{"id":9680,"date":"2007-01-20T10:52:19","date_gmt":"2007-01-20T15:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9680.html"},"modified":"2007-01-20T10:52:19","modified_gmt":"2007-01-20T15:52:19","slug":"this-week-in-god-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/this-week-in-god-45\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in God"},"content":{"rendered":"

First up from the God Machine is a news item<\/a> that sounds apocryphal, but a) it appeared in a fairly credible newspaper; and b) I can’t find any reports debunking it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

“No! Nein! Nyet!” was the commission’s categorical answer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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”?
\n
\nNext up is a story by way of my friend Ron Chusid<\/a>, about the soon-to-be-open, $27 million creationist museum<\/a>, where visitors can learn how “true” The Flintstones really were.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“Mocking publicity is free publicity,” spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

As for why a non-believer would pay money to visit the center, no one’s quite sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}