Sadventists, badventists

This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn't believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said "goodbye!", and scurried away. It's so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty.

Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists.

The Seventh-day Adventist cult's "prophet" and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White, was astonishingly fanatical and legalistic, and let's face it, folks, crazier than a bag of wet cats. At the age of nine, Ellen was hit in the head with a rock, which resulted in her being comatose for three weeks. Many think this trauma damaged her brain in ways that could have caused her extreme zealotry -- I prefer to call it religious lunacy -- which involved what she claimed were visions shown her by god, visitations by angels, and even a trip to Jupiter. Others think she was a calculating, greedy, power-hungry fraud. Some think she was a combination of both. Then there are the Sadventists, who believe even today in 2011 -- despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, all of which is poorly explained away by the cult, although the explanations are good enough for the believers -- that she was a true prophet of god whose writings were divinely inspired and remain an infallible supplement to the word of god. The cult holds Ellen in the same regard as the biblical prophets (something else they deny vehemently to outsiders but acknowledge within the invisible walls that surround the cult). Over the years, there have been endless revisions and changes made in Ellen's writings by the Sadventist Powers That Be to cover up some of her more embarrassing statements or obvious errors, which seems odd if her infallible writings are divinely inspired. Nevertheless, nearly a century after her death, Ellen's writings are still the arbiter of doctrine and scriptural interpretation in the cult.

The really fascinating thing about Ellen White is that most other Christians consider her and her cult heretical — the whole thing about a wild-eyed prophetess declaring a privileged status with God and Jesus and witnessing miracles doesn't sit well with all the other wild-eyed fundamentalists and evangelicals who declare that they have a special relationship with divinity. And yet the modern young earth creationists, the kooks who trace their interpretation of the Bible and our origins to Whitcombe and Morris's The Genesis Flood, are actually promoting Ellen White's version of the creation story. Ron Numbers has traced it all back in his book, The Creationists, and basically what Ken Ham and the Hovind's are pushing is Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, sanitized of any mention of the crazy Millerite lady from Maine.