Sunday Entertainment...

[onager]

Some of you may have seen the thread about John Brown, the wacko Fundie who is drilling for oil in Israel based on a Buy-bull verse.

I posted this in a thread about him, and thought some of you might enjoy reading it as well. The link goes to a XIAN site that finally caught on and called Wyatt a crook. (But that was only after several years and thousands of dollars in donations.)

Original post:

One of the most hilarious Xian hucksters ever was Ron Wyatt, of Wyatt Archeological Research ("WAR"). His story is straight out of the Middle Ages, when con men selling The Genuine Foreskin Of Jesus did a brisk business all over Europe.

In his slick videos and in-church pitches (arranged by his Celebrity Xian Booking Agency--yes, such things exist), Wyatt claimed he had found the following:

--Noah's Ark
--the ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah
--the exact location of the Red Sea crossing by Moses, complete with Egyptian chariot parts resting on the bottom
--the exact location of the post-hole that held the cross on which Jesus was crucified
--the location of Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia and a fortune in ancient, solid gold Israelite artifacts
--the Ark of the Covenant, buried 20 feet below the crucifixion site. (When the non-existent earthquake occurred on Crucifixion Day, the crack in the earth allowed the blood of Jesus to drip on the Ark, and the blood was still preserved on it. Or something like that.)

Wyatt even roped in so-called mainstream journalists like Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs. At least one "non-fiction" book appeared about Wyatt's discovery of Mount Sinai.

(The site was unfortunately secured by the Saudi Arabian government after all Wyatt's hard work finding it. Which meant he couldn't furnish any proof of it. Don't you hate it when that happens?)

In the end, the people who turned against Wyatt were the Creationists--the financiers of his scams over many years.

A Twue Bewiever tells the whole story here, "A Great Christian Scam:"

http://www.tentmaker.org/Dew/Dew7/D7-AGreatChristianScam.html