Monday, May 28, 2007
Never Never Land
“It’s going to be a great complement to what we have at Big Bone Lick State Park," Kentucky Commerce Secretary George Ward told the crowd gathered for the Creation Museum ribbon-cutting yesterday.
“I envisioned when I was here (a year ago) that every Christian school – probably in the country – is going to have a field trip to the Creation Museum.” Ward said, “And we’re really happy to have those visitors.”
Ward's Faustian bargain -- Kentucky will officially sanction lying to children in exchange for tourist dollars -- may be in keeping with the times. These days, it seems, people will do anything for money, from deciding the paternity of their children before Judge Judy's national television audience to eating blenderized rats on "Fear Factor."
Despite all the tourist dollars that will no doubt pour into Kentucky coffers, Ken Ham's Creation Museum will not complement Big Bone Lick State Park unless, of course, you believe matter and anti-matter somehow complete each other.
The fossil site at what is now Big Bone Lick State Park, discovered in 1739, preserves the fossilized remains of mastodons, wooly mammoths and ground sloths attracted to the warm salt springs at the park. Some 15,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, many of these animals got stuck in the soft, jelly-like ground around the spring. The park has been called the birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology.
Answers in Genesis, the young earth creationist outfit, that built the Creation Museum believes mastadons, wooly mamoths, and ground sloths were all with Noah on the ark. They migrated to North America through Asia and across the Bering Strait and reached Kentucky some 700 years after the flood. The bones at Big Bone Lick, they believe, were fossilized "by catastrophes towards the end of the Ice Age, which was an aftermath of the Flood."
At the Creation Museum, compensation for the utter absence of evidence supporting this Bronze Age worldview is provided by all the Space Age techno glitz money can buy. In this over-produced animatronic fantasy land, a Disney World where the religious right can hide from the real world, AIG's Never Never Land is a place where the world never grows old and fundamentalists never grow up.
“I envisioned when I was here (a year ago) that every Christian school – probably in the country – is going to have a field trip to the Creation Museum.” Ward said, “And we’re really happy to have those visitors.”
Ward's Faustian bargain -- Kentucky will officially sanction lying to children in exchange for tourist dollars -- may be in keeping with the times. These days, it seems, people will do anything for money, from deciding the paternity of their children before Judge Judy's national television audience to eating blenderized rats on "Fear Factor."
Despite all the tourist dollars that will no doubt pour into Kentucky coffers, Ken Ham's Creation Museum will not complement Big Bone Lick State Park unless, of course, you believe matter and anti-matter somehow complete each other.
The fossil site at what is now Big Bone Lick State Park, discovered in 1739, preserves the fossilized remains of mastodons, wooly mammoths and ground sloths attracted to the warm salt springs at the park. Some 15,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, many of these animals got stuck in the soft, jelly-like ground around the spring. The park has been called the birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology.
Answers in Genesis, the young earth creationist outfit, that built the Creation Museum believes mastadons, wooly mamoths, and ground sloths were all with Noah on the ark. They migrated to North America through Asia and across the Bering Strait and reached Kentucky some 700 years after the flood. The bones at Big Bone Lick, they believe, were fossilized "by catastrophes towards the end of the Ice Age, which was an aftermath of the Flood."
At the Creation Museum, compensation for the utter absence of evidence supporting this Bronze Age worldview is provided by all the Space Age techno glitz money can buy. In this over-produced animatronic fantasy land, a Disney World where the religious right can hide from the real world, AIG's Never Never Land is a place where the world never grows old and fundamentalists never grow up.
