In case you thought the Internet couldn’t become any weirder, one parent is on a mission to make the dinosaurs go extinct … again. The mother’s protest has gone viral, garnering the world’s collective side-eye with a bizarre rant about dinosaurs that’s so weird it sounds like a hoax.
“At my children’s school, several children were left in tears after one of their classmates (who had evidently been exposed to dinosaurs),
became bestially-minded and ran around the classroom roaring and
pretending to be a dinosaur.”
As an actual paleontologist I can assure all of you that people like this exist in spades and they show up to paleontological conventions with angry signs and need to love themselves more. I was once stopped on a sidewalk in Denver on my way into a conference by a man who told me that I was doing the devil’s work and ruining America by trying to, “reanimate God’s aborted creations.” Who hurt you?
Wait, God provides abortions now?? What will the anti-choicers say?
I will never forgive God for aborting the dinosaurs.
When I was a wee little cynic and my then-stepfather was a mega-fundie, I went to church camp that taught Young Earth Creationism and I put up my hand and said “But what about dinosaurs?”
Everybody else was allowed to go out and play freeze tag, but two counselors had me stay after so they could explain that God put dinosaur skeletons in the ground to test the faith of paleontologists.
This was a very foolish thing for them to say, for a lot of reasons, but primary among them was that asking a small child to choose between God and Triceratops does not end well for God. I had always wanted a riding Triceratops. (I did not have any opinion on riding gods.) And I had a lot of books about dinosaurs and furthermore, I knew a lot more about the topic than the counselors did, so my wee little cynic powers were engaged and I gazed beady-eyed at the counselors and even though I was a conflict averse child, I do not think I gave them the answers that they wanted.
I was eventually allowed to play freeze tag.
My mother was very angry to hear about this later, because she never bought into that particular God-is-waiting-to-yell-gotcha! philosophy.
(And the last time I spoke to my then-stepfather, it was to get into a knock-down drag-out fight about whether or not ammonites were really extinct. God, that man was an ass…)
My run-up to this story is that we didn’t have a lot of money and my parents had the vague idea that instead of running around in the forest covered in blood all day, they wanted me to meet other homeschooled children. So they sent me to the Baptists. (Religion costs nothing! Maybe she’ll… make friends!)
The Baptists sent me back.
I was 14. I was in university biology classes. I had a lot of rage. I was an awkward, brilliant, outraged little girl who was very very used to Defending Her Fucking Corner. (That’s where the pickaxe came in.)
So when a visiting preacher/lecturer came to deliver a Powerpoint on the perfidies of scientific evidence, I puffed up like an excited owl. MY TIME HAD COME.
“WHAT ABOUT THE DINOSAURS??!” was my creative and original opening gambit.
“What you have to understand,” the Christian lecturer told me gravely, “Is that after they were on the Ark -“
My mind did a handbrake turn.
I was completely disarmed.
DINOSAURS ON THE ARK?
DUDE.
LISTEN.
LET ME EXPLAIN TO YOU THE PLOT.
YOU WANT YOUR DINOSAURS IN YOUR BIBLE FANFICTION?
YOU GOTTA KILL THEM IN THE FLOOD.
BENEFITS OF HAVING THE DINOSAURS KILLED OFF IN THE FLOOD:
explains why dinosaurs could be BEFORE
explains why no dinosaurs NOW
geology
ties in with very inarguable palaeontological evidence in a satisfying way
you ALREADY have a built-in extinction myth here HITCH YOUR STORY TO THAT
GEOLOGY – DUDE LISTEN YOU COULD CONCEIVABLY LAY DOWN ALL KINDS OF STONE DEPOSITS WITH A FLOOD
HELL CATACLYSMIC FLOODS WOULD EVEN EXPLAIN SOME OF THE FUNKINESS OF THE FOSSIL RECORD
THIS LITERALLY GIVES YOU A LEG TO STAND ON
DUDE
I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU
He did not believe that I was trying to help him.
sir please think of the children please please sir if you’re gonna do this you gotta play within the bounds of a reasonable mythopoeic framework
i ain’t asking for the Hero with a Thousand Faces, i ain’t asking for a religious praxis seamlessly melded with a framework of scientific evidence here
I JUST CAME HERE TO FIGHT
I AIN’T READY TO REWRITE YOUR ORIGIN MYTHS FIRST
I am only a tiny scientist now but someday I will be big and strong
please do not leave me with THIS as an origin story
but he left me with that as my origin story
oh man I’m still so upset about it.
all of the evo-bio/geology/palaeontology friends have these really solid “and THAT was when I realized THEIR GOD WAS NOT MY GOD” stories and I’m just like
“I COULDN’T EVEN FIGHT WITH HIM. This wasn’t even him bringing a knife to a gun fight! This was him throwing down his knife, going “bibble-bibble-bibble” and then flinging himself into a river. And what can I say? It worked. It disarmed me. Like some kind of Christian weasel war dance.”
Dear saints and martyrs and assorted other holies, I may have had problems with oher people in my childhood but they were never THESE problems.
…Just as well because I too was one of those “I know what is true and this crap you’re feeding me is NOT TRUE” children.
