Somebody Tell Ken Ham Lying is a Sin

Image source.

For some reason, this post at Answers in Genesis caught my attention: An Ark Legacy, 20 Years Later. As with everything AiG has ever said, it's laced with lies.

Here they are:

When I was only about 19 or so and attending university in Australia, I remember the time our church handed out a booklet to the congregation. It contained a devotional about the Flood of Noah’s day, but it stated that the Flood was just some local, not global, event. I remember my father, a schoolmaster, becoming quite upset with the false teaching. He had made sure our family understood that the Bible clearly taught a global Flood.

My father led somewhat of a crusade to lovingly but firmly confront the booklet’s publisher (a fairly conservative organization theologically). He saw the booklet’s teaching as an attack on the authority of the Word of God.

...

My dad was burdened that people in the church were being led astray by secular teaching. ... He knew that the compromised teaching he read in the devotional booklet was an attack—coming from inside the church—on God’s Word.

Oh geez, seriously? "False teaching"? "An attack on the authority of the Word of God"? This is how AiG characterizes anything that doesn't agree with their young-earth-creationist interpretation of Genesis.

(And that "lovingly but firmly confront" bit is also nasty. Uggh.)

I used to be a young-earth creationist, and a huge fan of Answers in Genesis. Why? Because they said things like "this is what THE BIBLE says" and "this is what REAL Christians who REALLY believe the bible believe" and "this is what God CLEARLY teaches." Those old-earth creationists and gap-theorists and theistic evolutionists didn't just have a different interpretation, no, they were rejecting the bible in favor of "man's wisdom" or some crap like that.

Because, as Ken Ham said, if you don't believe what the bible says in Genesis 1, you'll end up not believing the parts about Jesus too. It's a slippery slope to rejecting the gospel.

I wanted to be a REAL Christian, totally committed to Jesus, totally believing the bible. So I was drawn to the fringe extreme groups that claimed "this is what God says, and everyone else is a fake Christian." They said we can't even listen to what other ideas were out there, or we might be led astray. They said everything was an "attack" on the bible- there would be no honest evaluation of alternate explanations.

(I said "fringe extreme groups" because, they are, but mainstream evangelicalism creates an environment where such groups can totally exist. Evangelicals promote this idea that many/most Christians aren't actually REAL Christians. So when someone like Ken Ham comes along and says "People who claim to be Christians but don't believe the earth is 6000 years old aren't real Christians," it fits perfectly. I haven't seen anything within evangelical Christianity that takes a stand against this kind of, ahem, false teaching.)

It's all lies though. It's a horrible misrepresentation of their fellow Christians- a sinful misrepresentation, in fact.

"People who don't believe in a young earth don't take the bible seriously!" No. No. We do. We just think that's not what Genesis 1 actually was trying to say. And we would appreciate if you didn't bear false witness against us. (Or take the Lord's name in vain. "This is what God clearly said!" Yeah okay.)

Everybody needs to CALM DOWN. We can have a conversation about this without THE ENTIRE GOSPEL being at stake. We can listen to each other without worrying that our minds will be infected by devious twisted ideas from the devil.

If you think that Christians mentioning that they think the flood was not a global flood is "an attack coming from inside the church," maybe you should take a step back and look at yourself. You're the one attacking "from inside the church."

And if you reject the clear teaching of Scripture from Exodus 20:16, it won't be long til you reject the gospel too.