The sight of creationist arses

Posted on April 7, 2006 by acb

I had not realised the aggression of modern creationists. They are all over Nature’s newsblog report on Tiktaalik. One of them drew a really awe-inspiring smackdown from Henry Gee. This gained its effectiveness becasue it was theological — a rebuke from someone who can actually read the bible in the original. There is a sense in which American protestantism has grown much more blindly authoritarian since the nineteenth century, when educated people could actually read Greek, Latin and Hebrew. But of course this isn’t really an argument about facts. It consists almost entirely of young men coming in and showing their arses to the enemy. I don’t know what can cure this, so long as they stay at a safe distance.

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9 Responses to The sight of creationist arses

  1. des von bladet says:
    April 7, 2006 at 11:00 am

    In which era did the ambient educatedness of American gentiles include a reading knowledge of Hebrew?

  2. acb says:
    April 7, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    I think you’ll find if you went to Harvard in the eighteenth century that’s what you’ll have learnt. The place started off as a seminary; and Greek and Latin will certainly have been part of the elite education in the nineteenth century.

    Next thing you’ll be telling me that the von Bladets couldn’t afford a tutor who spoke Greek. I think of the poor man in his little attic over the coach house in the west wing of the ancestral mansion somwhere in Livonia, huddled around a smoky fire of damp incunabula which he can no longer read. I just want to weep when I think of it.

  3. Sedulia says:
    April 8, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    The Yale University coat of arms includes Hebrew on the book; it’s supposed to be Umim and Thummim from the Bible. The earliest U.S. universities were established for Episcopal/ Anglican clergymen who were indeed expected to learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew. It was certainly fairly widespread for educated people to read Latin and often Greek.

    I think it’s actually reassuring to realize that a lot of the worst rudeness on the internet is from very young people.

  5. Mrs Tilton says:
    April 8, 2006 at 10:18 pm

    Yea, even unto our degenerate recent days, Yalies (‘אורים ותמים’) attending sporting events against Harvard (‘Veritas’) are able to make literate jibes against their opponents by chanting that ‘Your veritas sux if it ain’t got that lux‘. Oh, for the old days of humanist schooling.

  6. Sirocco says:
    April 9, 2006 at 5:12 pm

    Greek and Latin will certainly have been part of the elite education in the nineteenth century.

    One theology student in 19th century Norway was rebuked by his examinator thus: “What! Is the candidate not in command of Old Bulgarian?!”

  7. des von bladet says:
    April 10, 2006 at 3:47 pm

    Of course we had a Greek tutor! Until we had to burn him to keep warm, at least. It is only the tongue of the Hebrews that we utterly neglected and we cannot say we account it much of a loss.

  8. acb says:
    April 10, 2006 at 3:59 pm

    Mrs T: — your Hebrew has gone all garbled on the comments page. Please advise before anyone claims it is all Greek to them. I lack to skill to unicode it.

  9. Mrs Tilton says:
    April 10, 2006 at 8:25 pm

    Goodness, that’s garbled indeed. Let’s try again:

    אורים ותמים

    If it still won’t work, in transliteration it’s urim v tummim, which Yale puts on its arms and is please to deem equivalent to the ‘lux et veritas’ in the motto below.

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