| Topic: |
Science > Physics |
| User: |
"Eggs Ratzinger" |
| Date: |
19 Aug 2007 05:17:14 PM |
| Object: |
Favorite Museum of Current USA President |
A Museum for the President of the USA!
The Bible speaks for itself
at the Creation Museum!
http://www.creationmuseum.org/about
Walk through the Garden of Eden.
http://www.creationmuseum.org/
The Tree of Life, central to the
garden, stretches out its branches,
laden with ripened fruits.
Walk through the Cave of Sorrows
and see the horrific effects of the
Fall of man. Sounds of a
sin-ravaged world echo through
the room. Finally, see the
sacrificial Lamb on the cross,
and the hope of redemption...
http://www.creationmuseum.org/about
Americans are Flocking to a
Hi-Tech Creation Museum
Where Man and Dinosaurs
Frolick Happily Together...
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/19/3275/
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2872252.ece
Dinosaurs of all kinds abound
here, from the stegosaurus
silhouettes rearing atop the
iron gates as you first reach
the parking lot to the numerous
and impressively convincing
animatronic pterosaurs wagging
their giant tails and chewing
plastic cud inside. At America's
newest public museum dedicated
to exploring the origins of man
and our planet, dinos are big
box office, especially with kids.
Yet, there is something askew
about the exhibits here and it
doesn't take long to see. It's not
just the "Thou shalt not touch" signs
or the biblically named Noah's Cafe,
offering respite for lunch. How about
a stroll down the Trail of Life, first stop,
the Garden of Eden with faux cypress
trees and gurgling streams?
Look, there are Adam and Eve
taking a dip, and not far away
another dinosaur lurks, and a lion too.
It's not just the presence of the naked pair,
with niftily placed lily pads to cover their
naughty bits, that seems barmy.
Wouldn't they have been gobbled up
by now, before they had the chance
to do any eating themselves, say of
the forbidden fruit? What were the
designers of this place thinking?
Here is what. That Adam and Eve
really did beget us and that before
they sinned, all creatures were
vegetarian, meaning dinosaurs were
no more likely to eat them than butterflies.
They were thinking also that man
and dinosaurs lived at the same time.
As you proceed on your walk, a few
more surprises await. We are told how
the world is no more than 6,000 years old
and Noah's Flood created all the world's
fossils as well as its topography as we
know it (including the Grand Canyon,
gouged by its ebbing waters). And yes,
the Earth and the entire universe were
indeed created in six momentous days.
The Museum of Natural History in
New York this is not. Welcome, rather,
to the Creation Museum, a $27m facility
that opened in May -- to a veritable
onslaught of enthusiastic visitors -- on a
49-acre site in northeast Kentucky close
to Cincinnati. There is no shortage of
references to Darwin, whose teachings
about evolution most of us are familiar
with and more comfortable accepting.
But the clear purpose is to demolish not
celebrate them. You get the idea of where
you are also when you learn that the folk
behind it are the founders of a
fundamentalist Christian ministry
called Answers in Genesis.
Theirs is a seductively simple, if controversial,
thesis - that to solve the eternal conundrum
of where we come from we need look no
further than the first book of the Old Testament.
And their contention here is that there is
nothing scientists can throw at us -- in
paleontology, geology or astronomy -- that will
disprove this. Indeed, the point of the museum
is to demonstrate that the more we consider
the clues to our origins found by
scientists -- and there are a dozen
thoroughly respectable sounding ones
on the museum's own staff -- the more
they fit better with the Genesis version of
creation than with Darwin's.
"We all have the same facts," explains
one video in the museum showing two
men working side by side to unearth a
dinosaur fossil in the desert. One is a
Darwinist, the other a creationist.
"We are merely interpreting the facts
differently, because we are coming from
different starting points." No kidding.
The blurb on one exhibit bears the
headline: "God's Word versus Human
Reason". It's the latter you shouldn't trust.
"The Bible is the word of God," explains
Ken Ham, the museum's principle founder.
The promotion of creationism has been his
life since giving up teaching in Australia
and he says he has no fear that one day
evolutionary scientists will come up with
something to shatter his young Earth beliefs.
"I can stand boldly and tell you that that
will never happen. They will never find
something that will scientifically disprove
what is the clear teaching in the Bible."
Such conviction must be comforting.
Many of us will find the postulations of
the museum and of Ham far too fantastic
to take seriously. Nor would we be alone.
About 50 protesters gathered outside its
gates on opening day in May holding signs
aloft excoriating Ham. He says the Ark was
lifted by the flood a mere 4,500 years ago
or thereabouts and dinosaurs were among
the cargo. (Forget all you know about the
massive creatures roaming the Earth
65 million years ago.) And if both the Bible
and all other legends omit to mention
dinosaurs living alongside humans, it is
because the word was only invented
130 years ago. But myths are full of
dragons. (One exhibit points to the
depiction of a dragon on the Welsh flag.)
