Pessimistic Politics: There Go the Dinosaurs

In this tract, Chick talks dinosaurs, so let us begin with a little background on the dinosaurs verses the Christian argument.

Growing up, I always thought dinosaurs were cool. They were they strange creatures that looked like something out of a very creative fellow’s head: massive, hulking beasts who ruled the lands, crushing anything in their path (at least these were the ones I cared about). They even had scientific value, so teachers and parents could breathe a sigh of relief when I was reading about them, as opposed to some pandering pap or porn. And, most importantly to a child, there were a lot of toys based on them, so I could get my dinosaur fix without my parents spending too much, with the possible exception of Dino Riders or Jurassic Park brand toys.

Little did I know that dinosaurs were entangled in a war with the Christian church. While I’ve outgrown my obsession with the power felt through dinosaurs (that was replaced with sex, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still think dinosaurs were cool), I still like the buggers because they’re still a threat to arrogant, by-the-Book Christians who’ve cherry-picked their way through most of the Bible. The very existence of dinosaurs (or at least the theory surrounding their existence and extinction) has been a heathenized thorn in the side of creationists who insist the Earth was built in six days, and only six thousand years or so ago, a number based on guesswork.

The standard argument goes that dinosaurs and man didn’t exist at the same time, with the former predating the latter by a few million years (around 230 million, actually). Then, around 65 million years ago, it’s speculated that a mass catastrophic event wiped most of the dinosaurs out, and mammals rose from the ashes and took over.

This is a complete contradiction with Creationism, therefore making it a key topic of major debate and causing a direct rise in the cost of aspirin for Christian parents who need something to take the edge off of the headaches given to them by their children's insistence on getting a clear answer about how dinosaurs factor into the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark. Most Christians seem to slap their hands over their ears and ignore the problem, but there are a strong number who insist the matter be solved, and within their logic. This is where it gets tricky.

Very few creationists at this point can deny the existence of dinosaurs, or the risk facing the wrath of the scientific minded and toy companies. The fossil evidence is far too imposing to even consider ignoring, though I have heard of people claiming dinosaur bones were the work of Satan, and planted to confuse us (are you really that surprised?). Instead, Christians shoehorn dinosaurs into their beliefs, creating a more plausible, but still unlikely world history, where dinosaurs existed with man.

Call it the influence of satanic science if you will, but I can’t imagine a group of hairless apes, or many animals alive today, that would survive for very long with dinosaurs. Research (evil research, of course) seems to suggest a lot of different types of dinosaurs and other large creatures, and I’m not sure if humans could have lived through the first triceratops stampede. But that’s just my uninformed opinion. After all, we, as a species, once faced insurmountable odds and survived three separate OJ trials.

The Bible doesn’t offer too much evidence one way or the other. One of my main concerns is the Bible doesn’t mention dinosaurs in any great detail. You would think at the very least, the authors of the Bible would think to mention something as significant as a two-ton lumbering lizard. I imagine the Romans would be feeding Christians to an allosaurus myself.

Now the trick here is the term “dinosaur” (or rather it’s derivative) wasn’t coined until 1842, so early English translations of the Bible wouldn’t say “dinosaur.” I received an e-mail from a reader suggesting the term “dragon,” which does appear in the Bible and could describe dinosaurs (this is true; read it sometime). I headed over to Bible.com (which is a top-notch Bible resource, and has some entertaining reads if you like hearing Christians tell you the rules) and did a search. At first, I only found dragons mentioned about sixteen times in the entire Bible, Of this number, the word “dragon” is found thirteen times in Revelations, possibility to describe Satan, but not as an actual natural creature. Another one was just the name of a place, but two other occurrences bore reason for further investigation.

Then I realized I had selected another version besides the King James version (which is the right one, if you believe Chick). Since I like to avoid having egg on my face, I searched through the proper version, and lo and behold, the term “dragon” popped up thirty-four times. Now before the whole KJV posse starts celebrating my seemingly self-admitted defeat, I should point out none of the passages I observed described what the dragons were in any detail. Because I was curious about the discrepancies between the two Bibles, I compared some of the passages, and discovered “dragon” had been substituted with “jackal” most of the time, with “serpent” a long second. So Chick might be onto something when he talks about corrupted Bible revisions, though I think it just makes the case for Christianity a lot weaker.

