I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist this. Some light relief – or at least it seems like that watching the Dow index
Having heard Matt Damon ask:
I need to know if she really thinks that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. I want to know that, I really do. Because she’s gonna have the nuclear codes.
I was fascinated to read this recollection of Governor Palin’s beliefs recalled by a Wasilla Resident, Philip Munger, and reported into today’s LA Times
More below the fold.
Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks,” recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.
The idea of a “young Earth” — that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on — is a popular strain of creationism.
I guess Palin is referring to the so called Paluxy Man Tracks near Glen Rose in Texas, which have been persistent revealed to be as nothing of the sort, or one of the several prints like photo below, easily and quickly exposed as fraud.
(ASIDE: Don’t you just love the way this is done? Whoever carved this is really smart. It shows a rare encounter between a one legged man limbo dancing under an obliging dinosaur. And the arrows are perfect, just in case you didn’t know what you were seeing.)
I know people’s private religious beliefs should never disbar them from office, but when those beliefs interfere with commonly accepted tenets of proof, validity and reason, we’re actually talking about someone’s capability to distinguish fact from fiction, evaluate the evidence of their senses, and show some basic adherence to the enlightenment tenets which if I remember correctly, are part of the inspiration behind the founding of the United States.
But here my history fails me: can anyone come up with equally wacky beliefs from a previous Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate?
6 comments