Letters to the Editor
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Capitalism is alive and doing very well, thank you.
This is great. Ken Ham must be laughing all the way to the bank, on each and every run. One problem: when all the other shysters who are making their living off the ignorant and downtrodden awaken to Ken's big joke, his colossal colosseum of convoluted constructionism will come tumbling down faster than he can make a final withdrawal and get out of Dodge.
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Should people who don't trust modern science fly in airplanes?
I wonder if people who say things like, "the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted" fly in airplanes? It seems to me that flying in an airplane requires an awful lot of...um...faith in modern science, if you'll pardon the word. I also wonder if he takes medicine, uses a cell phone, drives a car and, on the whole, enjoys the, oh dear, "fruits" of modern science. I don't think you can have it both ways. If modern science has so botched the job with evolution, then surely airplanes shouldn't fly, nuclear bombs shouldn't explode, and I shouldn't be instantaneously transmitting my thoughts halfway across the continent on my slick new laptop...which just happens to be an Apple :)
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Hairless Apes
The Creation Museum's exhibit staff seem eager to substitute fictional perfection when the realism of truth isn't conveniently tasteful. A Middle-Eastern man with no chest (or back) hair? A woman with no shrubbery peeking coyly from an armpit? I suppose they could have figured out a different use for candle wax, but then they didn't have any Knowledge until just before they got the boot out of primordial Disneyland, so that seems unlikely. The pictures of the models of Adam and Eve show pretty clearly what the Creation Museum is truly about - willful disregard of the complexity of science and our world in a desperate attempt to maintain an illusion that can be fed as pablum to those who can't be troubled to learn the truth.
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They know not of what they preach
There are two main problems with the Creationists:
(1) They are trying to refute science that they don’t understand; and
(2) They display incredible hypocrisy by assiduously applying the label of ‘dogma’ to evolutionary science, while categorically refusing to apply any skepticism to their own dogma.
The science of ‘evolution’ goes far beyond Darwin, who published his seminal work almost 150 years ago. Unlike then, we now understand countless molecular mechanisms including the structure of DNA and how it encodes for genes, how mutations occur, and how entire genomes of different species compare with each other. The ‘theory’ of evolution encompasses hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of datum, elegantly converging from molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, archeology, and physics. All of the data are consistent with the theory; none are inconsistent with it.
Next time you encounter one of these people, please remind them of these facts.
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How "American" They Are!
A number of readers have remarked on the physiognomy of The Creation Museum's Adam & Eve. Why do they look so much like well-groomed Americans?
As it happens, some Creationists would have an answer & it is a sinister one indeed. It may be that the Museum is set up more or less according to the assumtpions of "British Israelitism," which still has a following in the USA amongst the ultra-fundamentalist & white-supremacist right. This noxious doctrine holds that the people of Great Britain were the "real" Jews (the so-called Lost Tribe), & that, therefore, their line is the true line of the Chosen People.
In short: Look around the margins of the Creationist/Homeschool movement, and you will find its very nasty bedfellows flirting with anti-Semitic & White-Supremacist views. A good many underlings in the Bush White House are on a hand-shake basis with these bigots, too.
Cf.: Michele Goldberg, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." It will disturb your sleep for weeks. But it is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the fringe, theocratic elements of the GOP.
--Mark Richardson, Kyoto, Japan
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Inside My Creation Museum
I’ll tell you what I think. I think I’m a literalist even when I mean to be metaphorical, or analogously witty and punloving. And because I’m a literalist I have a tendency to generalize my experience and my ego filtering defensive mechanisms to fit nearly everyone I come in contact with, either physically or through written word or thought or just remembering the last time I made love to a woman named Eve. In the end it’s only my version of the story that I pay attention to, even when other bards are knocking at my door with love poems and rifles.
I’m a creationist. I have spent years memorizing the story of my creation. I spent thousands of dollars telling priests and therapists the story of my creation. I had paradise and then I was tricked into peeking behind the curtain and gained knowledge that everything wasn’t perfect in Edenville. And just like the vegetable munching dinosaurs that never even considered a meal of atomized flesh, the t-rexes of my paradise fundamentally claim it really was paradise. They will tell the same story again and again that everything I learned peeking behind the curtain is wrong.
According to them, and to them the potential of absolute truth must be weighed in accordance with their rotund reading of sacred birthday cards and other congratulatory text, it was paradise. Then the flood of their history was wiped from the world I knew in a 400 session (10 session equal 1 day in all sacred text) deluge until all that was left was a naked me and weirdly inconsistent localizing of fossil and plant matter in different degrees of psychic strata. I fundamentally deny my father ever loved my mother even though my mother will fundamentally embrace a paradise that contains only facsimiles of my reality. I mock my mother to the point that I refuse to speak to her. She spends her days playing solitaire or reading the Left Behind series of novels. My father can only say, “When is this ever going to end?”
It’s a crazy lonely world I live in and I’m always looking for a new way to tell my story so others will believe me. I just need someone to finally tell me that what I say happened really happened, and if at all possible, I’d love to know why. This is my reality. When I put down the beer, or quit checking my retirement account or actually pay attention to my wife when he talks (sorry that was a slip of some sort as my wife really is a she) what I know is only what I don’t know, a sort of Rumsfeldian dream fugue. I don’t know shit about any of this and if someone can give me an answer, hell, I’ll drive to Cincinnati if necessary, and shell out (by the way how much does it cost to get in?) the cost of a ticket to believe.
Not really. I think religion is like my parents trying to convince me they really didn’t beat me or scream maniacal curses or demand I pay tribute to them with some sort of self burning sacrafice. I think religion as commonly considered is a displaced paranoia in an effort to finally find out who’s listening behind the sheet rock. Cause my little boy brain thinks someone has been listening all along and that someone can finally tell the story to clear everything up once and for all. Cameras have screwed with everyone, cause now we know they've had pictures for at least 150 years. And finally, I think religion spent a number of years backstage morphing with political correctness so its impossible to distinguish between fact, hyperbole, shock, interpretation, or plain old bullshit. I think religion of every stripe belongs in diaper bag along with anti-bacterial wipes and vegetable snacks.
In case I want to be honest, I’ve got my museum too. All the art and facts of my creation, the creation of my creators all the way back to Grandma Kelly who fucked her boyfriend Edward in the backseat of a Packard on a hazy summer evening in Irvington. And when I spend a Saturday afternoon walking the halls of this museum I sometimes get really pissed that more people don’t know about what really happened. Sometimes I get so pissed I think if I had the money and the people I’d invade my paradise with an army to clear out all the infidels who mar my story with claims of tofu rex’s and perfect skin.