Dragons.
Sounds crazy right? (of course it is) But that wont stop bible literalists from claiming that all the talk in the bible about dragons is actually talk about dinosaurs.
It's another attempt to represent the confused mysticism of the bible as accurate scientific observation.
Another fantastic example of hindsight allowing a re-interpretation of the text to say it was true all along.
What I find disconcerting is that creationist literature is sounding more and more reasonable... not the arguments they are still crazy or just plain wrong, but the presentation is getting better.
If I had to attribute a cause I would say that the creationists have been learning from the climate change deniers. They are coming into the game with a lot of polish now and some very reasonable sounding people are realising just how much money can be made by telling people what they want to hear.
I don't for one second think that everyone espousing these view points actually believes them, mostly because much of the arguments being made are deeply flawed and that the way they are being presented shows an understanding of those of flaws and how best to hide them.
So when I see interviews like this
I have to consider that at least some of these people know what they are saying is false, but they have chosen to perpetuate a false belief system either for some emotional comfort or for monetary gain and given that these people make a direct living from presenting these beliefs I think the latter is more likely.
They even mention in this interview that there is no word for dragon in hebrew, that the word used can have several meanings including whale. And yet they use the current visual imagery of a dragon that not only did not exist until well over a thousand years AD but that has a clear and obvious evolution in western art.
Go back historically along the artistic representations of St George and the dragon (possibly the most iconic reference to any such creature) and you'll find that early images of a dragon look nothing like our current idea of the flying fire breathing beast. If anything they look more like a large lizard (don't forget that St George was actually a roman soldier from the middle east).
To assume that our modern image of a dragon is anything like the images in the minds of the biblical authors is not just a stretch It's obviously not true.
How long before the whole Jonah story gets reworked to include a dragon? Bible literalists will explain that it wasn't a whale because the actual text reads "great fish". This is mostly because it's physically impossible for a whale to swallow a person - even the biggest whales actually have tiny throats and can't swallow anything larger than a orange, plus the biggest whale stomach would not allow a human to stretch out much less stand up.
Fish don't score any better but they can always claim there is something we've never discovered yet living at the bottom of the ocean...
Of course "great fish" is only a short step away from "great serpent" and thats obviously a dragon right? Watch this space, I see a profitable book in the works for the first person to string that argument out to 80,000 words...
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