Bat shit crazy Ben Carson

        November 4 2015,  marked 93 years to the day that the tomb of King Tutankhamen was opened in Egypt, revealing spectacular artifacts and a magnificent mummy of the boy king.  The celebration was somewhat marred, at least here in the U.S., by a leading Republican candidate for president, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who confirmed a statement he first made in 1998 — that he believes the Egyptian pyramids were grain silos, not tombs, and were built by alleged Hebrew patriarch and dream analyst,  Joseph.

       The unanimous collective reaction from archaeologists and historians, who have command of literally centuries’ worth of research into the artifacts and literature of the ancient Egyptians, is… "Huh? No frickin' way!" (or its measured, urbane, scientific equivalent)

        Carson said in his 1998 talk at Andrews University, a Seventh-Day Adventist-affiliated university, “And when you look at the way that the pyramids were made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they’d have to be that way for various reasons.  And "various of scientists"  (Carson wasn't an English Major)  have said, ‘Well, you know there were alien beings that came down and they have special knowledge and that’s how, you know, it doesn’t require an alien being when God is with you." As a Seventh-Day Adventist, Carson appears to subscribe to the idea that the book of Genesis is literal history. He also apparently doesn't subscribe to the general rules for parsing a coherent sentence. 

        Just to be clear, no actual scientists think that aliens built the pyramids. There is a small but vocal contingent of people who believe in pseudo-archaeological explanations, but archaeologists have thoroughly dismantled those harebrained theories with actual factual research.   So while it may look informed and realistic,  for Carson to deny alien involvement in pyramid building, he then  attributes them to a  single guy, not an Egyptian , by the way,  rather than, well, the ancient Egyptians.

        We actually do know what the pyramids were built for because the ancient Egyptians told us what they were built for.  They were a literate people. They specifically describe these architectural wonders as tombs and, just to make sure we would know that millennia later, they buried people in them.  Denying ancient people the capability of building monumental structures is not new, though, and not confined to Egypt — plenty of people over the years have denied that Native Americans could have built the massive earthwork mounds across the U.S. and that the Mayas could have built their pyramids without help from aliens, Europeans, or a "higher  power." Perhaps Joseph helped while on vacation?  Carson affirmed this ludicrous belief in Joseph and his "amazing  Technicolor  grain silo"  to CBS News,  doubling down, indeed almost gleefully wallowing,  in his  profound, willful ignorance of science.

        I thought to myself, hey, could this be an honest mistake and could Carson be right and these other historians, archeologists and scriptologists wrong ?  Naah, he's as screwed up as a soup sandwich, and not even other non Adventist and otherwise  sane  Christians should believe him and here's why.

        Essentially every credible (and many not so credible) Christian and Hebrew scholars have placed the whole  "God tells Abraham he's special" dialogue firmly in the 1850 BCE timeframe. Assuming the whole  Abe to Joseph family tree is accurate, that would place Joseph in Egypt, if indeed he was real and was really there,  ca 1800 BCE. And what might he have seen there when he was freed from servitude?  Well, he could have gone to Giza and seen the 700 year old pyramids! A bit more travel, and he could also inspect the 800 plus year old pyramid of  Zoser.  See the Egyptians, a people with language and writing, recorded all these building projects, including the name of one of the  relevant architects, Hemiunu, to whom they also built a statue, currently on display in Germany.  Unless Joseph was also a time traveler, he couldn't have been involved in any way with pyramid construction, for the simple reason that he wouldn't have been born for another 800 years or so by the time they were completed! End of story.    

        But , finally, does it really matter what Carson thinks about the Egyptian pyramids?  There will always be science deniers, there will always be people swayed by pseudo-archaeology, and there will always be people who believe regardless of the facts. .  It does matter, though, because  Ben Carson apparently also  believes himself competent to run the Executive Branch of  the  United States government, and of being  its face to the world. So it matters that Carson casually rejects hundreds of years’ worth of research because in denying science, he throws the U.S. back into the past.  It matters that he brazenly denies the Egyptian people their rightful history because this marginalizes an entire culture and makes the U.S. look like an ignorant bully, and we've already done too much of that.