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.

Starting the Day NICE and PISSED OFF

As a happy ranter, I always enjoy an opportunity to begin my day thoroughly pissed off (not as pissed off as, say, the guy I heard about on the traffic report this morning who was pulled over by the cops on his way to work, only to have a tanker truck plow into his pulled-over car. Now, that’s starting the day pissed off. The fine line between comedy and tragedy – if only the truck had hit the cop car.).

Anyway, I was granted such occasion this morning when I arrived at work (hence, already ripe for the pissing off), checked my e-mail, and was greeted by this, under the subject line “Keep It Going”:

“In Memoriam

Recently this past week, UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it "offended" the Moslem population which claims it never occurred.

This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.

This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russia peoples looking the other way!

Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be "a myth," it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets

This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!

Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world. “

As a suspicious and untrusting Jew, I promptly hit the trusty internet to see if this was in fact true. About three nanoseconds of research revealed that it was, in fact, untrue, and exactly the type of thing that really, really pisses me off. To use the Yiddish term, I “schreid Gewalt”, which in modern English basically means to go ballistic in a verbal manner, the manner in which we Jews most excel when going ballistic. Following is my response:

“This is blatantly untrue and based on a rumor that, due to its inflammatory nature, caught on like widlfire. If it were true, it would indeed be shocking and intolerable. As it is, it strikes me as exactly the type of thing people falsify and dramatize to incite further intolerance of a particular religious faith (in this case, Islam) and, hence, something no Jew should allow to stand.

Few Muslims are Jew-hating terrorists just as few Jews are Shylocks who secretly run the world. There's enough hate around without people buying every attempt to stir the pot. Think of the damage a rumor like this does to Muslim-Jewish relations, at a time when we need to be trying to fix things, not making them worse.

People, remember, there a lot of hatemongers out there who are always looking for a fight and would be happier to see us all dead rather than try to work out our differences. So please, question things like this. Let's try to stop the cycle of hate and violence, rather than perpetuating it. Isn't that the true lesson of the Holocaust?

Let's keep the truth going, not the hateful lies.”

I am of the general opinion that a lot of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in this country is a result of “the man” putting the cat amongst the pigeons among the lower classes, so that the working white poor are too busy worrying about blacks and Mexicans to see that it's actually rich white corporate America that's schtupping them (shit, am I in a Jewish mood, or “Jewd”, today, or what? Since when do I say “schtupp”?) out of a fair shot? Well, it now occurs to me that it's the same rich white corporate America that fans the flames of Judeo-Muslim tensions to make sure we are all too busy hating each other to take control of our region’s natural resources (otherwise known as oil). Also, since most Americans side overwhelmingly with Jews over Muslims, the more that people are made to hate Muslims and see them as having influence and power and as Jew-haters, the more they will favor America keeping its fingers firmly entrenched in the Middle East’s pie, under the guise of protecting Israel and the rest of us from those crazy-assed power-mad Muslims.

Clearly my conspiracy-meter is off the chart today. But there seems to be some truth to this. I mean, it’s a fact that many supporters of Israel are evangelicals who really could care less about Jews and whose only basis for concern is a fast-approaching apocalypse, one result of which is that all Christ-less Jews will be hellbound…so is it too much to think that keeping Jews and Muslims at war is a great way to keep American control over the situation in the Middle east and, hence, oil???