Article: A world where lies are true.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070326_a_world_where_lies_are_true/


A World Where Lies Are True


Posted on Mar 26, 2007


By Chris Hedges

"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their
doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of
consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than
reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses
can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real
life and real experiences deal to human beings and their
expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda-before
the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's
disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an
entirely imaginary world-lies in its ability to shut the masses off
from the real world."

-Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

In the middle of the lobby of the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum
in Petersburg, Ky., a 20-foot waterfall tumbles. Two life-size figures
of children with long black hair and in buckskin clothes play in the
stream a few feet from two towering Tyrannosaurus Rex models that can
move and roar. The museum, which cost $25 million to build and has a
sea of black asphalt parking lots for school buses, has a scale model
of Noah's ark that shows how Noah solved the problem of fitting
dinosaurs into the three levels of the vessel-he loaded only baby
dinosaurs. And on the wooden model, infant dinosaurs cavort with
horses, giraffes, hippopotamuses, penguins and bears. There is an
elaborate display of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve, naked but
strategically positioned so as not to display breasts or genitals,
swim in a river as giant dinosaurs and lizards roam the banks.

Before Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, museum visitors are
told, all of the dinosaurs were peaceable plant-eaters. The evidence
is found in Genesis 1:30, where God gives "green herb" to every
creature to eat. There were no predators. T-Rex had such big teeth,
the museum explains, so it could open coconuts. Only after Adam and
Eve sinned and were cast out of paradise did the dinosaurs start to
eat flesh. And Adam's sin is a key component of the belief system,
for in the eyes of many creationists, in order for Jesus' death to be
meaningful it had to atone for Adam's first sin.

The museum has a theater equipped with seats that shake and gadgets
that spray mist at the audience as the story of God's six-day creation
of the world unfolds on the screen and the sound system rocks the
auditorium. There are 30-foot-high walls that represent the cliffs of
the Grand Canyon, floors that resemble rocks embedded with fossils,
and rooms where a "Christian" paleontologist counters the claims of an
"evolutionist" paleontologist. It has the appearance of a real
science museum, complete with a planetarium, a gift shop and plaques
on the wall with quotes from creationist "scientists" who have the
title doctor conspicuously before their names. It has charts,
timelines and graphs with facts and figures. It is meant to be
interactive, to create, like Universal Studios, a contrived reality
with an array of costly animatronic men and women as well as moving
dinosaurs.

The danger of creationism is that, like the pseudo-science of Nazi
eugenics, it allows facts to be accepted or discarded according to the
dictates of a preordained ideology. Creationism removes the follower
from the rational, reality-based world. Signs, miracles and wonders
occur not only in the daily life of Christians but in history,
science, medicine and logic. The belief system becomes the basis to
understand the world. Random facts and data are collected and made to
fit into this belief system or discarded. When facts are treated as
if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard to
determine truth, in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the
reporting of the events of the day, the world becomes a place where
people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no
possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who
interpret the official, divinely inspired text. This is the goal of
creationists.

Other creationist museums are going up in Arkansas, Texas, California,
Tennessee and Florida. Museums are part of a massive push to teach
creationism in schools, part of a vast Christian publishing and
filmmaking industry that seeks to rewrite the past and make it conform
to the Bible. The front lines of the culture wars are the
classrooms. The battle is one we are slowly losing. Twenty states
are considering changing the way evolution is taught in order to
include creationism or intelligent design.1 Only 13 percent of
Americans in a 2004 Gallup poll, when asked for their views on human
origins, said life arose from the strictly natural process of
evolution. More than 38 percent said they believed God guided
evolution, and 45 percent said the Genesis account of creation was a
true story.2 Courses on intelligent design have been taught at
Minnesota, Georgia, New Mexico and Iowa State universities, along with
Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon, not to mention Christian universities
that teach all science through the prism of the Bible.

The museum is an illustration of the movement's marriage of primitive
and intolerant beliefs with the modern tools of technology, mass
communication, sophisticated fundraising and political organization.
Totalitarian systems usually start as propagandistic movements that
ostensibly teach people to "believe what they want." This is a ruse.
This primacy of personal opinion, regardless of facts, destabilizes
and destroys the primacy of all facts. This process leads inevitably
to the big lie. Facts are useful only if they bolster the message.
The use of mass-marketing techniques to persuade and convince, rather
than brainwash, has led tens of millions of followers to accept the
toxic totalitarian line by tricking them into believing it's their
own. Ironically, at the outset the movement seemingly encourages
people to think "independently" or "courageously."

At first all have, in the totalitarian belief system, a right to an
opinion, or, in short, a right to believe anything. Soon, under the
iron control of an empowered totalitarian movement, facts become
worthless, kept or discarded according to an ideological litmus test.
And once these movements achieve power, facts are ruthlessly
manipulated or kept hidden to support the lie. Creationism is not
about offering an alternative. Its goal is the destruction of the
core values of the open society-the ability to think for oneself, to
draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and
common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to
challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there
are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and
socially acceptable. We are beginning to see the growing intolerance
that comes with the empowerment of these ideologues. There is a bill
in the Texas Legislature to strip all mention of evolution from Texas
school textbooks and institute mandatory Bible classes for all
students. This is just the start.

And yet, coming from the modern age, these Christo-fascists cannot
discount science. They employ jargon, methods and data that appear to
be science, to make an argument for creationism. They have created
parallel research and scholarly institutions. They pump out articles
in self-published journals to provide "evidence" that homosexuals can
be cured, that global warming is a myth, that abortion can cause
breast cancer, that something they call "post-abortion syndrome" leads
to deep depression and suicide and that abstinence-only education is
an effective form of birth control. This pseudo-science has seeped
into the public debate. It is disseminated by nervous and timid media
anxious to give both sides in every argument. Those who have contempt
for facts and truth, for honest research and inquiry, are given the
same platform by the press as those who deal in a world of reality,
fact and rationality.

The movement desperately needs the imprint of science to legitimize
itself. It achieves this imprint by discrediting real science and
claiming creationist science as true science. All attempts to argue
the creationists out of their mythical belief, to persuade them with
logic, evidence, scientific inquiry and fact, will fail. They have
created a "fundamentalist science." They know they cannot return to
the pre-Darwinian innocence that let them believe the Bible alone was
enough. They need, in the midst of their flight from reality, to
reassure their followers that science, science not contaminated by
secular humanists and nonbelievers, is on their side. In this they
are a distinctly modern movement. They seek the imprint of science
and scholarship to legitimize myth. This is a characteristic they
share with all modern totalitarian movements, which co-opt the
disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to give a modern
veneer to their primitive and superstitious belief systems, systems
that allow the rulers to dictate reality and truth. The
"paraprofessional" organizations formed by the Christian right,
organizations of teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers and
scientists, mimic the activities of real professional groups. They
seek to challenge the legitimacy and the power of the traditional
organizations. The duplication of the structures and methods employed
by the non-totalitarian world, the use of pseudo-science to dress up
fantasy, is slowly undermining our legitimate scientific and
educational institutions. It is destroying the foundations of our
open society. It is ushering us into a world where lies are true.

1 Scott LaFee, "Local scientists, doctors and professors talk about
'intelligent design,' " The San Diego Union-Tribune, F-1, June 8,
2005.

2 Frank Newport, "Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported
Darwin's Evolution Theory," The Gallup Poll, Nov. 19, 2004,
http://poll.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=14107&pg=1.

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