Maybe the USA deserves to go down the shithole

Any nation that will tolerate -- no, not just tolerate -- FLOCK TO -- this
piece of *** deserves to be trashed. Talk about dumbing-down society. No
wonder Britney Spears gets more attention than Bush's deficit and his war on
the middle class.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/19/3275/


Published on Sunday, August 19, 2007 by the Independent/UK
Americans are Flocking to a Hi-Tech Creation Museum Where Man and
Dinosaurs Frolick Happily Together
Dinosaurs of all kinds abound here, from the stegosaurus silhouettes
rearing atop the iron gates as you first reach the parking lot to the
numerous and impressively convincing animatronic pterosaurs wagging their
giant tails and chewing plastic cud inside. At America?s newest public
museum dedicated to exploring the origins of man and our planet, dinos are
big box office, especially with kids.

Yet, there is something askew about the exhibits here and it doesn?t
take long to see. It?s not just the ?Thou shalt not touch? signs or the
biblically named Noah?s Café, offering respite for lunch. How about a stroll
down the Trail of Life, first stop, the Garden of Eden with faux cypress
trees and gurgling streams? Look, there are Adam and Eve taking a dip, and
not far away another dinosaur lurks, and a lion too.

It?s not just the presence of the naked pair, with niftily placed lily
pads to cover their naughty bits, that seems barmy. Wouldn?t they have been
gobbled up by now, before they had the chance to do any eating themselves,
say of the forbidden fruit? What were the designers of this place thinking?

Here is what. That Adam and Eve really did beget us and that before
they sinned, all creatures were vegetarian, meaning dinosaurs were no more
likely to eat them than butterflies. They were thinking also that man and
dinosaurs lived at the same time. As you proceed on your walk, a few more
surprises await. We are told how the world is no more than 6,000 years old
and Noah?s Flood created all the world?s fossils as well as its topography
as we know it (including the Grand Canyon, gouged by its ebbing waters). And
yes, the Earth and the entire universe were indeed created in six momentous
days.

The Museum of Natural History in New York this is not. Welcome,
rather, to the Creation Museum, a $27m facility that opened in May ? to a
veritable onslaught of enthusiastic visitors ? on a 49-acre site in
northeast Kentucky close to Cincinnati. There is no shortage of references
to Darwin, whose teachings about evolution most of us are familiar with and
more comfortable accepting. But the clear purpose is to demolish not
celebrate them. You get the idea of where you are also when you learn that
the folk behind it are the founders of a fundamentalist Christian ministry
called Answers in Genesis.

Theirs is a seductively simple, if controversial, thesis - that to
solve the eternal conundrum of where we come from we need look no further
than the first book of the Old Testament. And their contention here is that
there is nothing scientists can throw at us ? in paleontology, geology or
astronomy ? that will disprove this. Indeed, the point of the museum is to
demonstrate that the more we consider the clues to our origins found by
scientists ? and there are a dozen thoroughly respectable sounding ones on
the museum?s own staff ? the more they fit better with the Genesis version
of creation than with Darwin?s.

?We all have the same facts,? explains one video in the museum showing
two men working side by side to unearth a dinosaur fossil in the desert. One
is a Darwinist, the other a creationist. ?We are merely interpreting the
facts differently, because we are coming from different starting points.? No
kidding.

The blurb on one exhibit bears the headline: ?God?s Word versus Human
Reason?. It?s the latter you shouldn?t trust. ?The Bible is the word of
God,? explains Ken Ham, the museum?s principle founder. The promotion of
creationism has been his life since giving up teaching in Australia and he
says he has no fear that one day evolutionary scientists will come up with
something to shatter his young Earth beliefs. ?I can stand boldly and tell
you that that will never happen. They will never find something that will
scientifically disprove what is the clear teaching in the Bible.? Such
conviction must be comforting.

Many of us will find the postulations of the museum and of Ham far too
fantastic to take seriously. Nor would we be alone. About 50 protesters
gathered outside its gates on opening day in May holding signs aloft
excoriating Ham. He says the Ark was lifted by the flood a mere 4,500 years
ago or thereabouts and dinosaurs were among the cargo. (Forget all you know
about the massive creatures roaming the Earth 65 million years ago.) And if
both the Bible and all other legends omit to mention dinosaurs living
alongside humans, it is because the word was only invented 130 years ago.
But myths are full of dragons. (One exhibit points to the depiction of a
dragon on the Welsh flag.) Dragons and dinosaurs are but one.

