The Flintstones was a documentary...

Breaking NEWS! The Religious-Right-Neo-Con-Reactionary version of  Shakesville and related sites has done us all an amazing favor. Bishop Ussher's account of the beginning of ancient history from the Creation on October 4, 4004 BCE is finally available in English, ...for homeschoolers and pastors and similarly enlightened folk everywhere. Or, should I use VOLK? You can get it by mail, or at any creation, Dinosaurs and Us-type Museum, right next to the Triceratops Petting Zoo.

"Using the Bible as his timeline, Ussher began with the death of Nebuchadnezzar as a reliable date and worked backward through the genealogies of the Old Testament to arrive at the date of creation — 4004 B.C. Integrating biblical history (around 15% of the text is from the Bible) with secular (around 85% of the material is from non-biblical sources), Ussher wrote this masterpiece. ( AXE snark: I'm confused...how is the date of old Nebuchanezzar's death reliable? On what sort of specious logic did JU base that? Carbondating? Hardly...and, this period of "research" predated modern geology, palenthology, and things like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ussher was working from the King James Bible to prove the authenticity of the King James Bible. As a work of history it ranks right up there with...fuck, I don't know, the Aeneid.)

"Considered not only a literary classic, but also an accurate reference,(AXE Snark: By whom? Bob Jones? Sarah Palin? William Jennings Bryan? ) "The Annals of the World" was so highly regarded for its preciseness that the timeline from it was included in the margins of many King James Version Bibles throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, calling to mind the fact that the earth is only around 6,000 years old. The fact that Ussher’s chronology has been deleted from Bibles is evidence of the Church’s backsliding into the deceptive ideas of evolution. (AXE Snark: Once again, circular logic and just irritation. There's no more reason to cite Ussher as an authoritative reference in a published edition of the bible than to cite Mallory in a history of England. By the early  20th century, there had been over 150 years of biblical criticism including advanced linguistic and historical theology. Ussher was no more relevant than Mallory, and no where near as fun as Mallory.)

"The Annals of the World" is a necessary addition to any church library, pastor’s library, or any library — public or personal. The entire text has been updated from 17th-century English to present-day vernacular( AXE Snark -- The King James Version of the Bible is a marvelous piece of poetry and literature; one of the abominations of the 20th Century was applying contemporary "vernancular" to it. Frankly, if you get the translation right -- and translating from 18th Century Latin can be as tricky as translating from the 2nd Century Greek if not more so! Particularly since the majority of folks writing and thinking and speaking in Latin from the 18th Century onwards were Catholic and largely Jesuit! who have problems with bullshit, unless they're writing it themselves.) in a five-year project commissioned by Master Books. Containing many human-interest stories from the original historical documents collected by Ussher, this is more than just a history book — it’s a work of history."(AXE Snark: Yes it is. But, it's like reading Ptolemy for astronomy or Galen for medicine -- it's an interesting part of the history of ideas, but that's all it is. It tells more about the enlightenment and the effort to understand things and put them in context as opposed to blind belief. )

Thanks to Ed Brayton and Dispatches  from the Culture Wars for this one. As one of his commentators put it,

"Ed's afternoon routine:

1) Scan Wingnut Daily."

He sacrifices himself so the rest of us don't have to actually go over there ourselves. Just like everything you really need to know about Fox News you can get from The Daily Show.

Comments

[Rick98c]

Yes, you should indeed use the word Volk for this Volkisch bewegung.

[Agi]

I'm going to file this one under "people who should be euthanized"