Hey, Gedanken!
: I have heard similar things said about the tides. One that always used to bug me was an elder who everytime he gave that same talk (or one similar) would point out, incorrectly, that "no one knows why ice floats" (which stops lakes freezing from the bottom up); ergo there must be a Creator.
The logic of "we are so stupid and don't understand everything therefore there must be a loving Creator" always escaped me.
: Another elder used to claim as proof of the Flood that Bird's Eye (a frozen foods company) once tried to flash freeze an elephant but that it had rotted on the inside before it could be frozen. Therefore the only way the Mammoths could have been flash frozen with fresh food intact in their bellies was if there was a Flood.
Hah! I remember this bit of nonsense but can't remember where it originated. In Awake! perhaps? Anyway, when I was in my first year at MIT in 1979 I decided to contact someone in the Mechanical Engineering department to see if I could verify what sort of conditions it would take to flash freeze a mammoth. The professor I finally talked to looked at me like I was nuts, and I seem to recall his saying that the Bird's Eye story was an urban legend. I didn't really believe him, but I was at a dead end. A little later I started trying to prove that there really was a Noah's Flood (this was for an Anthropology paper). I looked up the original references whenever I found in WTS literature some references to "frozen mammoths" and such. To my horror I discovered that the very idea of "flash frozen mammoths" was invented in the 1950s by a charalatan name Ivan Sanderson, who the Society was in the habit of quoting. Turns out that Sanderson embellished the fact that lots of frozen mammoths have been found (this got a big kickstart in the late 19th century with the writings of the armchair geologist Henry Howorth, who embellished the reports of Arctic explorers, and another in 1950 when Immanuel Velikovsky's nonsensical Worlds in Collision got a lot of ignorant media attention), by claiming, without any evidence, that the frozen carcasses were quick frozen. I looked up the original 1903 Smithsonian Institution report on the Siberian Berezovka mammoth (the Society has long printed a picture of a restoration of this in writings about the Flood) and found that the men who excavated the carcass from the frozen ground specifically stated that all the internal organs were rotten. The only parts of the carcass that were well preserved were the outer portions such as the shoulder meat, which of course could freeze in a few days without rotting when exposed to near-freezing water followed by a gradual freeze-up. It became obvious to me that Watchtower writers had read the report, since they were publishing pictures of it, and so it was clear that they were simply lying to the JW community about the existence of "quick-frozen" mammoths in order to pretend that there is solid evidence of Noah's Flood.
: Of course this is all pretty mild stuff compared to the statements routinely made in WTS publications.
True enough. I don't have the reference at hand, but about the best description I've read about Watchtower mentality came from one Alan Rogerson, who wrote a book Millions Now Living Will Never Die: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses. He wrote something like this: "JW writers live in an intellectual twilight zone. Whenever their publications stray into any severe academic field such as science or theology, they at best mirror popular misconceptions and at worst are complete nonsense."
AlanF
Edited by - AlanF on 9 January 2003 14:10:31