But wait at least one second before dismissing Ham as a crackpot. For
starters, his is about the slickest museum you are ever likely to visit. It
has an interactive cinema that tells the creation story according to
Genesis, with wind gusts in the auditorium, vibrating seats and squirts of
water, as well as a state-of-the-art planetarium. Its animatronics are
worthy of a world-class theme park. In fact, the principle designer also
helped build exhibits for Universal Studios in Florida.

Something else impressive: the construction of the museum was funded
entirely by private donations; it doesn?t carry one dollar of debt.

In other words, in a country where the evolution-versus-creation
debate is alive and raging, there are plenty of Americans ready to embrace
Ham and support his museum. A recent Gallup poll in this country showed
nearly 50 per cent of people accepting the notion that, ?God created human
beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000
years or so.?

?The creationists have been very successful in persuading conservative
Christians to abandon their non-literal interpretation of the Bible,? notes
Ronald Numbers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who has written a
book on the subject.

Ham says that the target for the museum was 250,000 visitors by the
end of its first year. That was conservative. They are now on track to clock
150,000 people by the end of August, just three months after opening. On a
recent Tuesday, a long queue had formed at its front entrance one hour
before the posted opening time of 10am. Parents with children were there,
coach trips and excited church groups. And judging by the variety of license
plates in the car park, there were driving here from all across the country.

?It?s a very comforting feeling to be here,? admits Nancy Spivey, 65,
who has driven all the way from North Carolina ? to visit the museum with
her husband, Al, 65, a retired insurance executive. The couple consider
themselves creationists and are thrilled to find such a ?quality? place
supporting their views. ?A lot of so-called intelligent people think that if
you believe in creationism you are not very bright, but you get away from
that here,? Nancy adds. ?Everywhere else, we feel bullied and pushed
around,? says Al, noting that the evolutionary thesis of Darwin is the
accepted wisdom in every other natural history museum in America, not to
mention in its public schools and universities. For them, this is a
sanctuary.

Visitors are likely first to follow the Trail of Life, taking them
through what Ham calls the ?Six Cs of history?. The overarching theme of the
museum, they are creation (Eden), corruption (that damned fruit of
knowledge), catastrophe (the flood), confusion, Christ and the final C,
consummation (the day of the apocalypse when the Lord starts again and gives
us a new heaven and earth, free of suffering and death.)

Along the path there is a 40ft walk-through model of one section of
the Ark as well as a dark and grimy-bricked back alley reminding us of the
misery of sin. It includes a graffiti wall plastered with torn-up magazine
covers tackling such ?evils? as gay marriage, extra-marital sex and
abortion. It?s called the ?Culture in Crisis? room and to any small child it
would be pretty disturbing.

Ham, 55, who came to America 20 years ago but still has a faint
Australian lilt in his voice, says the reaction of Al and Nancy is typical.
?A lot of Christians have said that sort of thing. They are tired of being
beat up in this nation and angry at losing battles over abortion, over the
placing of the Ten Commandments in public places and about prayers in
school. They see this as making a very bold public statement to our modern
culture and to the world that the Bible is true and we can defend it.?

His taste for confronting liberalism may have come from his father, a
headmaster and Sunday school teacher who liked to say that anyone who
believes the Bible had better believe all of it, the parting of the Red Sea
and all. In 1974, a friend gave the younger Ham a book to read. Called The
Genesis Flood, it was the first jolt that stayed with him through his years
studying biology at university in Brisbane. ?The more I talked to my
professors, and the more I studied evolution, the more I could not believe
in evolution as fact. Nothing that I learnt there convinced me to believe in
Darwinian evolution,? he recalls.

It wasn?t until 1979 that Ham gave up a high-school teaching job in
Queensland and founded a creationist publishing company in his home,
Creation Science Education Media Services. A gifted salesman and speaker, he
began making regular visits to the US to sell his books. Eventually, in
1987, he decided to become full time, attaching himself to the Institute of
Creation Research (ICR), which remains active in San Diego. Never mind that
he and his wife Marilyn (they have five children) were homesick. ?I
recognized that if you are going to make an impact on Christendom and on the
world, Australia was not the place to do it from. Ultimately, America is the
centre of Christian world and of the business world.?

Making an impact is what drives Ham. Seven years after joining the
ICR, he and a friend, Mark Looy, co-founded a sister creationist
organization, Answers in Genesis, and decided it would be better located in
the more populous eastern United States. Today, Answers in Genesis has its
headquarters right behind the museum, employs a staff of about 300 people,
generates a daily radio program hosted by Ham that goes out to more than 800
stations across the US and has a thriving book and magazine publishing arm.

