The Creation “Museum” is not a museum

Kurt Percy, the assistant manager of the Cincinnati Museum Center, has crossed Ken Ham. Percy dared to speak the truth about the Creation “Museum”. I agree whole-heartedly with this comment:

This is not a museum, and this is further proof of that. Please stop referring to it as such. They are not an accredited museum by any association of museums. It is a theme park that misleads the public and it is a pockmark on our region. The fact that someone profits by misrepresenting their faith as science to children and families is shameful. When we wonder why America is falling behind in science education, it is because places like this are allowed to exist. I’m glad to see that their attendance is declining despite generous handouts from the state of Kentucky at the expense of their university funding.

Ken Ham’s “rebuttal” is pathetic. He cites a dictionary definition of “museum” at a manager of an accredited museum.

…an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value; also: a place where objects are exhibited.

So, is Disneyland a museum? A jewelry store? A church? Because you could claim that all of those fit his dictionary definition. A dictionary is a rough guide to common usage, not a definitive explanation of meaning.

Then Ham obliviously makes it worse. He cites other summaries of what constitutes a museum, in particular the American Alliance of Museums Accreditation, and notes that the Cincinnati Museum Center is accredited.

The Creation “Museum” is not. It’s not ever going to be accredited by any legitimate agency. Percy was exactly right: it’s a theme park, equivalent to a Halloween haunted house on a bloated budget, and it is little more than a colossal joke. There is nothing of lasting value there — animatronic Jews and dinosaurs and replica skeletons don’t measure up. There is definitely nothing worth studying; it has no archives, no scientific collection, no employees doing research. It could be blotted out by a meteor falling from the sky, and it would no loss at all to science, only a small loss to Kentucky tourism.

Then Ham closes by bragging about his new zip line ride at the “museum”. Without apparent irony.

I’m just glad someone in Cincinnati is speaking bluntly and honestly about the carnie act playing in nearby Kentucky. Someone give Kurt Percy a promotion.

Express yourself to CFI now

The board meeting at which Ron Lindsay’s behavior at Women in Secularism 2 will be one topic to be discussed is next week. If you are concerned about the direction CFI is taking, if you value it as an organization and want to see it improve, if you think Ron Lindsay has served the interests of CFI poorly, put it in writing and let them know now.

Now! Be constructive. Tell them what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. This is the time to make a course correction, before the catastrophic crash.

Mattering is a two-edged sword

A lot of people were impressed by Rebecca Goldstein’s talk at Women in Secularism 2 on the importance of mattering for human happiness, it was a real light-bulb moment for many people, I think. We’d like to believe it’s a concept that can be used as incentive for humanist goals, but as Vyckie Garrison points out, it can be used to motivate other purposes, too.

The reason Quiverfull is gaining ground is because it puts a female individual in the position of mattering – of mattering A LOT – to a collective.

If you really want someone to care about you more than anyone – all you need to do is give birth to them. Being a mother guarantees that you will matter – for good or for evil – your child’s life will be intimately wrapped up in yours, even despite the best efforts of a brilliant therapist later in life. (I say this only half-jokingly. We all love our mothers, BUT …)

Nice concept, that ‘mattering’, but as this illustrates, every idea needs a good follow-through as well. What is secularism going to do to allow women to matter?

El Censo Mundial de Ateos ahora en español!

An important message from the Atheist Census: El Censo Mundial de Ateos ahora en español! Más de 220.000 personas han sido contadas en todos los países del mundo – asegúrate de serlo tú también!

(For us non-Spanish speakers: “The World Census of Atheists is now in Spanish! More than 220,000 people have been counted in all countries of the world – be sure you do too!” And actually, there are options to translate it into a whole lot of languages there.)

At least Ohio kids seem smarter than their school board

You sure can spot the creationists by their use of slogans — “teach the controversy,” “strengths and weaknesses,” “teach both sides,” “think critically about controversial subjects” — and they’re all on display at an Ohio school board that is currently debating opening up the curriculum to creationism. The parents and students are resisting, at least.

Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it.

The best argument that one student provided is that “I don’t feel like the people here are educated or prepared enough to deal with it.” Yeah, that describes most school boards.

The Church of England just wounded itself

You may think this is good news, but you should be deeply troubled. The Church of England has officially decided that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

The Bishop of Leicester, who leads the bishops in the House of Lords, said they would now concentrate their efforts on “improving” rather than halting an historic redefinition of marriage.

It represents a dramatic change of tack in the year since the Church insisted that gay marriage posed one of the biggest threats of disestablishment of the Church of England since the reign of Henry VIII.

