Bring me the bones of a Sleestak!

[elfs]

One of the classic creationist canards is the old, "Until someone brings me a fossil of type Y, I have no reason to believe in the transition of X to Z. Where is the Y fossil?" The half-man, half-monkey, or as Congressman Jack King (R-GA) recently demanded, half man, half fish, and half-newt all rolled into one.

Well, if you go to the Biblical view, you'll see that, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent was a very odd thing. It talked, for one thing. For another, after the Fall God curses it to "crawl on your belly and eat the dust," implying that it had limbs of some kind. It probably looked like a Sleestak from Land of the Lost.

Therefore, I have a challenge for Representative Jack King: Until you bring me the fossilized skeleton of a Sleestak, I have no reason to believe the Book of Genesis to be true.

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Pfft. The book of Leviticus says that God commanded that people could not eat 4-legged flying creatures.

So a griffin, pegasus, or flying dragon should also suffice.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's true, it's just not fact.

The whole Garden thing is a big shaggy dog story with the punchline "Don't talk to women who listen to snakes." (basically a slur on several of the local goddess religions)

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Sigh... I remember watching "Land of The Lost" as a kid, and loving it. The show had some actual science fiction authors (one episode was written by none other than Larry Niven), and some seriously SF concepts.

It is unfortunate that Hollywood decided to, yet again, take one of my fond childhood memories, consume it, and excrete a modern "product" I wouldn't piss on if it was on fire.

It's depressing that there are still people who inhabit a modern, industrialized, 21st century country, and yet reject basic science because it challenges their conception of what their sacred writings assert. I guess it's a good thing that quantum mechanics is still considered to be obscure by most of the populace... it's conclusions are far more challenging to an ancient mindset than are those of evolutionary theory, IMO.

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

How about a flying squirrel? ;p

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Since snakes did start with legs and lose them, one would expect to find transitional forms, and indeed we have. Can't help you with the talking anthropomorphic part, though.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Oh Bullwinkle! That trick never works!

Heh. And here I was being amused by the ramifications of "Two legs good, four legs bad".

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Why should anyone believe the book of Genesis to be true? Only the stupidest lunatics believe it to be anything but a parable. Even the Catholic church says so.

Because be honest. If god knew then even as much as we know now, (he's been purported to know everything, therefore knows more about the universe than we know now), what would he say to a stone-aged goat hearder with intentions to rule the Hebrews? They didn't even have words for numbers past *40*, and even then they used that to mean "Many". Would this god speak to Moses about a universe billions of years old, and unfathomably huge, down to DNA and germs and evolution and dinosaurs?

Don't be silly. The poor man's eyes would glaze over faster than you can say "serpent". It would be like trying to explain the internal workings of a computer to a 2 year old. Noone could understand any of this without a lifetime of preparatory education.

Even better, would any immortal being that is supposedly everywhere at once, have any concept of *time*? What would a day mean to this god? Or a year? Or a billion years?