|
Step right up here, folks! Step right up, and for the blessedly low price of only $19.95 per adult, you too can witness first-hand the Biblical wizardry that only the Creation Museum can provide!
That’s right – I noticed on the news this weekend that in Petersburg, Kentucky, a 60,000 square foot museum has just opened, its sole purpose being to educate its visitors that the stories of the Bible are absolutely true, and that silly things like “evolution”, “archeology”, and even “science” are things that can’t really be supported by, well, science.
Confused? I was too, until I read about some of the exhibits on display. For example. I’ve always wrestled with the whole “God created us, all other life, and the entire heavens and Earth in only six days" thing. I know he's God and all, but why six days? Couldn't he have done it instantaneously? If it occurred before the physical manifestation of time, then how could the duration be measured? Even some of my fundamentalist friends have posited that maybe a day to God is like 1,000 of our years. Okay, but even if that were true, if God made all of this in less than a week, and that we humans here on Earth are his bestest and most favoritist pet project, then why would he put us all on some tiny little planet in a little solar system that exists on the outskirts of a tiny galaxy? Wouldn’t God want to let us thrive in a larger and more central location? Maybe even God likes to get away once in a while, and we’re more like his country home that he sneaks off to after a hard week at the center of the universe that he created.
If you’re looking to the Creation Museum for the answer to these questions, you’ll be happy to know that they put the entire controversy to rest. He made us all in six days – the same time it takes all of us to get from Monday morning to Sunday, where of course we all keep God busy by going to church to praying to him on his lone day of rest.
The Creation Museum lets us all know that the Bible is to be translated literally. This means that the Garden of Eden was a real place where all living things lived in harmony and there was no death. It also lets us know that our planet is 6,000 years old – that’s human years, not God years or even dog years, and certainly not the billions of years that the so-called scientific community (i.e., Satan’s dweeby beancounters) would like you to swallow.
Yes, you say, but what of the dinosaurs? The archaeological sciences and carbon daters estimate that these creatures went extinct tens of millions of years before human beings even walked the planet. Nice try, Captain Skeptic. How could that have ever happened if the Bible tells us that nothing is older than 6,000 years? My Fundamentalist friends have theorized that maybe God put those fossilized skeletons in the ground to test our faith, and that dinosaurs never really existed at all. That’s a pretty smart theory – one that almost made me toss my critical thinking hat and smell-test-ometer into the garbage once and for all. However, thanks to the fine experts at the Creation Museum, we now know that dinosaurs did indeed exist after all! Yep, they were created by God, and lived in harmony with everyone else in the Garden of Eden. In fact Adam himself befriended them and even named them. Sure this stuff isn’t in the Bible, but I happily defer to their judgment, since they did fork over $25 million to build the animatronic dinosaurs on display.
Before we stray too far from Adam, it was just learned in the last couple of days that the actor who plays Adam in the film depictions in the Museum is actually a well-known actor. He’s not really a household name - that is, unless your household downloads a lot of porn. Adam is portrayed by a guy named Eric Linden, who not only is a porn actor, but also has his own porn website, which I gladly would have offered the link to if I thought the actress playing Eve was on it as well. Unfortunately, the only picture I found of him was with a drag queen – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. Just not my gig, that’s all.
Anyway, back to conformity, true history, and not questioning anything. Where were we? Oh yes, dinosaurs and the Bible. According to the Museum, Noah even brought the Dinosaurs on the Ark. How you could fit two brontosauruses, two diplodocuses, and two brachiosauruses (not to mention the carnivorous T-rexes, allosauruses, and veloceraptors) on a boat that was only 300x50 cubits is beyond me. Sure the Bible doesn’t mention these creatures on the ark, but the Creation Museum - the one that takes Biblical interpretation literally and expects us all to as well - certainly does. Hey, the Bible doesn’t mention the untold millions of species of insects that must have gone on the ark, either, but they’re here today so they must have had tickets. It also doesn’t mention all of the other animals that weren’t indigenous to that part of the world, but they were there too. I’m guessing that Noah must have sailed around and picked them up before they all drowned.
The Museum also informs us that during this great flood, the waters from the 40 days and nights of rain created the entire Grand Canyon! Pretty cool, huh? Sure, visitors to the actual Grand Canyon can clearly see by the markings on the rock that the canyon was created over a long time by water currents (hence the untouched non-watermarked areas surrounding the canyon’s perimeter), but don’t let your eyes and brains fool you – it was made in just a few week by God back in Bible times. Thank you, Creation Museum, for sticking it to the geological community. Those guys have always bugged me with their mountains of “facts”, and stupid “irrefutable scientific evidence”.
Near the end of the tour of the Museum, you'll also find a display of the problems society is facing today, since many of us have strayed from blindly accepting every word in the Bible as absolute fact written by God himself. The display shows things like a child at a computer (likely downloading porn). I wonder if the Museum saved a few bucks on royalties by having the child download an Eric Linden movie, just to keep everything in-house. The Lord does love thriftiness, after all.
It also warns us of other societal dangers by taking us through a (fake) rat-infested dirty (fake) hallway, where the walls are covered in graffiti spelling out many of today’s horrible sins. Words like “School Shootings” and “Abortions” are alongside things like “Gay Marriage” – letting us know that two people being allowed to legally share their financial and material assets in a contractually-binding ceremony is the moral equivalent of running into a school and shooting all of the students. Whew! Glad they cleared that one up for us.
No Museum tour is complete without a visit to the gift shop, located conveniently at the end of the tour. Patrons of the Museum can buy little plastic dinosaurs and bring the to their next Sunday School show-and-tell. There are also books available that either:
A) Promote creationism and the Bible;
B) Refute the mountains of scientific evidence that characterize this museum as full of horseshit;
C) the Bible itself
Hey I have no problem with the Bible. But let's be honest - it was written by human beings - even most religious scholars believe that. On the same note, most religious scholars also advise people to read the book metaphorically - I think that there are some great lessons to be learned from the Good Book. However, selective literal interpretation to promote an agenda of intolerance is wrong. Also, twisting Biblical passages to make a profit from others is what I would consider the opposite of holy.
Really, it’s no surprise that someone has finally decided to do this. There’s really a large market for a museum like this out there. Newsweek did a poll last month that showed 39% of all Americans thought that the theory of evolution was “not well supported by evidence”. By my estimates, that means that more than one out of every three of us will believe anything so long as someone tells us that God wants us to believe it. It also means that a large minority of us is devoid of critical thinking skills. Of course, visitors of the Creation museum will argue that two-thirds of the rest of us will burn for eternity along with our evil, fact filled brains.
But hey, how much fun can Heaven really be if I have to spend eternity running away from veloceraptors?
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(358 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
