I was lured to BibleProbe.com while flicking through the otherwise reasonable links at Arts and Letters and, for a while at least, found it has a certain car-crash attractiveness to it, goosed along by photographs of Jesus (above) and overcooked opinions on everything from abortion (”and its known link to breast cancer”) to zoroastrianism (begins with Z).

Billing itself as “non-denominational for Christians & Jews”, Bible Probe treats Buddhists with bemusement but goes for the Muslim jugular. There are pages and pages of Islam-bashing idiocy, much of it in capital letters, and still plenty of bile left over for Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are doomed because they believe the “extremely false” teaching that “Jesus never rose bodily from the dead”), homosexuals (”gay press promotes sex with children”) and “the disgusting and blatant anti-Christ, homosexual and Satan-worshipping performer Marilyn Manson”.

And much more.

But once you’ve determined the significance of 666 to the godless EU and confirmed your long-held suspicion that “Dinosaurs & Man Existed together”, you can spend a good 20 minutes thumbing through the ghost pictures, accounts of angel visits and, um, optical illusions.

Regarding the spook pix, here you’re granted the freedom to make up your own mind, though Bible Probe helpfully offers its verdict, invariably agreeing yea or nay with no less a source than “Dave at the Hampshire Ghost Club”.

The photo up top is accredited to a woman who has since this post originally appeared has denied ever taking it.

She actually contacted me to ask that her name be deleted, saying the picture was given to her by someone else and she doesn’t believe it’s Jesus at all!

But Bible Probe gives her name and quotes her “son” as explaining that she was “taking pictures of airplanes departing the Dallas airport” in 1962 and, as she watched them disappearing into the clouds got to thinking about God’s imminent return “one glorious day”.

The next day (which wasn’t the one, sadly) the woman got “a call from the frantic clerk” at the photo shop about this one odd picture. “Days later she heard from God,” the alleged son allegedly continued. “His message was: Go to Honduras, feed my children and I will provide all your needs. My mother has been a missionary in Honduras, Central America, for over 35 years and she is still searching the clouds anticipating the Lord’s return.”

Bible Probe and Dave, noting that the photo came from “an ex-California missionary”, conclude that “this may be real”.

Before we leave Bible Probe forever (daring not to look back), frequent Dorseyland subject Richard Dawkins ought to be informed that this is the place to go for unassailable proof of creationism, which the website defines as “the belief that God created everything – like He said”.

“The most illusive [sic] thing that scientists have to look for is where did matter come from? This hunt often points to an atomic particle called a neutrino. Some scientists have been heard to say, ‘we are descended from neutrinos,’ even though they are just beginning to understand neutrinos. This goes to show you how they will believe in anything, even what they don’t fully understand – except the belief in God.”

Enter Bishop Ussher and his 17th-century calculation that God created the world on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. “Nothing in the fossil records indicates man existed more than 6,000 to 8,000 years ago,” Bible Probe notes resolutely, “so perhaps Bishop Ussher and the chronological time scale of the Bible is exact after all”. Thus Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday, November 10, that same year, and that the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on May 5, 2348, which was a Wednesday.

And if that isn’t convincing enough, the Venerable Bede figured the world as we know it was born in 3952 BC, Martin Luther favoured 4000, Johannes Kepler picked 3992, the Mayan calendar zeroed in on August 11 or 13, 3114, and Shakespeare, for Heaven’s sake, has a character in “As You Like It” saying, “The poor world is almost 6,000 years old”.

“Atheist scientists” keep changing their guesstimates by a a billion or so years every five years, Bible Proble complains, but fortunately, “CHRISTIANS ABSOLUTELY CAN BELIEVE IN A YOUNG UNIVERSE”, and here’s why:

“We have an awesome God, who spoke the universe into creation. This same God created Adam and Eve as adults and not as babies. It would be nothing for this God to create an earth and universe 7500 years ago – already mature …

“There is an awful lot of fraud by ‘Scientists’ such as Piltdown Man and Neanderthal man in our search for our beginnings. Its [sic] a sad thing that ‘Scientists’ are so fond of pulling a ridiculous arbitrary high number out of the air – as they seek to become famous and to ‘be the first’. In many cases, no more than a piece of a jaw bone is found – which could just have well have been a monkey – but some ‘Scientist’ will claim finding a million year old man or woman.

“Imagine intelligence analysts, real estate appraisers, or other analysts making the same sort of wild extravagant extrapolation and arbitrary assumptions that naturalistic scientists, space scientists and archeologists make every day. These wild assumptions scientists send to newspapers and scientific journals based on nearly no concrete evidence, are all actually in the realm of speculative philosophy. Where did these people get this authority to feed us speculation as if it was fact? Surely the press is to blame [uh-oh – P.D.]. But the individual scientist is also to blame for allowing the press to do this.”