Dragons and dinosaurs are but one.
But wait at least one second before
dismissing Ham as a crackpot.
For starters, his is about the slickest
museum you are ever likely to visit.
It has an interactive cinema that tells
the creation story according to Genesis,
with wind gusts in the auditorium,
vibrating seats and squirts of water,
as well as a state-of-the-art planetarium.
Its animatronics are worthy of a
world-class theme park. In fact, the
principle designer also helped build
exhibits for Universal Studios in Florida.
Something else impressive:
the construction of the museum
was funded entirely by private donations;
it doesn't carry one dollar of debt.
In other words, in a country where
the evolution-versus-creation debate
is alive and raging, there are plenty of
Americans ready to embrace Ham
and support his museum. A recent
Gallup poll in this country showed
nearly 50 per cent of people accepting
the notion that, "God created human
beings pretty much in their present form
at one time within the last
10,000 years or so."
"The creationists have been very
successful in persuading conservative
Christians to abandon their non-literal
interpretation of the Bible," notes
Ronald Numbers, a professor at the
University of Wisconsin who has
written a book on the subject.
Ham says that the target for the
museum was 250,000 visitors by the
end of its first year. That was conservative.
They are now on track to clock 150,000
people by the end of August, just three
months after opening. On a recent
Tuesday, a long queue had formed at
its front entrance one hour before the
posted opening time of 10am.
Parents with children were there,
coach trips and excited church groups.
And judging by the variety of license
plates in the car park, there were
driving here from all across the country.
"It's a very comforting feeling to be here,"
admits Nancy Spivey, 65, who has driven
all the way from North Carolina to visit the
museum with her husband, Al, 65, a retired
insurance executive. The couple consider
themselves creationists and are thrilled to
find such a "quality" place supporting their
views. "A lot of so-called intelligent people
think that if you believe in creationism you
are not very bright, but you get away from
that here," Nancy adds. "Everywhere else,
we feel bullied and pushed around," says Al,
noting that the evolutionary thesis of Darwin
is the accepted wisdom in every other natural
history museum in America, not to mention
in its public schools and universities.
For them, this is a sanctuary.
Visitors are likely first to follow the Trail of Life,
taking them through what Ham calls the "Six Cs
of history." The overarching theme of the
museum, they are creation (Eden), corruption
(that damned fruit of knowledge), catastrophe
(the flood), confusion, Christ and the final C, c
onsummation (the day of the apocalypse
when the Lord starts again and gives us a
new heaven and earth, free of suffering and death.)
Along the path there is a 40ft walk-through
model of one section of the Ark as well as
a dark and grimy-bricked back alley reminding
us of the misery of sin. It includes a graffiti wall
plastered with torn-up magazine covers tackling
such "evils" as gay marriage, extra-marital sex
and abortion. It's called the "Culture in Crisis" room
and to any small child it would be pretty disturbing.
Ham, 55, who came to America 20 years ago
but still has a faint Australian lilt in his voice,
says the reaction of Al and Nancy is typical.
"A lot of Christians have said that sort of thing.
They are tired of being beat up in this nation
and angry at losing battles over abortion,
over the placing of the Ten Commandments
in public places and about prayers in school.
They see this as making a very bold public
statement to our modern culture and to the
world that the Bible is true and we can defend it."
His taste for confronting liberalism may
have come from his father, a headmaster and
Sunday school teacher who liked to say that
anyone who believes the Bible had better
believe all of it, the parting of the Red Sea
and all. In 1974, a friend gave the younger
Ham a book to read. Called The Genesis Flood,
it was the first jolt that stayed with him through
his years studying biology at university in Brisbane.
"The more I talked to my professors, and the
more I studied evolution, the more I could
not believe in evolution as fact. Nothing that I
learnt there convinced me to believe in
Darwinian evolution," he recalls.
It wasn't until 1979 that Ham gave up a
high-school teaching job in Queensland
and founded a creationist publishing company
in his home, Creation Science Education
Media Services. A gifted salesman and speaker,
he began making regular visits to the US to
sell his books. Eventually, in 1987, he decided
to become full time, attaching himself to the
Institute of Creation Research (ICR), which
remains active in San Diego. Never mind that
he and his wife Marilyn (they have five children)
were homesick. "I recognized that if you are
going to make an impact on Christendom and
on the world, Australia was not the place to
do it from. Ultimately, America is the centre
of Christian world and of the business world."
Making an impact is what drives Ham.
Seven years after joining the ICR,
he and a friend, Mark Looy, co-founded
a sister creationist organization,
Answers in Genesis, and decided it would
be better located in the more populous
eastern United States. Today, Answers
in Genesis has its headquarters right behind
the museum, employs a staff of about
300 people, generates a daily radio program
hosted by Ham that goes out to more than
800 stations across the US and has a
thriving book and magazine publishing arm.