A prophet may be a bit strong, but Ham has a way with words that has
made him one of America?s better-known speakers on the conservative
Christian circuit. ?Ken could talk about some hot-button social issues of
the day and relate them to creation/evolution questions,? Looy, also born in
Australia and a self-confessed anglophile, says of his decision to join with
him. The museum is their crown jewel and testament to their success in
raising funds and support. Almost as impressive is how they have recruited
so many credentialed scientists to support the endeavor, including Dr David
Menton, who taught medical biology at the prestigious George Washington
University in St Louis for 34 years.

?I came here because I think the evolutionary world is the very
undoing of the gospel and is incompatible with biblical Christianity,?
Menton explains in his office in between giving talks to museum visitors
about what he sees as the unbridgeable differences between the skulls of
apes and humans. ?I see young people going through the public schools where
they are uncritically taught evolution and I see these kids getting
bamboozled by teachers who for the most part don?t know what they are
talking about.?

Ham says he is no extremist; he prefers ?Conservative Christian?. But
he is far enough out there to be unflustered that hours before our
conversation, Pope Benedict XVII, no less, had condemned the whole evolution
vs creation debate. ?This contrast is an absurdity,? said the Pope, ?because
there are many scientific tests in favor of evolution, which appears as a
reality that we must see and enriches our understanding of life and being.?

If anything Ham is puzzled. ?I don?t know why he would be saying
that,? he responds. It is not his position, he says, that anyone accepting
evolution cannot be a Christian. Indeed, there are millions of Christians,
sometimes called ?theistic evolutionists?, who surely consider themselves in
that category. But ignoring Genesis cannot be taken lightly. In fact, it is
downright dangerous.

?If you believe in millions of years of evolution and you didn?t get
it from the Bible, then you really do have to reinterpret Genesis, which
means you are upending biblical authority,? he explains. ?If you are saying
it really didn?t happen like Genesis describes, how can you trust anything
in the Bible?? Does this mean that a relaxed interpretation of parts of the
Bible, Genesis included, might lead to the unraveling of Christian faith
altogether? Ham likes the word ?unravel?. That is the point exactly. And,
thereafter, the unraveling of society.

?Step back and look at the big picture. America is not as Christian as
it used to be. The Ten Commandments are not where they should be, gay
marriage is accepted more and more, abortion is being permitted. The big
picture is that there is a loss of biblical authority in this nation and a
much greater loss over in England and in Europe generally.? That is the rot,
as Ham sees it, which has to be reversed.

It is hard not to admire Ham at least for his persistence. He is
tilting against a society that he says has been ?evolutionized? by its
government. Darwin?s theories of evolution remain embraced by the
overwhelming majority in the scientific establishment and remain standard to
the curriculum of all America?s public schools. He cannot market the museum
to school groups lest he be sued by the American Civil Liberties Union, for
meddling with the constitutional separation of church and state. And while
he may not like it, others will continue to brand him an extremist.

On opening day, a group called DefCon (Defense of the Constitution)
chartered a light plane that trailed a banner overheard quoting the Ninth
Commandment, ?Thou shalt not lie?.

With the museum, however, he is tapping into a genuine argument that
has simmered in America for a very long time, arguably since the so-called ?
Scopes Trial? of 1925, a landmark event on which the Creation Museum also
lingers. John Scopes was a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who found
himself charged with illegally teaching the theories of Darwin. Tennessee
had that year passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in its
schools. A standing-room only trial that drew world-wide attention, ended
with the teacher?s conviction. It was later overturned on a technicality,
however.

Ham dearly wants to stop the ?evolutionizing? that has been going on
apace since the Scopes Trial before it is too late and the museum is his
latest weapon. Impressive it most certainly is, but this visitor, at least,
wonders whether it will in the end be a destination only for the converted.
I found no one at the museum who was not already an adherent of Creationism,
except, that is, for myself.

And what do I think, as a true skeptic, asks Glenn Herbert, who has
come with his wife, three children and a niece, all the way from
Philadelphia? Well, I don?t buy any of it, is my reply, though politely put.
Herbert, like Ham, is not to be discouraged. Though I have spent six hours
in the museum, he urges I go through it all over again, ?and maybe the hand
of the Lord will reach down to you this time?.



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