Creation Museum at Salon

Ah, yes!

Salon does an article on the new Creation Museum and the letters section goes crazy. Good times.

The article includes lots of fun facts gathered from the exhibits:

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren't predators or prey, so the museum's designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.

Pretty cool. It should make vegetarians glad to know that meat eating is a sin. I guess that makes Atkins the devil.

But what you really get out of it is the profound sense of panic Ham and his followers are trying to cope with through their museum:

Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil."

It's pretty much an admission that if science is true than the bible can't be. Which undoes all of the live and let live arguments on both sides. What Ham is saying is that to live in the real world you have to be an atheist. So he's decided to opt out and live in this fantasy land where he can choose which ever version of reality he wants. His museum is not about religion - it's about a world without religion. He's an atheist in crisis.

But really, why take the museum seriously? Is it really any different from "museums" dedicated to UFOs or Bigfoot or the Lochness Monster? Is it really that different from Ripley's Believe it or Not, or Madame Tussaud's, or the London Dungeon?

I mean no one really believes any of this stuff do they? OK sure, some people believe that stuff, but just crazy fringe people. I mean you'd never see anyone running for president who didn't understand the difference between myth and science, fantasy and reality, right?

Right?

It's Not Crazy If It's Religious

The New York Times gives the benefit of the doubt to a wacky new Creationist museum in Kentucky:

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.

No, I think to the skeptic the museum is a fraud. Plain and simple. The antithesis of science and eduation, and what a museum is meant to be. To the believer, it's just a theme park ride / house of wax for Bible stories. The Times should be ashamed of itself for even giving these tin-foil alternate reality nutjobs the time of day.