There are times when people write things on the internet that are the intellectual equivalent of tightening a waist belt around a major artery until your eyes cross and limbs go limp.
This is one of those times.
There were several particularly, harrowingly dumb statements from politicians and media personalities that stood out this past week. Among them were Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle suggesting that young women were too busy being hot and care-free to vote or serve on juries properly, and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) saying that gay people in the military is a bad idea because of all those massages they’d be giving each other. (If you know anything about Gohmert, that won’t surprise you.) But the award for the most impressive of the harrowingly dumb things said or written this past week goes to Joseph Farah.
You might remember Farah. He’s a 60-year-old New Jersey native who runs a far-right website called WorldNetDaily. He was one of the leading voices in the Obama-wasn’t-born-here (or “birther”) movement. He also views marriage equality as the new tyranny.
And here he comes to troll you on God’s creation.
In a WND column, Farah reminds his audience that Oct. 23 is the day that Archbishop James Ussher determined was the day the Lord created Earth in 4004 BC. Therefore, we may have just celebrated Earth’s 6,028th birthday.
Obviously, it’s hard to find a reputable scientist or elementary school kid who believes that Planet Earth is a few thousand, not billions, years aged.
But Farah scribbles as rebuttal:
I know what some of you are thinking: “Farah, what about the dinosaurs that were tens of millions of years old? How do you explain that?” Quite simply, I don’t believe it. Throughout man’s history, in every culture, we have stories, pictures and sculptures depicting dragons and leviathans and sea serpents. Are we to believe these were all concocted in man’s imagination? Even the Bible references such observations. If behemoths like the one described in chapter 40 of the Book of Job somehow threatened the Bible account of history, I don’t think it would be there.
But here’s the bottom line: Is it crazier for me to believe the world is around 6,000 years old than it is to accept as scientific fact that it is actually millions or billions of years old?
Where’s the proof? Either way.
smdh.
Farah, of course, is not alone in holding this acrobatically irrational view. Roughly 40 percent of Americans seem to endorse some Creationist concept of history and origin.
So, cool.
