There is no shortage of knowledge out there. A woman named Annie Hawkins-Turner has the world record for biggest tits, for example. Yet there are so many mysteries left unsolved. Trees? Electricity? The fucking moon!? Name a single thing other than God that can explain them. Let me show you more answers inside the pages of Science 4 for Christian Schools.
We’ll be looking at the 1998 edition of Science 4, which remained unchanged since its first printing in 1976. As we get into it you’ll see why Bob Jones University Department of Science Education had no reason to update anything after 22 years. They nailed all science on the first try, which is pretty impressive when you consider they were just guessing at how any of this shit works. I’m not sure what the stakes are when you’re publishing a Christian science book, but I imagine convincing your reader that science is the work of imbecile liars who don’t trust the moon only makes the case for God stronger. Which seems to be exactly what they were going for.
The faculty of Bob Jones University have stood for the “absolute authority of the Bible since 1927” and their amazing toll-free number, 1-800-BJ-AND-ME, still works. Jesus Christ, this means their business model of making dumb people dumber for money has been working for over 90 years. And speaking of something almost one hundred years old, let’s talk about the moon.
Bob Jones University goddamn hates the garbage piece of shit moon. They open with an exhaustive look at how everybody’s wrong about the moon and it sucks. This book, which covers all of science, seems to be focused entirely around ranting about the moon.
The theories presented in Science for Christian Schools are framed as poorly worded arguments against the very things they’re trying to teach. So they give you enough details about the bitch ass moon’s shitty orbit so you can scoff at it and be satisfied anyone trying to figure it out is stupid. It’s ridiculous, especially when you consider the moon is an egg and its coming hatching makes all other knowledge effectively pointless.
The author’s frustrations with moon theories continue until page 8 when they finally explain how this confusing bullshit thing came to be. It’ll seem obvious after you hear it, but God made Moon instantly because it was better than Not Moon. If it occurs to you that instantly explains anything, maybe you now see the appeal of Christian Science.
So we’ve graduated, right? After 8 full pages of education we’ve learned magic is real and it’s a much better, faster answer than any fussy theory. If we’re not done with all learning, we’re at least done with the moon, right? Right!?
After a few more pages debunking moon facts, the author goes off the rails and starts hammering questions into her typewriter. “Why did God even make the moon!? Or you!? Non-whites!? W-why did God make anything!?” This leads us into our first homework assignment: explain three ways the moon proves God is awesome! Did you guess lights, lights, lights, LIGHTS, LIGHTS, LIGHTS, ha ha HA HA HA HA HA LIGHTS!!!? Close! It was werewolves three times! Look, I’m losing my mind. I think we’re good on The Moon. I’m going to jump ahead a few pages…
Oh Jesus, I think the moon knows we’re trying to stop learning about it.
This is, by any standards, fucking crazy. Why is this an entire page? I can’t picture anything less useful to a 4th grade science student than hearing how God is going to kill them, but not to worry because He’ll blow up the moon first. They don’t even know what horses or wheels are yet! Maybe save this advanced shit for Science 5 or 6? I’m going to go back and check the table of contents to see if there are any non-moon chapters in this goddamn thing…
Okay, good. It goes: moon, insects, electricity, plants, measuring, digestion, moon. That means only two out of the seven sciences are Moon. Let’s keep going!
I want to make sure you understand this isn’t a bit. The author of Science 4 for Christian Schools spent the first 16 precious, outlook-forming pages going over the full history of the moon from its origins of “suddenly made by God” to its final moments of “God is done with it,” and almost all of it is written in the form of questions. Even they don’t know why they did it. If you replaced fourth grade with a season in the NFL, it would do less to fuck a kid’s brain up. They’ve presented all other scientific knowledge as the bad guesswork of protracting fools who could have simply screamed into the night for the answers they sought.
If you presented this book to Joseph Goebbels he would say, “Zis is close to vat I vanted, but I asked for a ridiculous plan to make ze American children stupid, not a stupid plan to make ze American children ridiculous. Two stars.”
Let’s see if the lessons get any better in Chapter 2: Insects, Arachnids, and Myriapods!
This is word association madness. This is something you’d stammer at Denise Richards if she was your biology teacher in Topless High 3: Maximum Nipplage UNRATED BONER POOP EDITION. I get that not every first draft is good and 1976 Christian Science was still mostly Moon Fear, but they had twenty two fucking years to go back in and change this to something, anything resembling knowledge. Maybe the next chapter, Electricity, is better.
Oh, okay. It’s a mystery. They can’t say what it is or what it does or where it comes from; only that it makes telephones ring. I’m starting to see the limitations of using God as the answer to all things since He might refuse to talk to anyone for a couple thousand years. If you’re a Christian Science researcher who wants to write a book about electricity, all you can do is go out into a rainstorm and hold up big metal questions. And even then, He can only say yes or no and one of those answers kills you. So until God tells us how to interpret the leavings of the gloriously electrocuted, there’s just no way of knowing what “electricity” is. Let’s move on to the fourth school of science: Plants.
The first classification of plant, of course, is called Plants with No Tubes. This includes fungi, which leads the author to several questions and observations. For instance, what the shit is a fungi? How do the fungi eat? Are you why strawberries betray me, fungi? Fungi! How do you eat!? You tubeless abominations, tell me how you get foooood!
After Plants with No Tubes, God had a second idea. It was, you guessed it– pediatric diseases! Then inspiration hit– God would take the thing everyone hated about Plants with No Tubes and get rid of it. And that’s the story of what we now know as Plants with Tubes. This is a fascinating classification of plant, but the giant picture of “some unlabeled plants of indeterminate tubing” didn’t leave a lot of space for text. Luckily they were able to squeeze in four Plants with Tubes facts including the most important one: “liverworts have no tubes.”
One thing I’ve noticed as we get further into the book is how the smugness the author had back when she was disproving mainstream moon science is gone. She is now basking in the wonder of the Lord our God, Maker of Tubes. The section on light is basically “can you believe how fucking amazing eyeballs are!? FUCK!”
Scientists don’t even know what’s going on with eyes. They look at eyes and shit. They pull their eyes out of their own skulls hoping it will blind them to science’s lies, but they still see them when they dream. And hey, let me wrap both hands around your neck and scream, “Have you ever thought about trees, or as you may know them Tall Plants with Tubes!? Use the wonder of your self-repairing pocket telescopes to see the majesty of God’s tree science!”
I think this book was written by someone with good intentions who merely wanted to disprove the moon to children, but something happened while they were writing it. Maybe there was a gas leak in the BJ-AND-ME office. Maybe this is what happens to any brain when it gets too close to unmitigated truth. In other words, you can learn to classify trees.
The best thing about Christian Science is how there are sort of rules, but you can turn them on and off when you need to. So if someone points at a big, stupid canyon and says “By the measurable rules of erosion, this is older than the Bible,” you can say, “Not if you account for the Earth Softness of, I don’t know, 1753?” These fuckers saw a child win at tag by saying they had a force field and based an entire field of study around it. In other words, you can learn to classify trees.
