Overmoralising Factual Questions

It has happened to me, that fellow Christians (including Catholics) seem to suspect me of promoting Eastern Spirituality just because I consider Mahabharata and Ramayana partially factual.

Note, I said partially. Note too, what I "filter out" is what is incompatible with the true religion.

Note, I consider that part of what caused Mahabharata and Ramayana to be written and part of what causes them to be presented (including in Rama showing up in Mahabharata along with Krishna) as Ramayana first, and Mahabharata a thousand years later is, on my view, the "Proto-Hindoos" (if I may coin the word for what could well be pre-Vedic world views just after Babel) were deliberately trying to filter out both the Flood and the Tower of Babel.

But, even so, it happens to me that people either openly or by refusing the reply when I write them show they are accusing me of doing "Eastern spirituality".

Isaac Asimov seems to have been biassed against Creationism: Asimov, L., Is Big Brother watching? The Humanist 44(4):6–10, 1984. Given as source in

CMI : Contemporary suppression of the theistic worldview
by Jerry Bergman
https://creation.com/contemporary-suppression-of-the-theistic-worldview

That article cited in that article* seems to attribute to Isaac these statements:

‘creationists are stupid, lying people who are not to be trusted in any way.’ And that all of their ‘points are equally stupid, except where the creationists are outrightly lying.’

I met a very similar reaction from a certain Robert Sparling, at least on my own assessment, you can check it yourself on my debate with him:

Nor that Isaac Asimov is an excellent historian of science or philosopher of science
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.fr/2018/01/nor-that-isaac-asimov-is-excellent.html

This piece links to a video by an ex-Creationist, now atheist. At least he claims so. The title is from my comment III out of I to V, and the debate has now swelled comment I into the very majority of the post.

Ironically we come to Asimov again here ... on quora I came across a question implying this hate mongering of his against Creationists is far from over.

Now, there is another type of moralising, which seems to abound in the Catholic or formerly Catholic diocese of Paris.

Antiracism in blacks, perhaps including Priests, takes the form of accusing Young Earth Creationists of considering black people as inferior due to Ham's or Canaan's curse.

It sometimes takes the form of implying (at least as far as I can guess, or perhaps at best reconstruct from a half-recalled memory) that Kent Hovind was from the South, so of course he was racist, and so of course he would believe Ham's or Canaan's curse for racist motives.

I'll go to a video by Hovind and fact check ... sorry, could only find Q & A sessions in which he answers question on whether Ham can have fathered Canaan by Incest. Which, for my own part, not mainly Kent Hovind's, no. Noah being drunk doesn't mean his wife would be so mad she committed incest, even if drunk husbands (in this case by mistake) are a pain in the ass to married women. She was perhaps the Palaeolithic artist and off painting some in Lascaux, unless of course that was Japheth**.

His sin was backbiting, also called detraction. His father really was (with no real moral fault of his own, since it was probably first time he tasted wine) in a somewhat sorry state. Ham did not lie. But Ham did not do the right thing either. He could have quickly turned his eyes away, and instead he went off telling his brothers. Bad enough.

But, the problem is, some people over here seem to think, if I think this story is literally true, I believe black people are cursed because of this. When they don't even go further and don't get around to admitting there was a real fault, some of them either, but twist the story into Ham accidentally seeing his father drunk and naked and that was it, as if Ham had done nothing worse after that.

So, if I believe the Bible story, to them that implies not just that I believe that curse of Canaan happened, but that my believing creationism is somehow a code word for believing black people are inferior. Well, some are morally inferior : those who twist the story into a racist one and those who twist my open endorsement of Young Earth Creationism into an encrypted one for White Supramacism.

Twisting the Bible and twisting what another group believes is morally inferior. But the inferiority is not a purely formal one in the person so doing and due to his descending from Ham - and, as I have more than once pointed out : via Kush - but a material one, violating materially the commandment of not bearing false witness and of not bearing witness against one's neighbour unless necessary and very especially not bearing false witness against your neighbour.

But whichever way you use of overmoralising questions about which view of the world's history is right and which set of people is right, those who get away with overmoralising are the enemies of Young Earth Creationism. We creationists often do not feel welcome to moralise the question even enough as in "do we believe what God said?" And then some among us who play the same game against Geocentrism or against accepting relative historicity of Pagan stories other than Flood and Ipuwer papyrus.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Gabinus
19.II.2018

* Meaning, that article by Asimov, L., cited in that article by Jerry Bergman, if you didn't get it right! ** Noah's wife would have died around the same time as Noah himself, Japheth about the same time as Shem. One of my carbon tables has last carbon date for Palaeolithic cave art along the Biblical and real date for the death of Shem.