Don McLeroy’s “Unique and Insightful” Conspiracy Theorist

The Texas Freedom Network brings us some background on Robert Bowie Johnson, whose book Sowing Atheism: The National Academy of Sciences’ Sinister Scheme to Teach Our Children They’re Descended from Reptiles has been recommended by Don McLeroy, chairman of the State Board of Education. The TFN notes that Johnson sees Obama as part of a Satanic conspiracy, citing a press release:

In a series of essays published at www.solvinglight.com/blog/, author Robert Bowie Johnson Jr. presents evidence that Barack Obama is directly linked to Satanic teachings through his close association with Oprah Winfrey, who parrots and relentlessly promotes, worldwide, the anti-Christian doctrine of her guru, Eckhart Tolle.

“The voting public has a right to know to what degree Barack Obama, who has called himself a ‘committed Christian,’ considers himself and his wife to be integral parts of Oprah’s and Tolle’s New Age global tribe, a tribe that has adopted the “wisdom” of the ancient serpent as its own,” Mr. Johnson said.

Johnson also expounded these views in an article for Human Events:

Barack Obama’s connections to Oprah Winfrey and her New Age guru, Eckhart Tolle, are the least examined, yet most revealing, and by far the most potentially ruinous of the senator’s controversial associations. Obama claims to be a “committed Christian,” yet appears to support Oprah in the worldwide dissemination of Tolle’s and her virulent anti-Christian doctrine.

…In Iowa, Michelle Obama said that Oprah had touched her soul and empowered her. How so? Through the blatantly anti-Christian Oprah/Tolle doctrine?

Is Obama a “committed Christian” as he claims, or is he on board with Tolle and Oprah in their global anti-Christian crusade? Or, as a third explanatory possibility, is the Tolle-entranced Oprah, “the richest and most influential woman in the world,” not the Oprah Obama knew?

Johnson runs Solving Light Books, and he has apparently been published in

The Progressive, The New York Times, Playboy, the international publication of Answers in Genesis, TJ (Technical Journal), Newsday, and many others.

Not many people can boast of such a combination.

Johnson’s magnum opus, however, is a book called The Parthenon Code: Mankind’s History in Marble. Here’s the pitch:

The DaVinci Code
is fictional.

The Bible Code
is bogus.

The Parthenon Code: Mankind’s History in Marble
is a GENUINE ancient artists’ code which opens the door to long-hidden truths about the origins of mankind.

In this book, and in other volumes such as Noah in Ancient Greek Art and Athena and Eden: The Hidden Meaning of the Parthenon’s East Facade?, Johnson claims that Greek mythology is based on historical events depicted in the Bible – Nereus is actually Noah, and Athena is “the serpent-friendly Eve of Genesis”. One reviewer, preposterously, calls this “the first interpretation of Greek Mythology that actually makes sense.”

In the early 1980s, Johnson was the co-creator of a couple of ideological board games. Mother Jones reported in 1981:

Johnson and [Ronald] Pramschufer are marketing a new board game called “Capital Punishment,” in which the goal is to get “criminals” past “liberals” and into the electric chair, on death row or imprisoned for life. Under the game rules, liberals can free the criminals, but when that happens, an innocent citizen becomes a crime victim and is sent to “heaven”.

This followed “a satire of the welfare system titled ‘Public Assistance: Why Bother Working for a Living'”(1), which can now be purchased here.

Johnson also collaborated with Pramschufer to write a guide for small presses, and in 2007 Pramschufer’s RJ Communications (now called SelfPublishing, Inc) published a novel entitled Danger My Destiny, co-authored by Johnson and Hilda Petrie-Coutts; she is the mother of composer and music producer Wernher Pramschufer, so presumably is also related to Ronald.

Johnson’s first book was the polemical 1973 West Point: America’s Power Fraternity, co-authored with a certain K. Bruce Galloway; Gore Vidal complained that they “tend to see conspiracy where there is often only coincidence”, citing their claim that Vidal’s West Point graduate father had been made Director of Aeronautics by Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to retain West Point control over civil areonautics, particularly for mail transport. According to Vidal (2),

Actually, it was civil not military aviation that pushed for my father’s appointment, while the decision for the army to fly the mail was Roosevelt’s. 

McLeroy’s recommendation for Johnson’s Sowing Atheism can be seen here:

In the current culture war over science education and the teaching of evolution, Bob Johnson’s Sowing Atheism provides a unique and insightful perspective. In critiquing the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) missionary evolution tract—Science, Evolution and Creationism, 2008, he identifies their theft of true science by their intentional neglect of other valid scientific possibilities. Then, using NAS’s own statements, he demonstrates that the great “process” of evolution—natural selection—is nothing more than a figure of speech. These chapters alone are worth the reading of this book.

Next he shows how the NAS attempts to seduce the unwitting reader by providing scanty empirical evidence but presented with great intellectual bullying—both secular and religious. He actually embarrasses the NAS with a long list of their quotes where they make the obvious claim that evolutionists believe in evolution. He then shines light on the Clergy Letter Project, again showing the obvious—theistic evolutionists believe in evolution…

According to a profile, McLeroy “holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University and a Doctor of Dental Science degree from The University of Texas Dental Branch in Houston.”

(Hat tip: Ed Brayton)

***

(1) “Gallows Humor Alive and Well”, in Mother Jones, July 1981, p. 10.

(2) Gore Vidal, “West Point”, in Matters of Fact and of Fiction, 1978, p. 194.