First up from the God Machine is a news item that sounds apocryphal, but a) it appeared in a fairly credible newspaper; and b) I can’t find any reports debunking it.
The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.
The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The commission’s damning of the letter “X” came in response to a Ministry of Trade query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman for a new service carrying the English name “Explorer.”
“No! Nein! Nyet!” was the commission’s categorical answer.
Why? Well, never mind that none of the so-called scholars manning the upper ranks of the religious outfit can speak or read a word of English. But their experts who examined the English word “explorer” were struck by how suspicious that “X” appeared. In a kingdom where Friday preachers routinely refer to Christians as pigs and infidel crusaders, even a twisted cross ranks as an abomination.
If this story is true, it has to be one of the stranger religion stories I’ve ever seen in a long while. Banning an “X” because it reminds someone of a cross? Wouldn’t it make more sense — if, by “sense,” you mean following a twisted strain of logic — to ban a lower-case “t”?
Next up is a story by way of my friend Ron Chusid, about the soon-to-be-open, $27 million creationist museum, where visitors can learn how “true” The Flintstones really were.
Ken Ham’s sprawling creation museum isn’t even open yet, but an expansion is already underway in the state-of-the art lobby, where grunting dinosaurs and animatronic humans coexist in a Biblical paradise.
A crush of media attention and packed preview sessions have convinced Ham that nearly half a million people a year will come to Kentucky to see his Biblically correct version of history.
“I think we’ll be surprised at how many people come,” Ham said as he dodged dozens of designers working to finish exhibits in time for the May 28 opening.
The $27 million project, which also includes a planetarium, a special-effects theater, nature trails and a small lake, is privately funded by people who believe the Bible’s first book, Genesis, is literally true.
For them, a museum showing Christian schoolchildren and skeptics alike how the earth, animals, dinosaurs and humans were created in a six-day period about 6,000 years ago — not over millions of years, as evolutionary science says — is long overdue.
Officials at the “museum” are aware of the fact that they’re being mocked and ridiculed for spending $27 million to build a center to present pseudoscience, but they don’t seem to mind.
“Mocking publicity is free publicity,” spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said.
People behind the attraction also admit that the “museum’s” mission is to “share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with nonbelievers.” Indeed, Looy acknowledged that they’ve hired a chaplain, who’ll be on hand to help convert visitors in need of “guidance.”
As for why a non-believer would pay money to visit the center, no one’s quite sure.