Monday, June 04, 2007

Creation Museum Updates

I got tired of hunting back through old posts to find the one on the creation museum, so I'm updating here.

The Revealer is amazed at the oversight of Bible illustrators. After hearing all about the Creation Museum he expected pictures of dinosaurs in his illustrated Bibles, but found none.

6/8 updates:

from PeskyFly, who's just now noticing.

ArsTechnica has a review via Pharyngula. They include this statement: "Designed for a fundamentalist Christian crowd, the Creation Museum is no friend to those who do not hold to its creationist tenets." Surprised? One of the comments to that Pharyngula post has the url to an article that explains

A man who plays Adam in a video aired at a Bible-based creationist museum in Kentucky has led a different life outside the Garden of Eden, flaunting his sexual exploits online and modelling for a clothing line that promotes free love.

After learning about his activities Thursday, the Creation Museum pulled the 40-second video in which he appears.


and the actor is quoted as saying

"But just because I'm Adam on the screen, that doesn't mean I'm Adam off the screen."


Bad Astronomy, where he talks about the Adam actor:

Today’s example is Ken Ham’s atrocious "creation museum", which is more akin to a funhouse full of warped mirrors that distort reality than an actual place to learn stuff. The situation: in a film shown in the museum depicting the Biblical account of creation, it turns out the actor playing Adam has, well, bitten off more than just a chunk of apple. He used to run a "sexually suggestive" website. Ham has taken down the video pending an investigation.


At Daily Kos there's a post commenting on the Ars Technica review.

And via a comment on this DefCon post comes a link to this Onion article, which quotes one person as saying, "It's going to face some tough competition when the nearby Flat Earth and Gravity Schmavity Museums opens up.".

6/9 updates:

from Dark Christian comes a link to a Flickr Tour of the museum.

Send a comedian to the museum.

6/10 updates:

This American Chronicles article calls it "A $25,000,000 Monument to Stupidity" and says,

Ken Ham might be a nice guy—I don’t know him personally—but scientifically speaking, he’s an idiot. The fact that he seems to have a legitimate scientific education makes him stubborn and willfully ignorant, as well. Consider that he’s just spent an enormous amount of money building a facility to proclaim his plainly wrong theories to potentially hundreds of thousands of gullible visitors a year, and we may also add “irresponsible” to the list.

The “science” presented at the Creation Museum is a feeble imitation of the real thing.


6/11 updates:

BlueGrassRoots went for a tour and responds with this:

Early in the museum, the visitor is given advice on the proper mind frame to have for your visit: “Don’t think, just listen and believe”. As you can see in the picture below, Human Reason is the enemy and God’s Word is the hero. Descartes represents Human Reason, saying “I think, therefore I am”. But God tells us there no need to waste your beautiful mind, for God says “I am that I am”.

So logic, reason and science are Bad; blind faith is Good.


The BlueGrassRoots review is the most snark-filled report I've seen so far.

EvolvingThoughts provides a link to a blog which has a round-up of articles.

SoMA Review comments on Adam's antics.

update 6/23:

Aetiology has gone on a field trip. She says, "My brain still hurts."

update 7/2/2007:

EvolutionBlog concludes a multi-post review and includes this general statement:

Is this the end of civilization as we know it? No. But it is one more symptom of the disease that has been growing ever since Ronald Reagan started making appeals to religious fundamentalists a standard part of Republican Party politics in the 1980's. Just ponder the fact that AiG had little trouble raising the twenty-seven million dollars needed to build this monstrosity. Consider that now everyone in the Cincinnati area has for a neighbor a professional propaganda factory spitting out some of the vilest and most vicious stereotypes of science and scientists that you will ever encounter. This is not a good thing for American civilization. And a culture that can produce such monuments to ignorance is a culture facing some serious problems.

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