The most specific the Bible gets about dragons is in mentioning Leviathan, an enormous sea monster that is considered in Christian mythology to be associated with Satan or evil. However, in Hebrew traditions, Leviathan is considered a whale, fish, snake, or crocodile. Christian scholars believe it to be mundane animal, along with other Hebrew and Christian folk-creatures, like Behemoth and Ziz. I know, the Bible contains references to weird, unbelievable stuff. I was shocked too.

Interestingly, the Behemoth sounds more like a dinosaur, as it is described in Job 40:15-24 as a creature that "moves his tail like a cedar.” Modern religious scholars believe, however, the Bible was describing an elephant or a hippopotamus, but the problem is neither has a “tail like cedar.” Three possible explanations are the “tail like cedar” is describing the needles of a cedar tree (which would be closer to the elephant), the “tail” is actually the trunk of an elephant, or the word “tail” is a nice way of saying “penis.” So it could be a mundane animal, or scholars could be full of crap.

I’m surprised Chick didn’t throw mention of this out there, but I guess that would require him to actually read the parts of the Bible he’s not used to. Instead, he ignores any mention of Leviathan or Behemoth, two creatures that could have provided enough intrigue to perhaps sway some people to his side. But I guess he thought to himself “Talking about strange, mythical things that couldn’t possibly exist? That’s just stupid!”

It told you, he’s either crazy, moronic, or losing his touch. Maybe all of the above.

One Christian theory to explain the fossils is the dinosaurs died in the Great Flood, but this doesn’t make sense, because Noah was to gather all creatures. Even Chick concedes to this. If Noah did bring all of the dinosaurs with him (yeah, all 3,400 or so) in addition to all of the other animals of the world, he may as well of asked God to just float him a small continent. This is without getting into all of the scientific impossibilities of the Ark and its task, but Christians will just chalk that one up to God.

This is not to mention the fact that dinosaur bones are found under millions of dated years of soil, but Chick might just have an answer to that one in this tract. He touches on this dating method in another tract, Big Daddy?, but the information in there is so out of date, it simply does nothing but support the progression of science and make Christians look ignorant. For example, he states that the only reason atoms hold together is because Jesus binds them, not knowing the negatively-charged electrons balance out the positive charge of protons. I’m not making this up. And he’s still circulating this tract as is.

But back to dinosaurs. Chick decided to dedicate another tract (see In the Beginning) to explaining the dinosaur problem. At least that was the intention, but he ends up offering nothing but his own hazy theories and rambles on about things hardly related to the topic. So it’s actually not an atypical tract.

Here’s how the dinosaur’s extinction plays out in the World of Chick: the tract starts out with a brontosaurus, who is apparently fully capable of cognitive thought and language, expressing deep concern that someone saw her (Chick identifies it as a her). Cut away to an extremely happy-looking man who announces to his village from an unidentifiable era “I saw one… I saw one… Everybody follow me!”

Cut back to the dinosaur, who struggles up the mountain and concludes if she makes it into the clouds, she can hide, as if there were any clouds this close to the ground that would hide a multi-ton dinosaur. The villagers, meanwhile, are hot on her trail, but the dinosaur makes it just in time and safely hides, much to her obvious relief, as her facial expression looks like she’s just finished passing a mature red oak. She’s safe!

Or maybe not. One of the villagers shouts “I think I see her” while the others clearly can’t. We pan over to the quivering dinosaur to discover she was just hiding her head in the clouds, and the rest of her was sticking out in plain view. And you thought Chick was getting blasphemous with talk of intelligent animals! Of course, the villagers who couldn’t see a two-ton butt sticking out in plain view aren’t going to be winning any of Alfred Noble’s Prizes anytime soon.

Well, we can guess what happens to the dinosaur. As the villages march back down the mountain, one of the villagers exclaims, “Yummy dino-burgers tonight.” If you paid attention to the rest of this article, you know their meal would never be referred to as dino-anything, because the term couldn’t have been coined when these people were alive. And to think Chick is giving YOU a history lesson.

During the meal, a boy asks his grandfather “Why is it so hard to find dragons anymore?” as he stuffs his face full of brontosaurus. Grandpa makes the insightful observation “They’re a dying breed. Who knows? You may be eating the last one!” Might’ve been a good idea to bring that up before extinguishing the last of your favorite food source.

I give Chick credit for making the dinosaur/dragon connection, though I’m not about to overlook that “dino-burger” thing…

Flash to the present, where we’re posed the question “Where did the dinosaurs go?” An evil professor explains “Millions of years ago… ….only the dinosaurs ruled the world. Do you know what killed them? A giant comet hit the earth!” We, of course, know the true story of where the dinosaurs went: a village of gluttons ate them all.

