Prepare to Believe!

Pop quiz time, kiddies.

Dinosaurs were
a) created by God on the 6th day
b) residents of the Garden of Eden, alongside Adam and Eve
c) vegetarians until Adam fucked everything up for everyone

The answer is all of the above according to Answers in Genesis Ministry and they have a flashy new museum to prove it, complete with the catchy catchphrase "Prepare to Believe." The Creation Museum, located in Petersburg, Kentucky, just a few miles from Cincinnati, clocks in at 60,000 square feet of high-concept exhibits, including animatronic displays, video screens, tableaus, and even a planetarium (God loves stars, too).

You might say that the $27 million dollar investment in getting the museum up and running seems excessive. Aren't these Christian freaks just preaching to the choir (har)? But in a world where ideology trumps reason, more and more people are open to Creationism. Half of those polled in a 2006 Gallup poll said they believe that humans did not evolve. And three of the ten Republican presidential candidates have said they don’t believe in the evil-ution. And supposedly, most of the contributions to fund the museum came from families donating $100 or less—that’s a shitload of Christians!

Present these ideas in a slick “museum” that’s The Ten Commandments meets The Flinstones meets Jurassic Park, and these evangelicals will fool even more people into thinking that there’s legitimacy behind the pseudo-science. The exhibits were created by a former designer for Universal Studios, Patrick Marsh, who, in addition to being a Christian freak, is also a bigot, as evidenced in this choice tidbit from The Guardian. When asked about the existence of early human fossils, Marsh says, "There are no such things. Humans are basically as you see them today. Those skeletons they've found, what's the word? ... they could have been deformed, diseased or something. I've seen people like that running round the streets of New York."

Anyway, if you have no plans to visit lovely Cincinnati anytime soon, you can check out Answers in Genesis’ renderings in their walk-through slideshow. Plus some hilarious and frightening photos culled from the web.

And here's some funny scary stuff from the museum's site:
The Creation Museum will be upfront that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice, and in every area it touches upon.

We’ll begin the Museum experience by showing that “facts” don’t speak for themselves. There aren’t separate sets of “evidences” for evolution and creation—we all deal with the same evidence (we all live on the same earth, have the same fossils, observe the same animals, etc.). The difference lies in how we interpret what we study. We’ll then explore why the Bible—the “history book of the universe”—provides a reliable, eye-witness account of the beginning of all things.

After that, we'll take guests on a journey through a visual presentation of the history of the world, based on the “7 C’s of History”: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation. Throughout this family-friendly experience, guests will learn how to answer the attacks on the Bible’s authority in geology, biology, anthropology, cosmology, etc., and they will discover how science actually confirms biblical history.