This one is in North Carolina, and I think it deserves some special attention. This ain’t just a Creation “Museum” — it’s a Christian bookstore, an antique tool collection, and a taxidermy hall of fame!

Ken Ham should be squirming with envy.

Note the fawning tone the television announcer takes — it’s clear he thinks this concatenation of kitsch is simply wonderful.

Answers in Genesis explains how you can use a “Biblical framework” to figure something out. In this case, they use the Bible to… derive the existence of Atlantis and peg the time of its sinking to somewhere between 1818BC and 600BC.

The phrase that comes to mind is “Garbage in, garbage out.”

It’s good to know that in the ecosystem of inanity, we have village idiots, like Ken Ham, and itinerant idiots, like Sean Meek. Meek has created something called The Traveling Creation Museum as part of his life’s work of making people stupider.

The Traveling Creation Museum is available to come to your location. It has exhibits on the days of Creation, the Flood, the Ice Age, dinosaurs and much more. It shows how the real scientific and historical information supports the Genesis account of Creation.The Museum includes many authentic antiquities from the ancient world and reveals in a dramatic and visual manner the grandeur of God’s creation.

That’s all the detail I’ve been able to find on this thing. There doesn’t seem to be a formal schedule for it, I haven’t found any photographs, I’m a little disappointed. I suspect that what it actually is is that if you give him a call, a creepy Christian guy in a safari suit will show up in his van (or maybe, if I indulge in a flight of grandiose fantasy, it’s something as elegant as a Winnebago) and hector kids about how the Bible is completely and literally true in every word. He’s one of those guys, the ones who insist that the Bible must be accepted as the ultimate authority on everything, which means that the Earth must be 6000 years old, something the Bible doesn’t say.

Attempting to compromise the Bible is like pulling a thread on a cheap sweater; it all begins to unravel. Suddenly all the verses that speak of God’s mercy and forgiveness begin to look self-serving and manipulative. All of the Bible would be built on lies and deception. As important as the question of Creation is, it is not the central question. The central is, and always has been, is the Bible really God’s Word?

No.

Wow, that was easy.

Anyway, if anyone wants to check this thing out, we do have a confirmed destination: it will be in Gastonia, NC, in the First Wesleyan Church, across the street from the Dairy Queen. That’s good news — it’s not like someone would have to travel to this obscure little place to see a craptacular display of a god-wallopers ignorance, you could also get yourself an ice cream cone.

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Proud Canadians have written in to tell me that they beat us: they have their own ignorant ass with plans for a traveling museum.

OK, OK, you beat us at hockey. Do you have to get so danged competitive about everything now?

The Duggars are that creepy family paraded about on The Learning Channel — the ones with the swarm of kids. It’s a horrifying show, but in this episode, the nightmare is compounded by the fact that they visit the Creation “Museum” and even get a personal guided tour from freakishly dead-eyed Ken Ham. Only watch it if you like to torment yourself.

One other reason to watch it: they show enough of the “Museum” that you really don’t need to go there.

Do pity these poor kids, too.

I’m getting a flood of email from Israel. As one correspondent explains, Israel maintains three kinds of state-supported schools: one kind for the ultra-orthodox, because the state has always fostered freakishly fanatical ignorance among the lunatic subset, and these schools teach no science at all; a fully secular system, particularly in higher education, because Jews have also had a strong scholarly tradition, and Israel depends on material strategies for its survival, and these schools teach science very well; and a general intermediate kind of school where religion may be taught but science is also taught. That situation may be in peril now. Gavriel Avital, the chief scientist in the education ministry, has made a few statements that show he is a lunatic.

“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” Avital said yesterday.

“There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,” he said. “If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I’ll insist that isn’t the case.”

Nobody has explained to me yet how such a putz got appointed in the first place, but this isn’t a good sign. The man is a freakin’ incompetent.

Prior to his appointment, Avital said in a video interview with Machon Meir, a religious-Zionist Jewish studies institute, “Another scientific field that is problematic is biology, or life and environmental sciences. When your doctrine is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution and its implications, you are standing on unreliable foundations – that is, there is no God, there was only something primeval, and then there are certain random developments which led to the apex of all creation, the human being.

“Today I am pleased that more and more scientists engaged in pure science, rather than being employed in the name of an ideology, are reaching the conclusion that the world must have a master. Nothing is given to chance,” he said. “These are my opinions and I won’t deny them just because I was appointed to an Education Ministry position.”

The chorus of outrage is already building among sensible scientists in Israel.

Yehoshua Kolodny, a professor emeritus at Hebrew University who won the Israel Prize for his contributions to the study of earth science, responded furiously to these statements yesterday.

“Denying evolution is like denying science itself,” Kolodny said.

“Evolution is not a theory, but an observation point that anyone can see. Perhaps Dr. Avital did not notice that throughout history, various species existed and then became extinct. In 2009, the entire world celebrated 200 years since the birth of Darwin and 150 years since the publication of his book ‘The Origin of the Species,'” he added.

“When a top scientist ignores these things, it’s a cultural calamity,” Kolodny said. “There are no disagreements among scientists regarding evolution. Catholics and Protestants long ago ended their war against evolution, and Avital is for all intents and purposes joining the radical fringe of evangelicals in the United States.”

I have to disagree with Dr Kolodny on one thing: Catholics and Protestants are still fighting over evolution in the US. Apparently some Jews are simply joining them now, parroting the same drivel that had its origins in fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism.

Still, let’s add a few international voices to that chorus. Write to [email protected] and politely suggest that Gavriel Avital is clearly not the right man for the job.

The freethought community is grieving at the loss of Helen Kagin, and Ken Ham, petty whiner that he is, has decided to complain about her obituary.

We found it unfortunate that someone took this sad time as an opportunity to take a shot at the Creation Museum in an obituary. And sad, too, that some of the information was not correct. There were not hundreds at the protest rally outside the gates of the Creation Museum when it opened–we counted perhaps 70 people. Also it was not so “peaceful,” considering that the protestors brought in a loud rock band to disrupt our opening day, and also rented a plane to circle and buzz the museum for a few hours, dragging a banner stating: “Thou shalt not lie.”

She was one of Ken Ham’s many enemies, so I could understand a little fist-shaking…but this is so piously hypocritical. He finds it unfortunate that someone would snipe at the idiocy of his “museum” in an obituary, but doesn’t seem to find it at all unfortunate that he has chosen to snipe at the deceased.

And that’s without even the standard Christian snideness of opening up his complaint by pointing out how sad it is when someone dies…but at least Christians get to live forever in the “arms of the Lord and Savior”! I’ve run into more than a few Christians like that, who find their joy in the misfortune of others amplifed by the fact that not only are they dead, but they’re burning in hell, unlike his or her prospects.

Although I do find some personal satisfaction that Ken Ham is seething in this life over the contempt the Kagins have frequently expressed for Ham’s follies.