A prophet may be a bit strong, but Ham
has a way with words that has made him
one of America's better-known speakers
on the conservative Christian circuit.
"Ken could talk about some hot-button
social issues of the day and relate them
to creation/evolution questions," Looy,
also born in Australia and a self-confessed
anglophile, says of his decision to join with
him. The museum is their crown jewel and
testament to their success in raising funds
and support. Almost as impressive is how
they have recruited so many credentialed
scientists to support the endeavor, including
Dr David Menton, who taught medical biology
at the prestigious George Washington University
in St Louis for 34 years.
"I came here because I think the evolutionary
world is the very undoing of the gospel and
is incompatible with biblical Christianity,"
Menton explains in his office in between
giving talks to museum visitors about what
he sees as the unbridgeable differences
between the skulls of apes and humans.
"I see young people going through the public
schools where they are uncritically taught
evolution and I see these kids getting bamboozled
by teachers who for the most part don't know
what they are talking about."
Ham says he is no extremist; he prefers
"Conservative Christian." But he is far enough
out there to be unflustered that hours before
our conversation, Pope Benedict XVII, no less,
had condemned the whole evolution vs creation
debate. "This contrast is an absurdity,"
said the Pope, "because there are many
scientific tests in favor of evolution, which
appears as a reality that we must see and
enriches our understanding of life and being."
If anything Ham is puzzled. "I don't know why
he would be saying that," he responds.
It is not his position, he says, that anyone
accepting evolution cannot be a Christian.
Indeed, there are millions of Christians,
sometimes called "theistic evolutionists", who
surely consider themselves in that category.
But ignoring Genesis cannot be taken lightly.
In fact, it is downright dangerous.
"If you believe in millions of years of evolution
and you didn't get it from the Bible, then you
really do have to reinterpret Genesis, which
means you are upending biblical authority,"
he explains. "If you are saying it really didn't
happen like Genesis describes, how can you
trust anything in the Bible?" Does this mean
that a relaxed interpretation of parts of the Bible,
Genesis included, might lead to the unraveling
of Christian faith altogether? Ham likes the
word "unravel." That is the point exactly.
And, thereafter, the unraveling of society.
"Step back and look at the big picture.
America is not as Christian as it used to be.
The Ten Commandments are not where
they should be, gay marriage is accepted
more and more, abortion is being permitted.
The big picture is that there is a loss of biblical
authority in this nation and a much greater
loss over in England and in Europe generally."
That is the rot, as Ham sees it, which
has to be reversed.
It is hard not to admire Ham at least for his
persistence. He is tilting against a society
that he says has been "evolutionized" by its
government. Darwin's theories of evolution
remain embraced by the overwhelming majority
in the scientific establishment and remain
standard to the curriculum of all America's
public schools. He cannot market the museum
to school groups lest he be sued by the
American Civil Liberties Union, for meddling
with the constitutional separation of church
and state. And while he may not like it, others
will continue to brand him an extremist.
On opening day, a group called DefCon
(Defense of the Constitution) chartered a
light plane that trailed a banner overheard
quoting the Ninth Commandment,
"Thou shalt not lie."
With the museum, however, he is tapping
into a genuine argument that has simmered
in America for a very long time, arguably
since the so-called "Scopes Trial" of 1925,
a landmark event on which the Creation
Museum also lingers. John Scopes was a
biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who
found himself charged with illegally teaching
the theories of Darwin. Tennessee had that
year passed a law forbidding the teaching of
evolution in its schools. A standing-room only
trial that drew world-wide attention, ended with
the teacher's conviction. It was later overturned
on a technicality, however.
Ham dearly wants to stop the "evolutionizing"
that has been going on apace since the Scopes
Trial before it is too late and the museum is his
latest weapon. Impressive it most certainly is,
but this visitor, at least, wonders whether it will
in the end be a destination only for the converted.
I found no one at the museum who was not
already an adherent of Creationism, except,
that is, for myself.
And what do I think, as a true skeptic,
asks Glenn Herbert, who has come with his wife,
three children and a niece, all the way from
Philadelphia? Well, I don't buy any of it, is my
reply, though politely put. Herbert, like Ham,
is not to be discouraged. Though I have spent
six hours in the museum, he urges I go through
it all over again, "and maybe the hand of
the Lord will reach down to you this time."
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/19/3275/
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2872252.ece
www.creationmuseum.org
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Favorite Museum of Current USA President |
19 Aug 2007 07:31:20 PM |
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Something else impressive:
the construction of the [27 million dollar] museum
was funded entirely by private donations;
it doesn't carry one dollar of debt.
Why do idiots have all the money?
Tax the churches. Tax the ***** out of them. Tax them like they were
selling cigarette whiskey to children.
Tom Buckner
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