What I love most about evangelical Christian ministries are the leaps in logic many of their spiritual leaders take when trying to keep scripture current. As humanity progresses scientifically, finding factual explanations for things once attributed to an invisible monster Yahweh, it seems that the evangelical communities are constantly backpedaling, trying as they might to rationalize the bizarre of the Christian Bible with proven facts that are, for all intents and purposes, fundamentally at conflict with these broadly-worded, open-ended scriptures.
These attempts at reconciling scripture and science are, to me, more entertaining than instances when evangelical Christian ministries just outright deny that science and attack it.
A Tennessee pastor’s recent oddball rant opens with a seemingly innocuous question:
“Now, how many of you have heard of Mount Shasta?”
Apparently, no one in the congregation has heard of Mount Shasta. But, he continues:
“Mount Shasta is a UFO hotspot. Now I want you to notice the connections and correlations that are made here.”
There it is. The pastor has already admitted to his flock that this part of his sermon has no concrete basis, but instead relies on “connections and correlations,” like he’s some kind of evangelical Dale Gribble.
Over the next several minutes, this pastor make phenomenal progress in piecing together Biblical ideas with batty folklore, turning what is supposed to be a speech on scripture into an X-File. Citing an article written for UCKYA about an interview with Paul Dale “Demon Warrior” Roberts, a paranormal investigator (or “Esoteric Detective”) and comic book artist, the pastor finds “connections and correlations” — involving such things as Lumerians, UFOs, and cryptids — that result in grandiose claims that scientists are abandoning evolution and now looking to the “spirit world” for answers to life’s great mysteries.
“A lot of scientists, a lot of them — and there’s really no way to know specifically because of political correctness and the pressure that’s put upon them — a lot of scientists have abandoned Darwin. But because of fear of losing their jobs, fear of losing the ability to produce papers, uh, fear, fear, peer pressure, they have to keep it in and they don’t come out with it, but here and there some do. They have abandoned Darwin. They have abandoned evolution. And the reason they have is because it — well, there’s a lot of reasons — but they know that it is a fairy tale, that it’s not based in fact. And so by doing this, what do they do? They need to find out ‘where do we come from, why are we here?’ So instead of dealing with Darwin — and they say the Earth is about 6.5 billion with a ‘b’ years old — instead of dealing with Darwin, they jettison Darwin, and now they’re looking up and past and they’re getting into the spirit world and into the paranormal world and they two of them are — they compliment each other — and they begin to get into something that their scientific books know nothing about.”
Evangelical Christian ministries promote some seriously batshit stuff, but this is by far the most out-there six minutes and forty-five seconds of preaching I think I have ever heard. It’s one thing to peddle unsubstantiated theories about an invisible man in the sky prone to paradoxes (after all, that legend is why Christians gather in the first place), but to use crap one would find in the weird part of YouTube to discredit scientists and lie about an abandonment of evolution is without question one of the most intellectually-deficient, but amazingly hilarious things I, or really anyone, have ever heard.
I mean, this congregation is just one or two sermons away from becoming a mass-suiciding UFO cult.
Does this mean that evangelical Christian ministries will soon adopt a Space Pope?
Featured image by Matthaeus Merian, available in the public domain.
h/t Raw Story
