A sociologist visits the Creation “Museum”

Bernadette Barton provides an interesting perspective on Ken Ham’s wretched little palace of ignorance. The Creation “Museum” is not a happy place.

Particularly nerve-wracking were signs warning that guests could be asked to leave the premises at any time. The group’s reservation confirmation also noted that museum staff reserved the right to kick the group off the property if they were not honest about the “purpose of [the] visit.”

Because of these messages, Barton said, the students felt they might accidentally reveal themselves as nonbelievers and be asked to leave. This pressure is a form of “compulsory Christianity” that is common in a region known for its fundamentalism, Barton said. People who don’t ascribe to fundamentalism often report the need to hide their thoughts for fear of being judged or snubbed.

At one point, Barton reported in her paper, a guard with a dog circled a student pointedly twice without saying anything. When he left, a museum patron approached the student and said, “The reason he did that is because of the way you’re dressed. We know you’re not religious; you just don’t fit in.” (The student was wearing leggings and a long shirt, Barton writes.)

The pressures were particularly tough for gay members of the group, thanks to exhibits discussing the sinfulness of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. A lesbian couple became paranoid about being near or touching one another, afraid they would be “found out,” Barton writes. This “self-policing” is a common occurrence in same-sex relationships in the Bible Belt, Barton said.

I felt it when I was there. I didn’t fit in, either, and having guards with dogs wandering about isn’t exactly welcoming. I suppose if you were a fundamentalist Christian with a finely honed persecution complex, you might appreciate visiting an armed camp where conformity is enforced, but it really wasn’t my favorite atmosphere.

The article does get the creationist’s side of the story.

The signs and warnings, he said, are because people will occasionally come to the museum to hand out anti-Creationist materials, disturbing other visitors.

“We know that the nature of the subject is controversial,” Lisle said in a telephone interview. “It’s just one of the things that we have to deal with in a fallen world.”

Lisle defended the anti-gay messages in the museum as part of the museum’s goal to stay true to Biblical teachings.

Funny, isn’t it…creationists come to real museums all the time, hand out their literature, even lead tour groups through and babble stupidly against the message of the exhibits, and no one patrols the place with police dogs to suppress the free expression of dissent. I wonder why?

I get email

Greg Abell wrote to me, requesting answers to his questions, which he doesn’t ask, and since he caught me in a cranky moment, I felt like answering.

Hello,

I wanted to ask a professional scientist how something can come from nothing?

No, you didn’t. You wrote as an excuse to preach at me, and are not asking any sincere questions. You’re a phony.

If there is no God, you have to prove how this is possible.

Matter had to come from somewhere. Space had to have a beginning. Time also has to originate right?

Ask a physicist. I’m a biologist. It says so right over there under my picture to the left, where you got my email address. So why are you pestering me with questions way outside my expertise? I wish these loonies would write to me asking about biological events within the last half-billion years, where I might be able to give a pretty good answer. Big Bang stuff, ask an astronomer/physicist; origin of life stuff, ask a biochemist; rock stuff, ask a geologist.

Why aren’t you harrassing Vic Stenger or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss or Sean Carroll about these subjects, instead of me? You’ve already pissed me off with your inappropriate, clueless questions — and I can already tell you’re an insincere, pretentious twit who won’t pay any attention to any answers I might give, anyway.

You got your assertions wrong. Matter had to come from nowhere: we aren’t talking about Private God digging a hole in one place for dirt to fill a hole in another. We are talking about the creation of matter, space, and time out of nothing. Inventing a god who did it doesn’t solve the problem: it just postulates that there was no nothing, but instead an anthropomorphic superman with magic powers, which is the kind of hypothesis a five year old might make. And not a smart five year old, either.

If you landed on an alien planet and discovered something that looked like plastic, had buttons and a screen. You would say it looked like a computer. You would also have to deduce that some kind of intelligence made this.

Yes, by analogy with similar devices on Earth, I’d make a reasonable hypothesis about how it was manufactured.

If I saw a herd of small purple alien creature with tentacles and three eyes scuttling about organically and gnawing on the fragrant hoobatchie trees, though, I’d suggest that they got there by procreation and that there were mommy and daddy hoobatchie nibblers around, and that they come from a long line of autonomous biological replicators. No intelligence on the part of the organisms is required. You, on the other hand, would postulate that a robed and bearded humanoid strolled across the planet, snapping his fingers and conjuring the plants and animals into existence…because that scenario requires very little intelligence and zero evidence on your part.

YOU don’t give your self enough credit. Your Brain is 100 times better than a computer!!!!!!!Plus you have hands and fingers and senses and you are telling me that this just happened as if I could destroy a watch with a hammer, throw the pieces in a bag and if I were able to shake the bag long enough, eventually I would get a watch??????

I wouldn’t tell you that, because only an idiot would think smashing a watch is a relevant experiment.

PLEASE SMELL WHAT YOU ARE SHOVELING!!!

I thought you were asking questions? You’ve already decided that any answer I might give is ordure.

I hate to be rude but you really need to get over yourself and grab ahold of the only possible way of escaping a place that has no love because God is Love, This Universe is Filled with His Love. If you choose to reject God in this life by not accepting the fact that He sent His Son to be The sacrifice for our unrighteousness, then God will give you what you want and He will remove Himself from you which is what Hell is.

We enjoy love in our lives, We understand the concept. God is Love, Remove God, Remove Love and Compassion and etc…..multiply that by eternity and that’s what Hell will be like and it is a real place.

This universe is filled with vacuum, gas, dust, radiation, and uninhabitable chunks of rock and ice. Imagining a magic man in the sky doesn’t change reality and fill it with candy floss and puppy dogs.

