“It Does Not Move”

The earth does, but fundie opinion doesn’t

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
2/17/07

A friend of mine in Texas emailed me a link to Daily Kos, which breathlessly reported, “Wow. Just when you think Republicans can't get any crazier, we find out that the powerful chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, Warren Chisum, doesn't even believe that the earth revolves around the sun.

“Still, it's enough to set the world a-spinning that the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee in the House, distributed to legislators a memo pitching crazed wingers who believe the earth stands still – doesn't spin on its axis or revolve around the Sun – that Copernicus was part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Old Testament.” A copy of the memo can be found here.

Daily Kos then added, “Head on over to FixedEarth.com, and you'd swear this was a parody site.” So I did.

I read the seven page article debunking “geosynchronous orbit.” Seems that our Kabbalic masters hid from us the fact that electromagnetic forces are far stronger than gravity. He demonstrates thusly: ““Electromagnetic forces are infinitely more powerful than gravity… As we know, a child can test this statement with a plain magnet or an electromagnet and a coin on the ground. Gravity holds the coin on the ground, but pass the magnet over it at some appropriate height and….”

And, well, nothing much. Coins aren’t magnetic. If he’s outside on a sunny day, he might see the magnet’s shadow move in relation to the coin after a while. But Truth can always overcome a little inaccuracy, and, undeterred, the author (the “scientific paper” is unsigned) gets to the point after only a few minutes of Jew-bashing. “From Newton till today the standard mathematics which attempt to explain all space phenomena centers on the concept of ‘gravity’. The apple and all else falls to the ground and this observed fact needs a name. Call it ‘gravity’. No problem.”

A favorite rejoinder of brights to people who insist that evolution is “only a theory” (usually Communist, Satanic, or Jewish) is that “Gravity is only a theory, too.” This is often followed by a friendly invitation to step off a tall object and show how inconclusive a theory can be.

The author continues: “But to attribute the formation of the earth and all else in the universe to gravitational forces pulling and shaping and rotating and orbiting Big Bang debris into its present mind-blowing order and function and precision is more than a bit off the wall when you think about it, isn’t it? Take one quick example, viz., the matter of tides on the earth. Here we are told that the scientific explanation is that the Moon’s weak gravity stretches the earth like a rubber ball and thus controls tides on both sides of the earth. This utterly sappy, contra-scientific nonsense has become a scientific “fact” that is in all the books. How can we have been brought to believe such pseudo-scientific balderdash?! Well, Kabbalic ‘science’ (‘falsely so called’: I Tim. 6:20,21) rules over the world’s ‘knowledge’ today, that’s how. This ‘knowledge’ must have a non-Biblical, naturalistic ‘explanation’ for the tidal phenomena; so ‘gravity’ got the job.”

You see? Just a Kabbalic Konspiracy. Or maybe that is a Qabbalic Qonspiracy. Spelling may vary, consult your local listings. It’s those darn Jews! They kept hidden the fact that EMF is more powerful than gravity, limiting the secret to the entire “scientific community,” most high school students, any interested laymen, and the television show “Nova.”

Of course, this isn’t too unusual for the internet. The world wide web is a splendid galaxy of crackpots, conspiracy mongers, revisionists, paranoids, and the delusional. If you don’t take any of it too seriously, it can make for hours of entertaining reading. Yes, some of them can be hateful, but they are also pretty much harmless.

Reading that the Head of the Texas Legislature Appropriations Committee was passing this nonsense around in the Lege was disturbing. I know that politicians, especially southern politicians, love to play the role of “reg’lar ole folks”, dumber than a bag of hammers and more ignorant than a blind chicken. You would think that “reg’lar folks” might sense that there’s something vaguely insulting about all this, but apparently that never happens. Maybe the politicians know what they’re doing after all.

But this goes beyond charmingly dumb and into the realm of “crazier than a crack house mouse.”

This all came to my attention scant hours after I saw the documentary, “Jesus Camp.”

If you haven’t seen this amazing movie, I recommend it.

The movie doesn’t ridicule evangelicals, or try to set them in an unfavorable light. The filmmakers, on their website, say they “make sure that they [evangelicals] were shown in a human, three-dimensional light. The children come across as kind, passionate and intelligent. Pastor Becky Fischer is a very likeable and real person, both on and off the screen.”

They weren’t scoffing. They were curious. And the movie clearly shows people who are kind, intelligent, and loving. In fact, with the exception of Ted Haggard, all the people portrayed in it were thrilled that the filmmakers were so accurate and fair. And in Haggard’s case, I suspect that, given the events that occurred in his life after the movie was released, that it was pretty obviously that he was making a play for the cameraman in his scene, and probably thought he was being a bit blatant. But he’s cured now, I hear.

To me, the movie showed a movement that combines religion, cultism, and addictive behavior. What the kids saw as “the spirit of Christ entering them” I saw as a powerful type of psychomotor orgasm, a release of endorphins that made the experience emotionally compelling – and addictive.

Combined with the hard right politics that now informs the movement, the kids quote Leviticus rather than the Sermon on the Mount, and gaze worshipfully at a life-size cardboard cut-out of Putsch. Endless propaganda from CDs, peers and mentors persuades them that evolution is a satanist plot, and that the “enemy” are those who believe that the United States is secular and free and that Jesus does not have dominion over it. To them, in other words, the “enemy” is the Constitution, the men who wrote it, and the people who live by it.

And they wave flags and crosses as they say this, unaware that they betray the values of both.

It isn’t so bad that there’s a crackpot on the internet who is a foe of the Copernican model. It isn’t even so bad that Texas has a highly-placed elected official who believes it. Texas, after all, elects fools and crackpots.

What is very spooky is that evangelicals make up 75,000,000 people in the US, a third of the population, and they are ripe to be easily persuaded that God says that the earth doesn’t move – or that democracy has to go