| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
28 Aug 2005 02:31:37 AM |
| Object: |
Adam, Eve and T. Rex |
"I'm going to Fundyland!"
These things are sprouting up like weeds.
---
Adam, Eve and T. Rex
Giant roadside dinosaur attractions are used by a new breed of
creationists as pulpits to spread their version of Earth's origins.
By Ashley Powers
Times Staff Writer
August 27, 2005
CABAZON, Calif. Dinny the roadside dinosaur has found religion.
The 45-foot-high concrete apatosaurus has towered over Interstate 10
near Palm Springs for nearly three decades as a kitschy prehistoric pit
stop for tourists.
Now he is the star of a renovated attraction that disputes the fact that
dinosaurs died off millions of years before humans first walked the
planet.
Dinny's new owners, pointing to the Book of Genesis, contend that most
dinosaurs arrived on Earth the same day as Adam and Eve, some 6,000
years ago, and later marched two by two onto Noah's Ark. The gift shop
at the attraction, called the Cabazon Dinosaurs, sells toy dinosaurs
whose labels warn, "Don't swallow it! The fossil record does not support
evolution."
The Cabazon Dinosaurs join at least half a dozen other roadside
attractions nationwide that use the giant reptiles' popularity in
seeking to win converts to creationism. And more are on the way.
"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs
back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group
building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's
already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.
"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to
brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use
dinosaurs. That's their star."
The nation's top paleontologists find the creation theory preposterous
and say children are being misled by dinosaur exhibits that take the
Jurassic out of "Jurassic Park."
"Dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden, and Noah's Ark? Give me a
break," said Kevin Padian, curator at the University of California
Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and president of National Center for
Science Education, an Oakland group that supports teaching evolution.
"For them, 'The Flintstones' is a documentary."
Tyrannosaurus rex and his gigantic brethren find themselves on both
sides of the nation's renewed debate over the Earth's origins and the
continuing fight over whether Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species"
or Genesis best explains the development of life.
Science holds that dinosaurs were the Earth's royalty for about 160
million years. Their reign ended abruptly, possibly after a meteorite
smacked into the planet, but they're considered the forebears of birds.
Unearthing dinosaur bones that are millions of years old "doesn't prove
evolution, but it shows the Genesis account doesn't work," said Nick
Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education.
Drivers who pull off Interstate 10 in Pensacola, Fla., are told a far
different story at Dinosaur Adventure Land. Its slogan: "Where Dinosaurs
and the Bible meet!"
The nearly 7-acre museum, low-tech theme park and science center
embodies its founder's belief that God created the world in six days.
The dinosaurs, even super carnivores such as T. rex, dined as
vegetarians in the Garden of Eden until Adam and Eve sinned and only
then did they feast on other creatures, according to the Christian-based
young-Earth theory.
About 4,500 years after Adam and Eve arrived, the theory goes, pairs of
baby dinosaurs huddled in Noah's Ark, and a colossal flood drowned the
rest and scattered their fossils. The ark-borne animals repopulated the
planet meaning that folk tales about fire-breathing beasts are accounts
of humans battling dinosaurs, who still roamed the planet.
Kids romping through the $1.5-million Florida theme park can bounce on a
"Long Neck Liftasaurus" swing seat; launch water balloons at a T. rex
and a stegosaurus, and smooth their own sandbox-size Grand Canyons,
whose formation is credited to the flood. A "fossilized" pickle purports
to show that dinosaur bones could have hardened quickly. Got an upcoming
birthday? Dinosaur Adventure Land does pizza parties.
"Go to Disneyland, they teach evolution. It's subtle; signs that say,
'Millions of years ago' " said evangelist Kent Hovind, the park's
founder. "This is a golden opportunity to get our point across."
Carl Baugh opened his Creation Evidence Museum in the 1980s near
Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, where some people said
fossilized dinosaur tracks and human footprints crisscrossed
contemporaneously. The Texas museum sponsors a continuing hunt for
living pterodactyls in Papua New Guinea. Baugh said five colleagues have
spotted the flying dinosaurs, "but all the sightings were made after
dark, and we were not able to capture the creatures."
Organizers at Creation Research of the North Coast in Humboldt County,
Calif., dream of building their own reptile park but lack funding and
acreage. So do leaders at Project Creation in Mount Juliet, Tenn., who
would need to raise about $1 million to assemble 30 to 50 pterodactyl
and brachiosaur replicas to mingle with live chickens and goats.
At the Institute for Creation Research museum in Santee, a San Diego
suburb, officials plan to enlarge its paleontological offerings.
"We like to think of [dinosaurs] as creation lizards, or missionary
lizards," said Frank Sherwin, a museum researcher and author.
A 50,000-square-foot Answers in Genesis museum and headquarters is under
construction near the Ohio-Kentucky border, where the group hired a
full-time dinosaur sculptor. When the facility opens in 2007, the lobby
will spotlight a 20-foot waterfall and two animatronic T. rexes hanging
out with two animatronic children dressed in buckskins.
The creation museums are riling mainstream Christian denominations that
believe the Earth is billions of years old and that God uses evolution
as a tool. This conviction makes modern science compatible with their
faith in a creator.
"Taking the Bible as astronomy or physics is blasphemy. They're treating
it as an elementary textbook and it's not," said Francisco J. Ayala, a
UC Irvine evolutionary biology professor and ordained Dominican priest.
