source:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070326_a_world_where_lies_are_true/
In the middle of the lobby of the 50,000-square-foot Creation
Museum in Petersburg, Ky., a 20-foot waterfall tumbles. Two
life-size figures of children with long black hair and in
buckskin clothes play in the stream a few feet from two towering
Tyrannosaurus Rex models that can move and roar. The museum,
which cost $25 million to build and has a sea of black asphalt
parking lots for school buses, has a scale model of Noah's ark
that shows how Noah solved the problem of fitting dinosaurs into
the three levels of the vessel-he loaded only baby dinosaurs.
And on the wooden model, infant dinosaurs cavort with horses,
giraffes, hippopotamuses, penguins and bears. There is an
elaborate display of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve,
naked but strategically positioned so as not to display breasts
or genitals, swim in a river as giant dinosaurs and lizards roam
the banks.
Before Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, museum visitors
are told, all of the dinosaurs were peaceable plant-eaters. The
evidence is found in Genesis 1:30, where God gives "green herb"
to every creature to eat. There were no predators. T-Rex had
such big teeth, the museum explains, so it could open coconuts.
Only after Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of paradise did
the dinosaurs start to eat flesh...
There are 30-foot-high walls that represent the cliffs of the
Grand Canyon, floors that resemble rocks embedded with fossils,
and rooms where a "Christian" paleontologist counters the claims
of an "evolutionist" paleontologist. It has the appearance of a
real science museum, complete with a planetarium, a gift shop and
plaques on the wall with quotes from creationist "scientists" who
have the title doctor conspicuously before their names. It has
charts, timelines and graphs with facts and figures. It is meant
to be interactive, to create, like Universal Studios, a contrived
reality with an array of costly animatronic men and women as well
as moving dinosaurs...
Other creationist museums are going up in Arkansas, Texas,
California, Tennessee and Florida. Museums are part of a massive
push to teach creationism in schools, part of a vast Christian
publishing and filmmaking industry that seeks to rewrite the past
and make it conform to the Bible. The front lines of the culture
wars are the classrooms. The battle is one we are slowly
losing. Twenty states are considering changing the way evolution
is taught in order to include creationism or intelligent design.
Only 13 percent of Americans in a 2004 Gallup poll, when asked
for their views on human origins, said life arose from the
strictly natural process of evolution. More than 38 percent said
they believed God guided evolution, and 45 percent said the
Genesis account of creation was a true story. Courses on
intelligent design have been taught at Minnesota, Georgia, New
Mexico and Iowa State universities, along with Wake Forest and
Carnegie Mellon, not to mention Christian universities that teach
all science through the prism of the Bible...
And yet, coming from the modern age, these Christo-fascists
cannot discount science. They employ jargon, methods and data
that appear to be science, to make an argument for creationism.
They have created parallel research and scholarly institutions.
They pump out articles in self-published journals to provide
"evidence" that homosexuals can be cured, that global warming is
a myth, that abortion can cause breast cancer, that something
they call "post-abortion syndrome" leads to deep depression and
suicide and that abstinence-only education is an effective form
of birth control. This pseudo-science has seeped into the public
debate. It is disseminated by nervous and timid media anxious to
give both sides in every argument. Those who have contempt for
facts and truth, for honest research and inquiry, are given the
same platform by the press as those who deal in a world of
reality, fact and rationality.
The movement desperately needs the imprint of science to
legitimize itself. It achieves this imprint by discrediting real
science and claiming creationist science as true science. All
attempts to argue the creationists out of their mythical belief,
to persuade them with logic, evidence, scientific inquiry and
fact, will fail. They have created a "fundamentalist science."
They know they cannot return to the pre-Darwinian innocence that
let them believe the Bible alone was enough. They need, in the
midst of their flight from reality, to reassure their followers
that science, science not contaminated by secular humanists and
nonbelievers, is on their side. In this they are a distinctly
modern movement. They seek the imprint of science and
scholarship to legitimize myth. This is a characteristic they
share with all modern totalitarian movements, which co-opt the
disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to give a
modern veneer to their primitive and superstitious belief
systems, systems that allow the rulers to dictate reality and
truth. The "paraprofessional" organizations formed by the
Christian right, organizations of teachers, journalists, doctors,
lawyers and scientists, mimic the activities of real professional
groups. They seek to challenge the legitimacy and the power of
the traditional organizations. The duplication of the structures
and methods employed by the non-totalitarian world, the use of
pseudo-science to dress up fantasy, is slowly undermining our
legitimate scientific and educational institutions. It is
destroying the foundations of our open society. It is ushering
us into a world where lies are true.
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