Behold your new gods! Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde from Zootopia. Image via Inverse

And I thought fake “historian” David Barton was off his rocker before! However, Right Wing Watch, just caught him in an act of vocal stupidity that is just beyond words.

On his “WallBuilders Live” radio program today, David Barton repeated his warning that Disney movies are anthropomorphizing animals by making people believe that they have human-like thoughts and feelings, which is causing people to essentially worship pagan gods.

“If you look back at the time of the Bible, a lot of the idols back then were actually animals,” Barton said. “Dagon was the fish God.”

Barton claimed that America never had any sort of animal rights movement until this nation got away from the Bible and Disney started producing movies like “Bambi” and “Lady and the Tramp,” in which animals were presented as human surrogates.

“The Bible tells us that you are to be kind to your animals,” he stated, “but you don’t worship your animals, you don’t make a Dagon god out of them and that’s what we’ve now done.”

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So Barton basically thinks that most people can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality? Well in some cases that maybe the case, otherwise who would believe the falsehoods he peddles as a “respected historian” of American history?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of PeTA, but even the most fringe animal rights organization would not take Bambi that seriously. After all, everyone knows that animals don’t talk in real life. The same goes for other classics like Lady and the Tramp where there are also talking animals. Anyone except the most sheltered child, is going to realize that the Jungle Book, is a fantasy, even if the new live action movie Disney made looks awesome. The only way that you would think that movie represents reality, is if you have no idea how real animals behave, including somehow not understanding that the real life versions of the animals in the film, cannot speak human languages.

Does Barton also think that Mickey Mouse, taught kids that mice were gods, since he not only talked, but walked upright, wore pants, and used technology? Same with Disney’s newest cartoon movie, Zootopia, where all the animals are also anthropomorphic to the point, where they act indistinguishable from people. But again, who would think that those cartoons represent real life, and if they did, who would think they did for very long? You’re not going to find any bipedal rabbit police women or conman foxes in real life. But even if one were to believe those silly cartoons, why would anyone feel compelled to worship animals as gods? They’re portrayed as being more like people than gods. I wouldn’t see any of those characters as worthy of worship, however I would want to protect them from any unfair or unjust treatment, if they were real creatures. Even so, those films are so far from reality that you can’t use them as compelling arguments for animal rights or even animal welfare. It makes far more sense to view such stories as allegories for real life problems facing human beings, such as racism in the case of Zootopia.

I’m curious now, does David Barton also think that shows like Loony Toons are teaching our kids to worship animals as gods, since the creatures in those cartoons are also usually anthropomorphic? Isn’t Warner Brothers also guilty now of promoting animals over people?

Oh and stories where animals have human like characteristics and tendencies go far back, far back before Bambi, or even Disney. They’re hardly a new, or even a twentieth century phenomenon. What about Asop’s Fables? In those tales, like in Bambi, the animals normally don’t wear clothes, and may still walk on all fours, but they’re still portrayed in a manner that makes them much more like humans than their real life counterparts. Asop’s animals clearly had some human tendencies. Does he expect us to believe that they were ancient Greek animal rights propaganda, or that Asop was trying to teach people to worship animals as gods? The ancient Greeks clearly had a high view of human reason, which they knew that no other animal possessed. As Pagans, they might not have shared Barton’s “Judeo Christian” view of non human animals, but they didn’t worship other creatures as gods. In fact almost all the Greek gods and goddesses had bodies that were idealized versions of the human form, and the ancient Greeks were hardly a society of radical animal rights activists. They ate meat and used animals to do their work for them, just like people in pretty much every other civilization in the ancient world.

Finally Dagon, didn’t exactly look like a fish. Even if he was refereed to as a “fish god,” he was never portrayed as simply being a fish. He may have been portrayed as a merman in some instances, but not as simply a fish. In Mesopotamian Mythology, he was never portrayed as a divine fish, nor do I know of any account of the people of Mesopotamia refusing to eat fish, or harm a fish, because they worshiped one.

Now we have one more reason not to take Barton seriously as a “historian.” As if we needed another.