"We believe that God created the world. They misread, misquote and
misuse the Bible, but they will lose out to science," said Ayala, a past
president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.
Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist and founder of Reasons To Believe ministry
in Pasadena, frets that "young-Earth theologians" damage the credibility
of scientists who are Christian and push intellectuals away from
religion.
"I'd put them in the same category as flat-Earth people and the people
that think the sun goes around the Earth," he said. "They think they're
defending the truth, but the young-Earth model has no scientific
integrity."
Advocates of the intelligent design idea, who assert that certain
features of life are best explained by a creative intelligence, bristle
at being lumped in with young-Earth creationists. There's little
question that the Earth is billions of years old, said John West, senior
fellow at the Discovery Institute, a public policy think tank in Seattle
that is critical of Darwinian theory.
"Critics would rather tar everyone with the brush of creationism," said
West, who teaches political science at Seattle Pacific University. "I
think the idea that Genesis provides scientific text is really
farfetched."
Creationists defend their dinosaur museums and attractions as a way to
teach a grander purpose: If the Bible's history is accurate, then so is
its morality.
"If [evolutionists] convince people that dinosaurs are exotic, strange
creatures, they've won right there, and the Bible looks like a book of
Jewish fairy tales," said Sean Meek, executive director of the Tennessee
group Project Creation.
In Cabazon, it was the apatosaurus' underbelly that first enticed an
Orange County developer a decade ago.
Gary Kanter had driven to the desert to size up Dinny the dinosaur and
the 60 surrounding acres of scrubland, with the idea of expanding the
adjacent truck stop.
While gawking up at the dinosaur's tummy, Kanter imagined the beast's
tree-trunk legs lumbering across the barren plain.
"He's like a movable Golden Gate bridge," he recalled thinking when he
reached his epiphany: Dinny was the perfect pitchman for a higher power.
Kanter's development company bought the site from the family of the late
Claude K. Bell for $1.2 million.
Bell, an ex-sculptor at Knott's Berry Farm, crafted Dinny from discarded
steel and concrete in the 1960s.
The mayor of Cabazon at the time called the reptile an eyesore. The
apatosaurus once sheltered two dozen people during a snowstorm and
starred in an ad for an air-conditioning company that bragged about
cooling the beast.
Bell eventually added Mr. Rex, a 65-foot-tall tyrannosaurus. The
creatures' red eyes glare in tandem at nighttime drivers and on
postcards that show Mr. Rex chomping a freeway sign. In 1985, actor Paul
Reubens climbed inside Rex for the film "Pee-wee's Big Adventure,"
peering through 50 spiky teeth.
Kanter and his wife, Denise, are Christian home-schooling advocates who
are hosts on a DVD titled "How to Home Educate with Ease." After the
gift shop vendor's lease expired, Denise Kanter posted an essay on the
Christian website Revolution Against Evolution, seeking volunteers for
the attraction.
"Our national museums (that we fund through our taxes) leave millions of
people with information that they are no more than an evolved rock," she
wrote. "The destruction of millions of souls has been devastating."
Pastor Robert Darwin Chiles offered to transform the Cabazon Dinosaurs
from tourist stop to place of worship.
The pastor and the Kanters now hope to turn Mr. Rex's innards into
exhibits about cryptozoology the study of speculative creatures, such
as Bigfoot and creationism. They will somewhat mirror those in Santee,
which takes visitors from Genesis to modern times with placards that say
Darwin "came at just the right time to be the catalyst for a revival of
ancient paganism" and that evolution birthed Communism, racism and
Nazism.
"It's what we call marketplace ministry. I bring the Gospel to the
people," said Chiles, who runs a nondenominational church at the
attraction, inside Bell's rickety old home.
Kids flock to the huge statues. "And it's not like they're crying, 'Oh,
mommy, take me out, I'm scared.' They're drawn to it," Chiles said.
"There's something in their DNA that knows man walked with these
creatures on Earth."
The Kanters intend to spend $2 million to $3 million to add a giant sand
pit where kids would rummage for fossils, a center that would contrast
creation and evolution arguments, a maze and a replica of Noah's Ark.
All that alerts visitors now is a cryptic sign that asks, "Is evolution
true?"
Parents glanced past it on a recent afternoon as their children raced
toward the growling dinosaurs. Boys wedged their heads between a smaller
carnivore's teeth, or smacked its mouth with toy swords. Toddlers hugged
Dinny's legs while one family crowded under his tummy in party hats,
unwrapped presents and bonked a stegosaurus piata.
Douglas Bant and his wife ushered their kids from gift shop to minivan
for the trip back to Scottsdale, Ariz. The couple teach their children
about Jesus, but Bant was miffed about a dinosaur trying to do the same.
"Who thinks, 'I'm going to open a gift shop and convince people this is
church'?" he said. "Why would you turn a toy for kids into some sort of
religious crusade?"
Corina Shreve had pulled off the highway with her son and daughter.
The family, from Westminster in Orange County, drops in on Dinny maybe
twice a year. Shreve said a staffer recently piled pamphlets about
creation onto her 6-year-old son Aeron's hands and told him to pass them
to friends.
When Aeron asked his mom during this year's visit for a T-shirt, Shreve
balked at buying the only one in his size. It read "By Design and Not By
Chance."
---
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dinosaurs27aug27,0,6894033.story?
coll=la-home-headlines
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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