I Didn't Even Know he Was Running for Office

Yeah, yeah...I know I've been running silent for the past couple of weeks. Mostly for reasons already cited. Strange Dreams... begins rehearsals this evening. We've got a great cast and I'm very excited to see this get going. I still need to finish typing the script, though, and I need to finish typing up a marketing blurb before someone kills me, but things are well under way. And The Prometheus Myth opens in three weeks. So that's been pretty busy.

I've got a couple of ferments going at the moment. I'll post more on them later. But first, I thought I'd get you all good and foaming at the mouth. I've got no link for all of this, so the complete article will be included below. My favorite quote from this has got to be, "The 250,000 people going to it will go back to their legislators and pressure them to vote for Jesus." That and the bit about the dinosaurs wandering around the Garden of Eden. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Read on and stock up for the coming Dark Age.


Genesis of a museum
Creationists, saying all the answers are in the Bible, put their beliefs on display in $25 million facility
By Lisa Anderson

Tribune national correspondent
Published April 25, 2006

PETERSBURG, Ky. -- The recent fossil discovery of a 375-million-year-old fish that could lurch ashore on bony transitional fins--apparently a long-sought missing link between sea creatures and land animals--made a spectacular splash in evolutionary science circles. But it created nary a ripple on the placid American campus of Answers in Genesis, where an enormous museum chronicling the biblical six days of creation is rising fast amid rolling fields.

Ken Ham, co-founder and president of Answers in Genesis, believed to be the world's largest creationist organization, and most "young-Earth" creationists are as unimpressed by science's finding another piece in the evolutionary puzzle as they are with science's finding the Earth to be 4.5 billion years old.

Using biblical calculations, young-Earth creationists believe the planet is about 6,000 years old; old-Earth creationists believe it could be older. Both, however, take the Bible literally and reject Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory that all life, including human, shares common ancestry and developed through random mutation and natural selection. Evolution enjoys near-universal support among scientists.

Not so among the American public, about half of which endorses creationism, according to polls. While new concepts such as intelligent design, which posits that life is so complicated that an intelligence must have devised it, recently have suffered setbacks from court rulings and scientific findings, creationism thrives, and Answers in Genesis is a strong sign of that.

Just hours after the fossil fish, called Tiktaalik roseae, landed on the front pages of many newspapers earlier this month, it also surfaced on the Answers in Genesis Web site. In a posting titled "Gone fishin' for a missing link?" the organization, in effect, threw Tiktaalik roseae back.

"Because evolutionists want to discover transitional forms, when they find a very old fish with leg-bone-like bones in its fins, they want to interpret this as evidence that it is some sort of transitional creature. . . . It may be just another example of the wonderful design of our Creator God," the posting said.

Absolute certainty

For creationists, there are no transitional creatures and no doubts. In the Book of Genesis, the biblical calendar of creation is as clear and simple as it is sacred: God created creatures of the sea and the air on Day 5. Land animals and man appeared on Day 6. And all of this, including the creation of Earth, happened about 6,000 years ago.

"Is the Bible the word of God or is it not? If you're going to reinterpret it from ideas outside the Bible, which continue to change, then it's not," said Ham, 54, a former high school biology teacher from Australia, who leads Answers in Genesis' 12-year-old U.S. branch. "The point I make is the Bible's account of creation is so black and white and has not changed, but man's ideas have changed." (Brief interruption here; remember this quote later, when you get to the part about the dinosaurs. One of the things that gets me most about creationist "scientists" is their hypocritical claim to believe that the Biblical account of creation is literal and complete, while simultaneously attempting to incorporate new discoveries that aren't Biblical into their worldview. There are no dinosaurs anywhere in the Bible. Any attempt to claim otherwise is pathetic at best, and at the worst, plain fraudulent. In fact, for a long time, creationists claimed dinosaur bones were a hoax. Some even went so far as to say they were placed there by God as a test of faith. The whole idea that a species could go extinct was, for some time, considered heretical, because it implied that God could somehow have created a creature that wasn't meant to be here. The point I make here is that Ham wants to claim that Christian ideas about creation haven't changed. But they have, and only the hypocrites can really claim otherwise. I now leave this slightly less than brief interruption. -M)

Ham is far from alone in that belief. According to nearly a quarter-century of Gallup polls, about half of all Americans consistently agree with the biblical account that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Polling also indicates that a majority of Americans say creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public school biology classes.

