Thursday, June 5, 2014

#1070: Richard Rives


You’ll have a tough job challenging Ron Wyatt for American lunacy. Wyatt was, as you probably know, a pseudoarchaeologist and young earth creationist who claimed to have found Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and evidence for Moses’s crossing of the Red Sea (a more comprehensive list and a – far too “neutral” – discussion here). His claims were, rather obviously, rejected not only by anyone with the faintest connection to real science but by most religious fundamentalists as well – even Answers in Genesis rejects his discoveries, and that’s quite a standard for idiocy to achieve.

Wyatt is dead, but his work lives on. Richard Rives is the current president of Wyatt Archaeological Research, and hence responsible for maintaining Wyatt’s legacy. Rives and company have for instance “cleaned up” some of Wyatt’s own descriptions of his adventures and discoveries to circumvent some amusing details.

But Rives has also branched out a little. The WorldNetDaily, for instance, covered (a WND “exclusive” again) his declaration of War on Christmas since Christmas is a pagan holiday that should not be celebrated by Christians. Strangely enough neither Rives nor the WND were cited by other conservative pundits in their annual tirades concerning the alleged war on Christmas, even though Rives is one of few who have attacked Christmas explicitly.

Diagnosis: A loony as they come. At least Rives has positioned himself at the fringe’s fringe, and his influence is probably rather limited.

4 comments:

  1. In addition to Mike Rogers, I also want to nominate the unrelated Kesha Rogers as well. She's a LaRouche cultist who wants to go to war with England.

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  2. Pretty slim evidence for your inclusion of Rives in the EOAL. What was his connection with Wyatt aside from becoming the President of WAR, and his "alleged war on Christmas"?
    It appears that you have very scant knowledge of Rives and perhaps just threw him in the mix because of your animus for Wyatt?

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    Replies
    1. Not sure I follow. The WAR website remains a litany of lunatic "Biblical-archaeology"-style pseudoscience, and is still dedicated to supporting Wyatt's delusional conjectures. Rives is still responsible for it, isn't he?

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