Your Jesus was just another in a long line of holy con artists. Why should I believe him over Mohammed, or Thor, or Krishna, or Buddha? That he did a tawdrier class of magic tricks during his brief life does not impress me, nor does the logic of blood sacrifice by another to atone for the imaginary sins of my many-times-great grandmother. He’s already absent from my life (and from yours too, I will note: that you pretend to have an invisible friend doesn’t make him real), and I’m feeling pretty good: a wonderful wife, three great kids, and a job I enjoy doing. If this is Hell, bring on more.

Your idea of science is fundamentally flawed. Your science starts off by limiting the possible answers. From the word Go, your science does not allow for the Super Natural!

My science begins with doubt and disbelief, which turns out to be a powerful foundation. It means I don’t accept crazy claims from random rubes on the internet, but instead expect verifiable evidence for those claims. It certainly does allow for the supernatural…as long as the supernatural phenomena affect the natural world in some measurable way.

You can go to the Big Bang which I kinda believe in because God “Spoke” the Universe into existence!

The word “Universe” simply means ONE VERSE/ ONE PHRASE

That phrase was “Let there Be”

No, it doesn’t. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin universum, from neuter of universus entire, whole, from uni– + versus turned toward, from past participle of vertere to turn

You’re making stuff up.

A RELATIONSHIP with Jesus is the only way you will be able to be free and escape the never ending agony of being in a place where God’s presence is not there.

I will be praying that the Holy Spirit Convicts you and that Almighty God would allow your heart to accept The Truth!!!

You don’t get it. I’m not in agony. I’m feeling damn good. Your god is a god of misery and promises of relief from horrible, awful pain; your god is a delusion for broken people. If ever I am in a situation where I am suffering (an inevitable state, since I’m not pretending that I’m immortal), I should hope I wouldn’t be so brain-damaged that I believe a retreat into fantasy is the solution. I believe in reality, and hard work, and the redeeming power of knowledge; I don’t believe in magic.

May God Bless you and your family Mr. Meyers

I would really appreciate any feedback you might have and thank you for your time.

OK.

You started by claiming you wanted to ask a scientist a question, and then instead of asking anything, you made a series of ignorant assertions, ranted about your goofy Jesus idol, and closed by misspelling my name. And now you want feedback?

You’re an arrogant ass, Mr Abell. Your faith makes a lot of noise about humility, but I’ve found almost all of its followers to be poisonously full of themselves, and you are no exception. I get letters like yours on a daily basis, and I assure you — all they do is repeatedly emphasize to me that religion breeds stupidity and lazy thinking and unconscionable pomposity. You are an anti-proselytizer. You are a walking, talking, preaching object lesson on why I despise religion. If you want to convert people, a better strategy for you would be to shut up and go hide in a cave where no one might listen to you and be frightened away from your daft pratings, because all you do is affirm my conviction that faith is for fools.

Episode XCIII: Lovely love song

I’m a big fan of Ray Bradbury, so I can almost identify with the young lady singing this song. I know, the last song in the thread without respite was nice to listen to as well, so I’m violating my usual habit of punishing you all with the noise here, but this one is worth it.

Oh, by the way, not safe for work. Definitely not safe for work.

(Current totals: 10,867 entries with 1,095,612 comments.)

I thought we were winning

I keep hearing from official sources that we’re getting Afghanistan under control, but I don’t believe it. If we are, how is this happening?

The Taliban in Afghanistan has publicly stoned to death a man and a woman over an alleged love affair, government officials said.

I guess a mass of soldiers sitting in your country really doesn’t do much to change your quaint ancestral folkways.

Beehive development

A beekeeper did something simple: he put a bell jar over an opening in his beehive. The bees obliged by building a hive within it, where you could see it, and captured the process in a series of photos.

i-ee17f0de52572045c0f9ba1966808c32-bellhive.jpeg

I’m fascinated by the fact that the first struts in the framework are regularly spaced vertical bars of wax — how did they do that? I want to see videos of those early stages when the bees are working to initiate the strips. I suspect there are some interesting bee:bee interactions going on as they set them up.

Shrinking taxa means more room on the ark!

I knew this was coming. There was an interesting taxonomic consolidation recently: Torosaurus is accused of being simply an older Triceratops, so those two taxa are being lumped into one, Triceratops. Jack Horner is suggesting that Nanotyrannus was simply a juvenile T. rex. These kinds of adjustments of the taxonomy happen all the time, both as more data becomes available, and as lumpers make more noise than splitters (a process that can be reversed, of course). It is not a big deal.

Except to creationists, who are overjoyed that combining two species into one means that “the Ark cargo was even lighter than previously thought”. There’s also some crowing about those arrogant scientists being wrong wrong wrongity-wrong wrong ding-dong! Gloating over an occasional error would be much more impressive if they also ever acknowledged the many times scientists have been right, and the creationists wrong.

Like this time: a little taxonomical shuffling does not salvage the story of God and the big boat. Triceratops/Torosaurus are still 70 million years old, and the fact that dinosaurs underwent morphological changes as they matured deep in the Cretaceous does not suddenly make the idea that they were living in the Middle East 6000 years ago and taking a year long cruise any more plausible.

Maybe they’re just hoping that if the paleontologists keep consolidating taxa they’ll eventually get to the point where all the dinosaurs are lumped into one species called Behemoth. That’s not going to happen either.

Trust Fox News to come up with a stupid poll

Really, they just don’t get it. The struggle for equality applies to everyone, not just a few dimensions of the range of human sexual behavior. It’s like they’re desperately parsing up the range to find something everyone will consistently object to, and it probably won’t happen.

Should transgender or transsexual people be allowed to legally marry?

Yes 76.9%
No 22.1%
Not sure 1.0%

Hey, how about the next question being, “Should gingers be allowed to marry people who can curl their tongues?”