The 'Smart Set' visits the Creation "Museum" (a.k.a. The Museum of Wish Thinking)
Check this out. A group called the "Smart Set" from Drexel visited the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum and filed this report.
It's a really interesting tour, taking us through the perplexing bizarro world Answers in Genesis has created. Consider the following:
It’s hard to say whether the Biblical exhibits are actually “first rate” and “world class,” since there isn’t a whole lot to compare them to. But they don’t look cheap. The wax figures are as professional as those in Madame Tussaud’s. Adam and Eve are the most represented. The real Adam, ashamed as he’s said to have been, would probably be mortified by the muscled yet strangely round belly designers gave him. Eve, however, is spared: Though Genesis says they were created nude, no delicate areas are visible. Still, there’s something strangely erotic in the two canoodling under the trees as a dinosaur watches with what looks like a knowing half-smile. When they’re bathing together in a pool, the sound of a waterfall strong in the background, lily pads cover their lower halves. The water level is as low as it can be, though. Suggestion makes the scene more titillating than if AiG had gone ahead and shown everything. After all, traditional museums show penises and breasts, and nobody walks away from Neanderthal exhibits hot under the collar.
The titillation doesn't surprise me at all. Whereas a science museum like the Museum of Natural History in D.C. strives to get the facts up front without the overt emotional appeals, the AiG museum, must make an emotional appeal because it derives itself from a revelatory religious experience. Titillation, however taboo and because it is taboo, demands its centrality. Think about it. The Christian must be confronted with the sins of their flesh while also denying those same sins. By evoking voyeuristic sentiment, they elicit their particular Christian audience's guilt - a central tenet of their doctrine of humanity's fall from grace. Everyone (at least of the targeted audience) looking at the exhibit feels their sin. Isn't that what so much of this museum is about, with its bonus material about pornography, abortion, teen pregnancy, and fornication?
The museum’s gift shop is the Dragon Hall Bookstore. The name might surprise anyone who’s heard Christian protests of Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. But it makes sense if you see the film Dinosaurs and Dragons in the museum’s basement. Ancient dragon myths, it claims, are proof that dinosaurs walked the Earth with humans. They only died out after Noah’s flood, when the limited number of plants diminished their numbers to the point at which humans could finish them off. Further creationism education is available in Dragon Hall. Its book titles include Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, One Small Speck to Man: The Evolution Myth, and Darwin's Demise: Why Evolution Can't Take the Heat. DVDs include Inherently Wind: A Hollywood History of the Scopes Trial, It Doesn't Take a Ph.D. and Lucy: She's no Lady.
I love this paragraph because it just shows us that the AiG folks will use the most baseless evidence - dragon myths - as evidence for their claims - dinosaurs' coexistence with humans. Hearsay and conjecture are preferred to independently verifiable and repeatable observation or experimentation. They ignore thousands and millions of scientific data, wave their hands and make some incantations to the lord, then use some shoddy myths from cultures they say are hellbound (Chinese, Greeks, Aztecs), and make an inference to the "best" explanation. When I say, "best," I mean the most vacuous, unrealistic, insane, pseudoscientific hodgepodge we see in an allegedly rational species.
Anyway, read on and learn more about the madness.
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