Letters to the Editor
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@RealName & Anonymous
Seems to me you should just leave people to their own myths.
Why, I'd be happy to do that, RealName, if they could keep their myths to themselves and not insist that they are true and that everyone else must run their lives by those myths whether they believe them or not.
But at the risk of asking an obvious question, would any of you offer the same level of ridicule for a similar museum created by Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Wiccan, or Shinto fanatics?
Believe it or not, Anonymous, I most certainly would. In fact, you don't even have to build a museum! Just come talk to me about your favorite myth that you just know is the One Truth, and I'll be happy to tell you how ridiculous it is.
What is the alternative to ridiculing this? Let it go unquestioned as the truth?
Read the article carefully, and you'll see these particular fanatics have no problem ridiculing people who believe differently than they do. That's fine. They have every right to do that. If, however, you're going to drag religion out of your church and home into the public arena, you can expect people to challenge you. Religion doesn't deserve any special exemptions or privileges.
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God IS into sex!
I mean, what if I gave people the ability to do the most amazing and fun thing, and then told them the were forbidden to do it- jeez, I'd be a real asshole wouldn't I...Oh never mind, that's sex- God did that one too...
I just realized that this is completely wrong! To go from 2 to 6.5 billion people in 6,000 years means that God must be totally about sex!
Hmm...is there a "begatting" room at the museum that covers this? Or perhaps a mathematical model that shows just how procreative people had to be to make this happen?
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@ AKA Smith
The water lilies are obviously there so they can dodge THE nagging question. You know the theological puzzle of our time: Did Adam and Eve have navels? I'll bet all you boys and girls thought it was so they didn't have to show the naughty, dangly bits, didn't you. Shows how little you understand the true puzzles of theology.
It's at least as important a question as: If the T. Rex was vegetarian back in Eden, why isn't he colored purple? And what's he doing with all those nasty tearing teeth? Or did they evolve , er I mean develop those after the fall?
There's a reason that "creationism" sounds so much like "cretinism".
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No one questions the cellphone
Evolution is continually doubted because there's no concrete technology created from the theory. Modern electronics are a direct result of physics and quantum theory. Buildings, roads, bridges: all the spawn of materials science and engineering. You never see fundies railing against the evils of the electron. Why? They'd be laughed out of the room by everyone, not just 40% of the population.
This should change in the next 20 years or so, if current technology is allowed to progress. A branch of artificial intelligence, Evolutionary Computation, has made great strides in the last two decades. Just google "genetic programming" or "evolutionary computation" and you'll see a wealth of activity. Personally I think video game AI will be a good source of innovation, and that will have direct contact with young people, but there are many other areas where EC is producing "human competitive" results: i.e. evolved solutions to problems that rival the creativity and complexity of current human researchers.
As evolutionary theory produces concrete technology the naysayers will have less and less of a leg to stand on. Just as only the fringe reject medical science now, claiming that only god can heal, only the fringe will claim that biological organisms are irreducibly complex, and thus unable to be created through evolution. The question will then be this: Will the satisfaction of definitively refuting the creationists be worth unleashing this technology?
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Ironically
Creationists, by denying their - god-given maybe? - reason in order to sidle up to nonsense peddled by mollycoddling, parasitic charlatans like Ham, more fully embrace the so-called "worldly" mindset of "If it feels good it can't be wrong" than any hedonist this side of Jerry Springer and the real world. For them, the Bible "feels good" damn the evidence "it must be right".
I, for one, would rather burn in hell, than kowtow to some sadistic deity with a penchant for voyeuristic punishments, and such sardonic ironies like filling our world with every indication that it is billions of years old, while secretly making the right choice a moral vaccuum of obesiance to those, like Ham, who least exemplify the more admirable traits of mankind.
This "museum" this public obscenity, this monolithic paean to misogyny, irrationality, fascist morality, this a-historical hodge-podge of wishful thinking, slander, meant to deliberately mislead children or, reinforce the misbegotten lies of their equally ill-informed parents - why, I'd sooner travel to the House on the Rock and pay homage to the 200+ foot fiberglass leviathan than pay one red cent to this, frankly, evil endeavor.
There is no more evil act than that of twisting the minds of children and filling them with lies, save that of reinforcing the subtle arrogance and priggishness of their parents, emboldening the hoi polloi to greater political, moral, and intellectual violence.
I encourage you all not to visit this place. Even for kicks. Even out of curiosity. With one hand they take your money; with the other they curse you. Why? Because, these stories feel good, so they must be right!
Sick. A national embarrassment. A generational canker. A sign of the debasement of the collective American mind and civic culture.
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Straw Man City!
The ever-courageous Anonymous writes:
But at the risk of asking an obvious question, would any of you offer the same level of ridicule for a similar museum created by Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Wiccan, or Shinto fanatics?
Hell yeah! Of course I would, and do!
The Muslims and their religion of pieces; the Hindus lost me with their god of smallpox; don't get me started on Judaism; Zoroastrianism probably doesn't have the cash to stump for a museum what with their 100,000 global members; Wiccans?! now you're just being silly; and Shinto being the state religion of Restoration Japan, they already have a museum called the Imperial Palace in Tokyo!
Your point was, again?
What I want to see in the Creationist museum is the diorama explaining where Cain's wife came from.
That and details of the oft-mentioned Biblical race of giants of which Goliath was the rock-star member.
Funny, we have all these fossils of the dinosaurs that lived in the Garden of Eden, but no giants...
OMG! A gap in the Theory of Creation!!! What will I believe now?!?!?