“Troubled?” you ask, “This is exactly what Myers has favored for years!” But, you see, I didn’t factor in the theological implications. When the source of all objective morality (as we’ve been told God and his priesthood are, many times) undergoes a major revision, we ought to think about what it means. Let us consider the possibilities.

  1. There is a god who cares very much what you do with your genitals, and sometimes he changes his mind. You should find this terrifying. Here’s this all-powerful deity who can send you to paradise or to hell, and the rules for admission can change at any time. Your absolute objective morality is suddenly in flux! You could be cruising along, living the rules of your religion meticulously, and there could be a revision at any time — what if god, on a whim, decided that all marriage was an abomination, and you were supposed to practice free love? Are you prepared to obey?

    1. Related concern: is this retroactive? So if a pair of randy, lonely medieval goatherds were getting it on in a beautiful French meadow and were condemned to hell for it, do they get released now? What’s the PTSD like after a thousand years writhing in unthinkably intense agony?

    2. I’d assumed getting into heaven is like getting tenure — you’re set for the afterlife. But apparently it’s more like working for a psychopathic boss and the rules can change on the fly. This doesn’t sound like a particularly pleasant, stress-free existence.

  2. There is a god who cares very much what you do with your genitals, but the priesthood has been consistently misinterpreting him. This should shake your trust in organized religion — they can get God’s will totally wrong. What if God gave you your genitals for a reason, and you’re supposed to be using them joyfully in all sorts of ways, and the communication between heaven and earth is just totally garbled? He’s up there raging at the phone line like Bill O’Reilly muffing his lines, while the priests are straining to understand what he’s saying in all the bellowing and crackling static. “What’s that you say? Something about penises? Cut off what?” We could be committing all kinds of crimes of omission and emission without even knowing about it!

    1. What if god said, “I gave you men a prostate for a reason, you should be using it”, and all those straight males in a committed relationship who haven’t been getting pegged regularly by their wife are damned to hell? That would be a shocker at the pearly gates.

    2. We don’t know that the priests are getting it right even now. Maybe god really is a bronze-age patriarchal chieftain with bizarrely restrictive rules about sexual behavior, and those untrustworthy priests are translating those rules with more and more errors. You really can’t believe anything they say, whether you like their conclusions or not.

  3. There is a god who really doesn’t care much about what you do with your genitals — he has greater concerns that matter more. Maybe he only has two commandments, “Be excellent to one another” and “Party on!” and all this fussing over specific sexual practices is a gigantic distraction — you’re not going to get grilled about where your penis has been or what has gone into your vagina when you get to heaven at all. All this angst about sexual behavior is simply a reflection of the psychological hangups in the heads of the kinds of people who appoint themselves morality monitors.

    1. I have a suspicion that chopping off young women’s heads for losing their virginity won’t be compatible with “Be excellent to one another”. Neither is beating up people you meet at a gay bar.

    2. We really don’t know what the rules are any more. Maybe we should stop trying to imagine what a cosmic overlord in the sky wants us to do, and look to our fellow human beings for guidelines, instead.

  4. There is no god, no afterlife, no eternal punishment or reward. The priests have been making it all up, using this invisible boogeyman as a goad to get you to serve their earthly whims. You’ve been had, people, rise up and throw off your chains, cast down the church!

I kinda like #4 best.

I have to admit, though, that the most conservative religious people actually have one thing right: if you go around changing any of the rules, if you exhibit any flexibility in interpreting the faith, it means you have cause to question the whole elaborate edifice of religion — every wobble has the potential to cause the whole structure to come crashing down. The church is extremely rickety, which is why reason is such a threat to them.

But I also think that demolition would be a good thing.

At least we know he watched the video

Ken Ham has replied to the conversation we had last night. We talked about the importance of a secular education, deplored creationism, and challenged Ken Ham to a debate in Houston when he’s there to speak at a homeschooling conference.

But what does he respond to? He cries, “Lilandra called me an ape!”

Yes, she did, because humans are apes. It’s not an insult, it’s a statement about what larger group your species is nested within.

Alternatively, maybe Ham objected because he feels a greater kinship to another clade, and would rather be grouped with them: he’s clearly part chicken. He was challenged to a debate; he earlier refused because it was beneath him to debate a non-Ph.D. (his degree is only honorary, but he apparently puts much stock in it), but now that there will be a person with a doctorate on the side of evolution, that excuse has evaporated. And now he’s nattering on about a minor point rather than addressing the bigger issues? For shame.

Aron Ra also comments.

Turkish creationists are creepy

The big kahuna of Turkish creationism is Adnan Oktar, better known as Harun Yahya…in fact, he seems to be the only major player in Turkish creationism. He’s a known con man, and a bit of a playboy, and his organization is more cult-like than any other creationist group I know of. He also is using an unusual ploy: he uses sex and a group of heavily dolled-up young women to promote Islamic creationism. Only in Turkey!