No, that sounds a little far-fetched. Maybe it was the comet?

“No! It’s all a story told by people who don’t trust God. And God should know. After all, He was there.” We’re reminded that “God created man, animals, and plants – in the same week! They were created, not evolved. That includes the dinosaurs.”

We’re told of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, with God and the Serpent both shouting at them to do what they say. There doesn’t seem to be a point to it, since they obviously already took a bite of the fruit. Why else would they be wearing clothes, unless they knew they were naked, which only happened post-fruit consumption?

And you should know God wasn’t really around when the Serpent tempted her with the fruit. You’d think he should have been, since he’s supposed to be everywhere, but regardless, if God actually took part in the debate, Eve might not have taken that bite, and we’d all be running around, blissfully ignorant and happily naked forever.

Instead, God decided to be a jerk, and this is just one of his first mistakes before he decided he wasn’t very good at this creation game and sent Jesus down to take care of things personally. Of course, we know Jesus ended up getting nailed to a tree, so God decided to let everyone know he was going to torch the entire Earth, but he’s not going to tell us when, because he’s a jerk.

Speaking of jerks, we see Cain and Abel (they’re not named, but it’s them), dressed in stereotypical caveman garb, despite the fact Chick once denied the existence of cavemen. Cain had just finished beating Abel on the head with his caveman-style club, and we’re prompted to “Look what happened next.” If Christians had any sense about how reproduction works, there should be nothing to see, because thanks to Cain, there are now two men in the world and one woman, his mother, and I wouldn’t think she would be feeling in the mood to get it on with her son, especially after he clubbed his brother to death.

But those were apparently different times, because humanity got to the point where “They rejected God and created their own gods. Before long the whole world was filled with wickedness.” This brand of wickedness seems to involve baby sacrifices, topless women, and demon idols with Ninja Turtle-like face masks.

“God was righteous. He must punish sins. Yet He gave them 120 years to repent. Everyone ignored Him except Noah.” See, if this was the God the psycho Christians will have you believe, he would have destroyed the lot of them then and there, but this time God was flexible.

Oddly, that 120 year warning time figure never appears in the Bible, but in rabbinic tradition. At first, Noah ignores God’s warning and plants cedar trees 120 year before the big event as a symbol of the sin of others in hope of converting them. I would have thought it to be typical gardening myself and not given it another thought. Then again, God isn’t known for getting to the point.

But the flood was coming, and “God put dragons and other animals on the ark…” Chick notes that “In 1841 they were renamed ‘dinosaurs’!” So now it’s confirmed that Chick is on the same wavelength as my reader, but he fails to provide any Biblical evidence to back up the existence of dinosaurs (or dragons) on the Ark. That’s because there isn’t any.

So goes the Flood. And forget that nonsense about rain causing the flood. As Chick once pointed out in a previous tract, the Earth was created with a canopy of water in the sky that made conditions perfect for life, allowing people to live longer, happier existences, up until he brought it down on their heads. That, and “the underground water shattered the earth’s surface.” Keep in mind the Bible doesn’t really say any of this, but that’s never stopped Chick before.

He also takes this opportunity to subtly dismiss the dating of fossil records by what layer of soil they are found by stating “Plants, animals, and people were drowned and sandwiched with the dinosaurs into layers of mud and rock.” So the reason for all the layers of dirt isn’t because of millions of years of gradual shifts in the surface, but from one big flood, brought to us by a giant canopy of water that was hovering over the Earth like magic until God decided to cut it loose.

After the flood, “Those dinosaurs that were in the Ark were ‘fruitful and multiplied’ like other animals.” This is demonstrated by a little dinosaur hatching from an egg and yelling “Mama!” as his mother (who, by the looks of things, is probably the same one who will be converted into “dino-burgers” in short order) looks on lovingly with a tear in her eye, thinking “He’s beautiful!” Of course, we can’t have beings who are capable of human-level thought mucking about, but if the dinosaurs made it off the Ark and did as God instructed, how did they all die?

Brace yourself for this one. “Remember those trillions of destroyed plants? They made the air rich with oxygen. And big animals need lots of it to survive. In the thinner air it was harder to breathe – they got slower and easier to catch.” Let that one absorb for a second. Check out the panel that explains this as well if you want to risk laughing until your lungs collapse.

