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Noah's Ark Museum 12/6/2010 11:03:18 AM
Kentucky politicians are asking for state money for
a museum dedicated to the Flood in the Bible.
This is 2010, isn’t it? If so, what’s with all the Flat Earth Society members in Congress?
Scientists have mapped the human genome; DNA researchers have traced our origins to the San hunter gatherers in Africa (Sorry, no Garden of Eden); the Hubble Space telescope has proven The Big Bang theory, and nanotechnology portends another industrial revolution of unrivaled prosperity with people wearing computers on their person like wrist watches. One would think all of thee indications would usher in an age of political progressivism to match our wondrous achievements. Instead, one of our major political parties targets fundamentalist Christianity (Islam’s first cousin) as their political base. Some of these people believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that cavemen and dinosaurs were co-existent. In Kentucky evangelicals petition the state for money to build a Noah’s Ark museum to go with the previous Creationism museum, which is raking in the bucks like a Vegas casino. Why is it that ancient Greek and Native American religions are referred to as mythology and this stuff is taken literally by a large segment of the American population (some say twenty percent)? Every single civilization in the history of the world has formulated a creation story. People are scared. They don’t know why they’re here; they’re afraid of death; they need somebody to tell them there’s an after life, which is okay as long as you don’t try to impose your creation myth on somebody else. Unfortunately much of what evangelicals believe is based on the Old Testament, with the vengeful God, the God who told Joshua to kill all the women and children after the Battle of Jericho. This creation story was written by Jewish wisemen, later rabbis, who have a word for “filling in the gaps” of what isn’t said in the Torah. It’s called “midrash” and it means to extrapolate or embellish on the original story. But who’s to say the original story wasn’t fiction in the first place?
There is only one atheist in the entire United States Congress, Pete Stark of California. There are probably some agnostics and other atheists as well, but they wouldn’t dare admit. We discriminate against atheists more in this country than we do against gays. Stark is one of the most senior members in Congress and he also just might be the bravest. He might also be the only member of the government who doesn’t have his head up his ass.
For a while there things were looking up. There seemed to be a cottage industry for agnostic and atheist books. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris all penned best sellers questioning Christianity. A lapsed fundamentalist minister, Bart Ehrman, wrote a tome entitled JESUS INTERRUPTED, in which he claimed theologians are well aware that most of what they teach is complete bunkum.
But then Obama got elected and the tea baggers came slithering out of the woodwork. We now have people like born-agains like John Thune defeating the statesman-like Tom Daschle for the senate and governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota holding revivals on the state house grounds and claiming that Creationism should be taught in the schools.
These people are dangerous. We’re seen them in action: denying global warming; home schooling their kids because they don’t like sex education (Can you say Bristol Palin?); opposing inoculation against disease, fluoride in drinking water, and pasteurization of milk; fighting stem cell research; and demanding that the Ten Commandments be allowed on the state house lawn. Worse yet, the so-called Texas School Board, has set about rewriting history, and because of its large population, textbook publishers look to Texas as a guideline for what they print, which might be why hardly anybody knows much about the theory of evolution, which is as reliable as the theory of electro/magnetism.
Narrow-mindedness is as big a disease as cancer and that’s the real reason these people believe in home schooling. Their kids just might learn something in a public school. Education is definitely the answer, but how do we break down the wall of misinformation?
