Questions

Last week I had a brief post about Ken Ham (Answers in Genesis/The Creation Museum) coming to Japan to spread the creationist/ID gospel.

By a strange coincidence...

The other night I went to the convenience store with my daughter to pick up some ice cream. On the way back she surprised me a bit by suddenly asking me how come there are no dinosaurs any more. After a bit of discussion on the topic, she then turned to the matter of "monkeys" and humans (she's only six so, like a lot of grown-up people, she's still a bit fuzzy on the monkey/ape distinction). "Did people come from monkeys?" she asked. "How?" She seemed satisfied with my very brief and very basic version of natural selection/evolution, but it's clear to me that I'm going to have to brush up a bit, and fast!

I'm absolutely thrilled to hear her ask these kinds of questions. I let her know it, too. (I think she gets a kick out of asking me stuff, as well.)

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Returning to Mr. Ham, this week we find him "Reporting from Japan." Here's the first thing he writes:

As I looked out of my hotel room in Tokyo on Friday morning, I thought of the 13 million people or so who live in Tokyo—and the 130 million who live in all of Japan—most of whom do not know the Lord.

Caught up in Shintoism and Buddhism, Japan has probably only 0.1 percent Christians.

The guy has just traveled halfway around the world to Tokyo (Tokyo!), and he can't even step out of his own blinkered worldview long enough to wonder just how it is that the Japanese have managed to do so much with nary a thought of Jay-sus. What a fucking hick.

In fact Ham has nothing of substance to say about Japan at all, and shows not even the slightest interest in the Japanese as Japanese. To him they are only pagans or potential Christians, nothing more or less. (I'd express in more detail how contemptible I find this idiot to be, but I've already sworn once, and I'm trying to cut down.)

At the end of Ham's "report," he informs us that:

Making such presentations is very tiring for the translator and the presenter. I have to summarize the concepts but keep the talk flowing logically. The translator then has to put it in sentences that make sense—and it is a difficult job when I use terms that are a little out of the ordinary for such meetings (e.g., natural selection, genetics, mutations, etc.).

Read that again, friends, and tell me if it doesn't sound like a bunch of gibberish. Granted, it's no doubt difficult to give a clear presentation through a translator. But, how on earth could terms such as "natural selection, genetics, mutations, etc." be viewed as "a little out of the ordinary" in a discussion ostensibly trying to disprove "natural selection, genetics, mutations, etc."? What kind of double-talk is this?

Or (again!), does Ham somehow think the concepts themselves are beyond the ken of the Japanese, that they don't even have the vocabulary to discuss them? Pathetic. That's all I have to say about that.

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My little girl knows the English names of all the planets, and can recite them in order. She understands what a planet is, and that the earth is a planet, so the idea of something big hitting the earth and messing things up, while maybe a little scary, doesn't seem impossible to her. She knows that the stars are suns, only very far away. She knows that Japan is a country, and that there are other countries, some far away. She's seen a couple of them herself, with her own eyes! She knows that in Canada people speak differently and often do things differently than people in Japan.

At six years old she's already an infinitely more interesting person than an idiot like Ken Ham.