I read Blag Hag today and saw post which I could not resist commenting on. Cindy Jabobs, self-styled prophet and founder of the organization “GeneralsInternational,” apparently has a penchant for making grandiose claims. One of her most grandiose and, one might even suggest, bat shit crazy claims can be found in the video below.
For those of you who cannot make it through these two minutes of stupidity. Her argument basically consists of a few key points.
1. The bible says homosexuality is wrong
2. Whenever we as a country do something against god’s law he responds by turning nature against us, by causing storms, flooding, etc.
3. Shortly after Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed a large flock of birds died in Beebe, Arkansas.
4. The current governor of Arkansas is named Beebe, and, Bill Clinton, the man who instituted DADT was previously a governor of Arkansas.
5. Conclusion, the death of these birds is clearly a sign from god that he is displeased with ending DADT.
There is so much wrong with this argument I don’t even know where to begin. I won’t even address point one, as everyone knows my thoughts on the reliability of scripture, and I could write multiple blog posts about the moral bankruptcy of taking ones ethics from it. The rest is simply a mess of logical fallacies including ad hoc rationalization, and causation fallacy, as well as a need for a basic lesson in statistics. Her entire argument reminds me of the argument found in this comedic website I found a few years ago, David Hasselhoff is the AntiChrist.
However, let us assume for the sake of argument that she is right. That she is correct in her assertions that there is a god, that he is displeased with the revocation of DADT, and the freedom homosexuals now have to serve in the armed forces openly. Further she is also correct that in trying to show his displeasure the best that god could come up with killing a flock of birds in Beebe, Arkansas.
Of course birds die all the time, and having been to Beebe, Arkansas I can honestly believe that any birds there might have committed suicide just to get away from it. (Flying wouldn’t be fast enough) However, I do have to ask, is this really the best God can come up with? The all-powerful creator of the universe wants to let us know that we messed up, but the best idea he can come up with is some harebrained biological equivalent of the Rube Goldberg contraption? This is why I submit that God clearly needs to take a speech class. I often think those speech teachers are going to throttle the students who say “um” constantly, how would they handle God as a student?
I remember a certain type of misdirection argument we were taught in my debate class. It was affectionately referred to as the "And then everybody DIES!" argument by our teacher. Called such because one of his students ended his version by yelling that. How he won debates I do not know...
ReplyDeleteIt goes like this (using her argument as an example).
A bunch of birds fell to the ground and died in Arkansas.
Clearly this was because God is displeased with us.
Why?
Because gay people are bad.
Bill Clinton is from Arkansas and he passed DADT.
DADT was repealed and a bunch of birds died.
DADT has to do with gay people...who God doesn't like.
God hates us! EVERYBODY IS GOING TO DIE!
It involves connected a set of unconnected facts together into a terrible set of circumstances...and it, sadly, works in debates.
I sat in on a debate once where someone managed to connect The Soviet Union, E.T. (the alien, not the movie), Nuclear waste and 3 mile island, into an argument. Her team won...