"It is strengthening. It's not adding more proponents, it's growing in terms of giving increased confidence to those who share that belief," said Ronald Wetherington, an anthropologist at Dallas' Southern Methodist University. He cited an American political climate in which creationists, who include many so-called values voters and evangelicals, feel politically and culturally empowered rather than marginalized.
In the United States, Answers in Genesis maintains a mailing list of 500,000 names and a monthly newsletter that goes out to as many as 120,000 readers, according to Mark Looy, chief communications officer.

Many of them have laid the financial foundation for the 50,000-square-foot, $25 million Creation Museum that Ham is building with donated money on a near-50-acre campus in the northern Kentucky countryside. As of March 31, almost $21 million had been raised, according to the Web site.

Minutes from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, the location is no accident, as underscored by the airport's slogan, "Half the U.S. population within an hour's flight."

While mainstream scientists shake their heads, marketing research indicates Answers in Genesis may be welcoming up to 250,000 visitors a year after the museum's scheduled debt-free opening next spring, according to Michael Zovath, vice president of the Creation Museum. Admission fees remain to be determined.

"The 250,000 people going to it will go back to their legislators and pressure them to vote for Jesus," said Volney Gay, director of the Center for Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "There's a suspicion of science and a suspicion of intellectuals in general."

Said Ham: "What we see is if you can get information to people, their worldview will be changed, and the way they vote on issues, on a school board or whatever, will reflect that change."

But some visitors well may come from abroad. Startling the British scientific community, earlier this year an Ipsos MORI poll for the BBC , found that 48 percent of Britons accept evolution, 22 percent believe in creationism and 17 percent choose intelligent design. Further, while 69 percent want evolution taught in the science classroom, 44 percent wanted creationism included.

Those kinds of numbers fuel and finance Answers in Genesis. The organization also maintains offices in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, which is the fastest-growing ministry after the U.S., Zovath said. In fact, he said, the strength of the 3-year-old British operation has reached the point that it held its first international conference there last weekend in Derbyshire.

Earlier this month, the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific body, signaled its rising concern about creationism and education by issuing a stern statement "opposing the misrepresentation of evolution in schools to promote particular religious beliefs."

Nonetheless, already there has been talk of charter flights from Britain to visit the museum next year, Zovath said. What they and other visitors will see promises to dwarf any other such creationist museum effort in terms of scale, presentation and marketing savvy. Once past the entry gates, flanked by two hulking steel silhouettes of stegosauri, they will enter a sprawling, parklike campus, graced by a large lake and lush landscaping. In the center of it all: an august, faintly templelike building done in honey-colored stone and fronted by 11 thick pillars.

Inside, the museum will feature 31 rooms, 200 exhibit themes produced by a former Universal Studios designer and 55 video presentations, all offering creation science's evidence for the Genesis account. There also will be a 2,600-square-foot bookstore with a medieval castle motif, a 150-seat Noah's Cafe with dinosaur footprints embedded in the floor, an 84-seat planetarium, a 60-seat theater and a spacious refreshment area with palm trees and a waterfall.

The dinosaur replicas, many of them animatronic, are spectacular: Creationists say dinosaurs lived simultaneously with humans because their death came only after original sin. Some of the more compelling effects are in the key rooms depicting what are called "The Seven C's of History." They are: creation, corruption, catastrophe (the destruction of the world by Noah's flood), confusion (Babel), Christ, the cross and consummation (his death and resurrection).

Along the Creation Walk

For instance, soft lighting, gentle sounds and pleasant fragrances will mark the Creation Walk, where Adam and Eve chat with God in the Garden of Eden before they are corrupted to commit original sin by an animatronic serpent. The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.

"We're trying to make this the most uncomfortable place in the museum to show how original sin has corrupted the universe," Zovath said on a tour through the site.

Through constant speaking tours, daily radio broadcasts and numerous publications, Ham relentlessly drives home the message that Answers in Genesis "is a Christ-centered ministry dedicated to upholding the authority of the Bible from the very first verse."

The museum, he said, is the embodiment of that and a "symbol of Christians making a stand, a physical stand here, not in a nasty, aggressive way, but in a nice, aggressive way."

Terms of debate

Evolution: Charles Darwin's theory, accepted nearly universally by scientists, says that all life on Earth, including human, shares common ancestry and evolved to its present state through random mutation and natural selection.

Creationism: Advanced by religious conservatives in response to Darwin's theory, creationism adheres to the biblical account that God alone created the world and all life in it, much as it is today, at one point within the last 10,000 years.

Creation science: Claims scientific evidence for the biblical version of creation.

Intelligent design: Considered a successor to creationism, intelligent design became popular in the early 1990s after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the teaching of creationism in public schools in 1987. Intelligent design posits that there are weaknesses in Darwin's theory and suggests that an unnamed intelligence must have designed some aspects of life.

-- Lisa Anderson