Notice Chick doesn’t site any sources, leading us to believe he made this theory up himself. Believe it or not, one of the theories proposed by scientists does deal with oxygen drops as the cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction, but this has to deal with global warming and the shift of atmospheric conditions due to volcanic activity (this theory also states there was more oxygen and around twelve times more carbon dioxide in the air than today). This oxygen drop could have caused the dinosaurs to die because they weren’t getting enough good air.

While this might seem like a skewed victory for Chick, this doesn’t explain what happened to the smaller dinosaurs who wouldn’t need so much oxygen. Some scientist believe the dinosaurs’ respiratory systems couldn’t adapt to the climate change, big or small, but this idea is based on comparisons with the respiratory system of modern birds. This implies evolution, which is one of the Deadly Sins of Chick (also on that list is homosexuality and Harry Potter).

So Chick’s theory, as stated, really doesn’t stand up because he forgets that some dinosaurs were smaller than dogs and wouldn’t need so much air.

From this point on, the tract almost forgets dinosaurs completely, and goes on about the sin of the world, and tells us God’s going to get us with fire next time, because he's so very considerate. He reminds us we are all sinners, Jesus is all-powerful, and uses the Flood as an analogy for punishment and salvation which is actually sort of clever, and probably not something many people draw a parallel to.

The cleverness doesn’t last, because the tract goes on to explain “At the perfect time in history, God sent his Son from heaven… …to a world that didn’t want Him.” Yes, the “perfect time in history,” the time when future generations wouldn’t believe their crazy old ancestors, many of whom still thought the sun was a god itself. This is, of course, completely ignorant. Everyone knows the true God is an invisible man.

Chick references John 1:10 to back up is statement that the “world that didn’t want Him,” though this verse is, big surprise, up to interpretation. All it says on the subject is “the world knew him not,” which could mean no one knew who he was, which has been an ongoing problem from day one. It doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t want God to show himself and help out the human race, they just didn’t know if this Jesus fellow was God or not. Considering all of the Jesuses we've had showing themselves over the years, skepticism is a reasonable attitude

On a minor note, Chick doesn’t capitalize the “H” in “his” when referring to God, a mistake which I’m sure Chick will repent ceaselessly for.

Chick shoves more evidence at us about how the world rejected God from the beginning by saying “God’s prophets knew He was coming. Even the angels announced His birth. No one but a few dirty shepherds paid any attention,” referencing Luke 2:8-18. This passage says nothing about the angels telling anyone but the shepherds that the Saviour was born, and Chick doesn’t give us any names of prophets who dropped the ball with the all-important task of public relations. Once again, God doesn’t seem to bother getting the word out and ends up blaming us for not knowing in the first place.

He also points out that “His arrival changed the world” and “The religious world went ballistic!” Yet he cites Philippians 2:7, which states that God “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant,” so it really wasn’t that big of deal until Jesus got out there and started pissing people off.

And piss people off he did. A bunch of angry religious leaders gather around and list off all of Jesus’s miracles, but they’re apparently so conceded, they think that a man who can pull this stuff off should listen to their beliefs. They express distain over this, and agree he must die. The final nail on the cross was struck when Jesus blurted the most troublesome phrase in the history of the world: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

We see the religious leaders ordering Jesus’s arrest, with Judas slyly interjecting to offer his services in tracking him down. The religious leaders find Jesus and demand to know if he believes he is “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” to which he replies “I am.” The religious leaders take offense to this and order Jesus killed, and are therefore condemned to Hell, even though they were being good Jews and executing Jesus for spitting blasphemies against God.

We’re then treated to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and how you can be saved by giving yourself to him. Chick erroneously points out “Noah’s family were the only ones in the whole world that believed God” (which is false if one doesn’t stick the phrase “at the time” in there some place) and states “The real issue isn’t where the dinosaurs went… It’s where YOU will go when you die.” This is “The real issue” because Chick might have actually realized his theory was stupid by now, but it was too late to start the tract over due to publishing deadlines, so he wanted to invalidate the first half of the tract and focus on Jesus, which he doesn’t do that great of job of explaining either.

So where did the dinosaurs go? You’d never know from this tract, and we can pose similar questions about the whereabouts of God, who seriously needs to get on TV and give us the rules, because with virtuosos like Chick spreading the Word, it’s no wonder we lost him.

Special thanks to Wikipedia.org and Bible.com for providing me with information used for this article.

All images are from Chick.com and are owned by them, as if anyone else would want to claim responsibility. If you want to check out this tract in its entirety, click here. If the address doesn't work, contact me immediately, since there's an off-chance our friendly Chickians decided to change the URL. What, they don't want MORE hits?