On one recent day, as he often does, Oktar was talking about one of his many exhibitions of fossils that he says disproves evolution.

Oktar and his cult-like organization have been in the Turkish media space for decades. But only last year did he deploy his new weapon in the battle against Darwinism: A flock of ostensibly attractive, curvy young women.

The “kittens,” as he calls them, call him “master” and generally guffaw at the right moments and nod their heads in agreement with whatever he says.

He’s been up to this for a while. He has a series of youtube videos that feature his Stepford houri droning about the miraculous nature of cell biology. If you have some sick fetish about having Barbie read a biology textbook to you in broken English, here you go.

Tonight, on the Nones

I’ll be joining Lilandra and Shayrah on The Nones podcast this evening, along with a few others.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula, Vic Wang of Houston Atheists, and Neeley Rebel Fluke of Orange County Freethought Alliance, and the mister Aron Ra will join Shayrah and me on the n0nes today at 8:00 PM CST. We will be discussing just who is scientifically inept Ken Ham or us. (Hint it isn’t us) We’ll also be further discussing what we are planning to do about Ham’s visit to Houston homeschoolers to hawk Young Earth Creationism as science. 

I think we’ll be making mocking chicken noises in the direction of Answers in Genesis.

Dragons!

The Creation “Museum” has a new exhibit: Dragons. Really. You see, according to their rules, which is that every word of the Bible has to be literally interpreted (whatever that means), nothing said in the Bible can be incorrect, metaphorical, erroneous, or even ambiguous — it has to be true. Since God told Noah that at least two of every animal were on the Ark, for example, that “every” means that every single kind of animal must have been on the big boat…which is why they insist that dinosaurs must have been aboard. Well, that and because dinosaurs are good marketing.

Similarly, there must have been dragons, because the Bible uses a word that translates as “dragon”. It’s that simple.

Does the Bible mention dragons? Used multiple times in Scripture, the Hebrew word tannin is defined by The Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon as “serpent, dragon, sea-monster.” It likely refers to certain reptiles, including giant marine creatures and serpentine land animals. Though translated several different ways and differing in precise meanings based on context, tannin can denote a dragon and therefore can potentially refer to a dinosaur since all dinosaurs are dragons (though not all dragons are dinosaurs by definition).

If tannin is so vague that it can refer to a serpent as well as a sea-monster, though, and can be conviently post-fit to mean “dinosaur”, it seems to me that there is no necessity to interpret it to mean specifically dragon. But then, my brain doesn’t work like a creationist’s. It says “dragon” in the Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, by God, so there were dragons!

And what’s more, the Bible says they breathed fire, so they were fire-breathing dragons!

The burden against the beasts of the South. Through a land of trouble and anguish, From which came the lioness and lion, The viper and fiery flying serpent, They will carry their riches on the backs of young donkeys, And their treasures on the humps of camels, To a people who shall not profit. (Isaiah 30:6)

Many dragon legends such as what we find outside the Bible could be embellished, but the basic characteristics of dragons can be found in known creatures. Some dragon descriptions fit well with certain dinosaurs. Fossil pterosaurs reveal dragon-like wings. Certain beetles shoot out burning chemicals, so is a fire-breathing dragon really that far-fetched?

Yes. Yes, it really is that far-fetched. The Bible is not a science book.

Bombardier beetles use a small reaction chamber to produce a pressurized blast of peroxides. It’s not “breathing fire”. This is merely the kind of incoherent nonsense you get when you pretend the myths of ancient people are evidence of anything other than that they held certain peculiar beliefs.

Creationist logic now dictates another step: if tannin is a dragon, and dragons breathe fire, and tannin also means “dinosaur”, then dinosaurs breathed fire. Yeah, we’re done here.

Now if the Bible is a mess of incoherence, you should listen to Ken Ham. He was interviewed about his dragon exhibit.

“There are lots of dragon legends because they were real creatures. We believe many of the dinosaurs would fit some of the descriptions of dragons, the land dragons at least. I’ve never seen an exhibit like this anywhere else,” Dr. Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum told OneNewsNow.

“We have an animatronics scientist there and other high-tech features like a dragon fly fossil. People will be able to download an app and when you put it over it, then the dragon fly comes out of the fossils and you see it three dimensional.”

Does anyone understand what the heck he’s saying? It’s interesting that his scientists are animatronic — that seems reasonable given their level of intelligence — but what do dragonflies have to do with dragons? What’s high tech about a dragonfly fossil? What is this magic app doing?

Every time I try to understand the mind of a creationist, my brain hurts.