My Donation Dollars At Work
I am a charter-member of the AIG Creation Museum. I’ve been there before and after it officially opened, get their magazine, and wholeheartedly support YEC (young earth creationism). The museum is world-class and makes an extremely important public statement against the evolutionary religious dogma we’re all forced to learn. I highly recommend it and commend everyone who made it possible.
However...
In their Answers magazine, another quality product, they step outside the creationist box in two areas that greatly irritate me: Calvinism and Misogyny.
Of course they can put whatever they want in their magazine and I don’t have to like it. But neither do I have to support it with my donations. If they ever ask me why I stopped, this is it.
The Calvinism, though personally I find it reprehensible, isn’t heavily promoted beyond their gushing praise of books by Calvinist authors. I can tolerate that. But not the misogyny.
Example: In vol. 3 no. 2, page 40, we see it boldly stated that “Family government was introduced at the moment of Eve’s creation. Adam was to be the jurisdictional head of the family and Eve was to be a helper suitable for him”. Now nobody doubts that last part, but she was his equal, his “flesh and bones”, his rescuer so to speak-- not his “assistant”. Check the Hebrew and even the LXX (noted in my Christian Egalitarian wiki and other documents here). But that nonsense about “jurisdictional head” is a big fat lie. There is no such jurisdiction before the Fall. There was no “family government”. Both were charged with “subduing the earth” and not one word is uttered or even implied about hierarchy of any kind. Like the Calvinist myth of “the death of man’s spirit”, pre-Fall hierarchy is imposed upon scripture without any shred of evidence.
Another spot is on page 86: “Yet in the functioning of the home, there is a chain of command: the husband is accountable to God, the wife is submissive to her husband”. They can’t state it any more clearly: woman does not directly report to God, but to a man! She can only get there through him, a sinner just like her. God “bosses” Jesus, who “bosses” man, who “bosses” woman. Somehow the submission to God that Jesus modeled only applies to women, but his rule over the church only applies to men. Nice.
I won’t repeat all I’ve written here that exposes and refutes such despicable pride and worse hermeneutics, except to say again that only the most brazen conceit can put half the human race under the other half. And the people at AIG go to such great lengths against “mere” racism! Such irony. They see the sinfulness of anyone thinking an ethnic group is beneath them, but turn around and so view the half of humanity with the “mitochondrial DNA”* (one of the articles in that issue).
I only wish they’d put half as much effort into defending the truths of scripture on this topic as they do on the six days of creation week.
*Added April 08: It turns out that mit. DNA being only from the mother was a myth. The scientific methods used to determine this were flawed. But I kept the expression here because it ties into the issue of the magazine I’m referring to. What I mean by it is just to refer to the female half of the human race.