This was the Renaissance Center in Dickson, Tennessee. It was supposed to be an educational resource.
The Jackson Foundation created The Renaissance Center in 1999, four years after the foundation was started with the stated mission to “motivate and educate children and adults through the use of technology in the area of the arts, science and humanities.”
It took some tornado damage a year ago, but was still used to house a community college, a branch campus of Freed-Hardeman college, a planetarium, and various other properties, like a dinner theater.
No more. It’s been bought by David Rives Ministries, and they plan to put some kind of creation museum in there. Yuck.
Who, you may wonder, is David Rives? He’s a baby-faced turdlet who achieved some minor celebrity as an evangelical Christian and columnist for — Jesus, it still exists? — World Net Daily. Apparently, being a Christian fraud associated with conspiracy theories and far right politics is a recipe for riches.
Rives is the kind of guy who claims gravity is in, and only makes sense in the context of, the Bible. He’s a grinning simpleton who calls himself an amateur astronomer while rejecting most of the evidence of astronomy — he’d be laughable if he wasn’t such a goofy little gomer who mostly inspires pity.
Yet somehow he acquired the many millions of dollars needed to buy a local educational institution, spend many more millions of dollars to renovate it, and is planning to rip out anything of value inside and turn it into a collection of lies and religious bullshit.
Plans for The Wonders Center & Science Museum include replicas of life-size dinosaurs, hands-on experiments for children, space-themed exhibits, and a rare historical collection of artifacts, including ancient Biblical scrolls.
I bet he’s going to make it tax-exempt, too.
It’s less than 350 miles from Ken Ham’s parasitic fake museum, and Rives has already fired a shot across AiG’s bows, claiming it will be the largest museum of its kind
. I do hope they parasitize each other’s clientele and crash and burn.
Capitalism ruins everything.
He probably calls himself an “amateur astronomer” just because he can remember the now obsolete mnemonic device “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.”
He has ancient biblical scrolls eh? Why do I find that reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally hard to believe? Oooohhh and dinosaurs too? I wonder if they take crystals as payment?
I’d like to see them each send missionaries out to proselytise the other’s queues. Unfortunately 350 miles is probably a bit too far for that to be realistic. Maybe the best thing to do is just send Tennessee all the reports on how Ham ripped off the local Kentucky township and state government with his tax arrangements.
Should be forbidden to name such place a “museum”.
@2 offer to pay them in cryptocurrency… :D
Ancient biblical scrolls, huh? Wonder if these were also looted from somewhere.
@ 6
Or just forgeries.
It would be fun if the “scrolls” contradict the Book of Mormon and got a feud going.
.
Let us do some GM to make his local fauna really interesting. Like cross-breeding lungfish with pirhana and releasing a breeding population in a nearby stream.
They can use the telescope to observe objects that are millions of light years away, yet somehow created only 6,000 years ago.
@ 9
tHe SPeeD oF LIghT WAs FaSTEr whEN ThE LORD cREaTed thE UNIveRsE!
@ 3
No different than Stupid Idiot ripping off communities and towns and running them to the ground through his putrid businesses.
But is he going to have a biblically-correct zip line ride?
@ #9
Now just wait a second there, Charley. Who says them objects are millions of lightyears away? Scientists? <spits> Phooey!
If he has some genuine ancient biblical scrolls, he will probably get a friendly visit from Mossad.
“Ocean’s Fifteen”: stealing a million $ from a Christian grifter.
The thingmajigs JWST sees are just painted on the firmament.
My next deepfake: showing David Rives insulting Kim Jong-un and the prophet Muhammed while holding a sign saying “all gun owners are limp dicks”.
@11 & 13
I heard he created the distant objects together with the light between them and us at the same time, as a test of faith.
@charley #18:
But the apologists tell us that Satan created all the fossils in order to undermine God, and God let him do it as a test of faith.
Bloody hell. Who in their right mind would want to trap their mind in a prison of unfalsifiability?
True.
The entire universe including us with all our memories was created…Last Thursday.
Which was yesterday.
The all powerful gods create a new universe every week.
So everyone has 6 more days to live before the next universe poofs into existence.
Make the best of your 7 day long lives.
America seems hell bent on riding religion back to Medieval times, or the Dark Ages.
How? Where did his money come from?
He seems to come from a line of televangelists — his father, Richard Rives, was a preacher also associated with WND. His son seems to have inherited it all.
Richard Rives was also the person who inherited Ron Wyatt’s ministry. Wyatt was notorious for his frequent visits to Turkey to search for the Ark, and who claimed to have found one of Pharaoh’s chariot wheels at the bottom of a river. Weirdly, he was an early promoter of the War on Christmas…but not on the side you might imagine. He thought True Christians™ would not ever celebrate Christmas, which was a pagan holiday.
So, basically, he’s a rich kook with a long lineage of wacky ideas.
I say we dust off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Rich Woods @19
Who in their right mind indeed! There is one over on
Mano’s blog right now.
They would fit right in at the Wonders Center and (cough) Science (cough) Museum.
If he only had a dollar for every dumb xian schmuck in the US&A! Praise the sweet baby jesus for giving him all those christozombies to pickpocket.
But I wonder where he got the money….
The site was foolishly erected upon an Indian burial site. It took some time for the spirits to get started, but the tornado is just a taste of things to come.
Hence the unusual number of accidents among Rives’ employees
(it would take some knowledge of statistics to disprove this statement. Which is why it would be easy to spread this particular rumor 😊 )
And the caretakers of the site during winter have the same problem as in Outlook Hotel. Redram!
There are a lot of rich people who knowingly fund charlatans like these guys, both to use religion to get large numbers of common rubes on their side, and to enable bigots and hatemongers to keep on attacking everyone else who doesn’t support the plutocrats’ agenda. ‘Twas ever thus, and ever thus shall be. Don’t be surprised if some of that money gets traced back to Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Koch Industries, or some other rich pond-scum who obviously doesn’t believe any of the nonsense they’re funding.
Holy Shamoley, there’s gold in them thar grifting hills!
I thought the dapper Rev had been swallowed by a black hole, selling CD’s out of his basement. Now he’s popped up as Hambo the Second.
One has to wonder if there is a connection….
One has to wonder if there is a connection (take 2)….
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-agents-memphis-seize-shipped-ancient-egyptian-artifact-88937263
A canopic jar was seized in Memphis.
@PZ:
I think you’re read “Ompalos”, but did you ever read “Father and Son”, by Philip Henry Gosse’s son Edmund?
I was browsing through it a couple of years ago, and was struck by his description of his father’s antipathy towards Christmas:
@32 “A canopic jar was seized in Memphis.”
well, where else? It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site, ancient capital, open-air museum. There’ll be mummies and canopic jars everywhere you look.
Re: richardh @ #34….
It did occur to me after posting that I should have specified that the seizure took place in Memphis, TN.