Florida Mayoral Hopeful: Dinosaurs Walked With Humans

When St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Bill Foster heard that his son was being taught about Darwin in the fifth grade, he fired off an angry letter to the local school board blaming the Nazi Holocaust on the Theory of Evolution.  Like all fundamentalist Christians, Mr. Foster rejects modern science.  He sincerely believes that the planet was created in six days by a  magical entity in the sky.  He's also quite certain that human beings coexisted with T-rexes and triceratops.

The Republican proclaims, "Dinosaurs are mentioned in Job, so I don’t have any problem believing that dinosaurs roamed the earth."  It's worth noting that the Book of Job takes place after the Flood - which means dinosaurs must have been rounded up and put inside Noah's Ark.  (Good grief, the brontosaurus turds alone would have sunk the vessel.)

Can a man who puts fairy stories above science become the mayor of the fourth largest city in Florida?  Should voters consider Foster's religion convictions when they head to the polls?  Local architect Michael Dailey thinks they should:   "This city is trying to increase its employment base with respect to scientific organizations and trying to recruit scientific concerns to come here.  If our mayor has a belief system that basically rejects science, how can people take him seriously?"  (Evangelicals will take him seriously, but then they believe donkeys talk.)

From the St. Petersburg Times:  Foster said he would eagerly court and recruit any science-based employers (like an ugly suitor with no intention of proposing) regardless of his own personal religious and scientific beliefs.  Those beliefs, he insisted, have nothing to do with how he would govern the city.  (Yeah, right.  Just like Sarah Palin's beliefs had nothing to do with the way she governed Alaska.  Or Dubya's, the way he misgoverned America.)  "I'm very accepting of the many faiths and diversity of the city," Foster said. "How does my knowledge of scientific theory impact my ability to rationally govern the city of St. Petersburg?  It's completely irrelevant."  (Not to science-based industries, I'm betting.)  Rather than Darwin's theory of evolution, Foster accepts the Bible's Genesis account in which God created the world and all living things in six days.  Foster, a member of Starkey Road Baptist Church in Seminole, dismissed the suggestion that each of those "days" could represent a period of thousands of years.  "In the Genesis account, it's timed by the sun and the moon,'" he responded.

You ever wonder why the Bible says it took God six whole days to create the universe?  If a supreme being were truly omnipotent, he could have just snapped his fingers and everything would have happened in a nanosecond.  Of course, that scenario doesn't lend itself to dramatic storytelling.

Comments

[Bee Girl]

If Foster gets elected, the encomony in St Petersburg is going to stagnate.

[Rick]

I'm tired of creationist conservatives intimidating school boards and forcing their Biblical worldview into the classroom. I've had enough of this! You're free to believe in mythology, but stay out of public service.

[Towlie]

Actually, there's a good reason why the Bible says it took God six whole days to create the universe. The Genesis creation tale was really just a bedtime story for little Jewish children to teach them the importance of observing the Sabbath. Just as God rested on the seventh day, so should his people. I'll bet the original authors of the tale would be shocked to find that so many of those children continued to believe the tale after they grew up.