My wife saw this article in Time and thought we might find it interesting. It’s a nice follow-up to The tide is turning which I posted two weeks ago.
I especiallly liked the last couple of paragraphs …
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts, Mike O | 5 Comments »Young Evangelicals still have their heroes and their causes, but those were less likely to be Falwell and Pat Robertson fighting abortion and gay marriage than Bono and Rick Warren addressing poverty and AIDS in Africa. When Falwell talked of AIDS, it was about God’s punishment of homosexuals. When Warren, who also views homosexuality as a sin, talks about AIDS, it’s about how to stop its spread and minister to the suffering. When he hosts a global AIDS summit, Warren invites both Barack Obama and Sam Brownback. That has the makings of a real moral majority.
It will be tempting to call Falwell’s passing the end of an era [...] Falwell practiced the politics of division, flinging damnation at those who resisted his vision of a Godly America. Now a rising generation of Christian leaders is looking to bring people together: the politics of division may be a shrewd electoral strategy but a shallow spiritual one. Their God is bigger than their party, more mysterious, more forgiving and more embracing. It is only partly wishful thinking when a progressive evangelical counterforce to Falwell like Jim Wallis declares that “the Evangelicals have left the Right. They now reside with Jesus.”
Rob Knop, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University writes:
It’s embarrassing. It’s deeply embarrassing. It makes me hesitate to admit that I’m a Christian in many crowds, because the association is immediately going to be with the ignorant jokers who put together high-funded and very slick marketing crap like this Creation Museum. I have nothing to do with them, despise what they are doing, and am very angry that they are besmirching the name of my religious tradition.
He issues a call to arms to his fellow Christians:
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts | 9 Comments »Christians, wake up. Decry this ignorance, for that is what it is. Take back the name of your faith, and call out these ignorant creationists for what they are. Don’t let them claim that any sort of Biblical literalism is at all holy or pure or a evidence of strong faith in the face of a cultural assault. Paint it for what it is; willful ignorance, held to and promoted, an embarrassing excuse for a religious tradition, an embarrassing excuse for human activity.
Here’s why I’m depressed. The Creation Museum opened officially to the public yesterday. And, I’m sad to say, it’s the best museum in the nation.
It’s completely inaccurate and strange. It proports that T-Rex’s 12 inch teeth were for cracking coconuts.
But it’s the best museum in the nation… at telling its story.
I’ve long complained about the shoddy educational structure of modern science museums. They are stuck in the 19th century. I visited the famed Natural History Museum in London recently and was appalled at the wasted educational opportunities. These folks seem to think that taxidermied animals behind glass are the best way to teach about natural history.
These museums are not about teaching, they’re about exhibiting specimens. At the British Natural History Museum, I expected a phenomenal bang-up presentation about Charles Darwin. After all, his collected specimens are housed there. Nope. There was a statue of him in the dining area of a cafeteria.
I looked for their display on human origins. It consisted of several replicas of hominid skulls in a glass case. That was it! No diorama of australiopithicenes on the savannah. No models of cave life with Homo neanderthalensis. Nope. Plastic skulls you could buy from Bone Clones locked away in a glass case.
Here’s a photo of that museum. Does anything look exciting to you?
Yes, that photo looks old, from the 1920’s I’ll guess. But the current presentation is still the same, nearly 90 years later.
Our science museums do not teach. They do not engage the visitor with the central themes in the story of life on earth. They do not show evolution. They do not show the scale of geological time. They do not educate. They merely display specimens.
Contrast that with the Creation Museum. There, they tell a specific, chronological story, scene-by-scene. They surround the visitor with multi-sensory experiences. They have dioramas. They use animatronics, music, drama, lighting… all the tools of the 21st Century, to tell their story. Believe it or don’t believe it, there’s no way you’re going to walk out of the Creation Museum not knowing the central narrative.
What’s the central narrative of modern scientific biology? Evolution, competition, survival. History is a long story of advances and retreats, and long eons of slow change. It’s a story of a world dominated by bacteria, then a world dominated by algae. Millions of years where the planet is a green slushy paradise of pond scum…. and the story goes on and on. 65 million years where the dinosaurs rule the planet, only to be extinguished in a relatively short time. Museums should take us on that journey. We should enter a time-machine when we visit the museum, and we should be taken to the deep, deep past and we should feel like we’ve visited these places. We should visit the Tertiary period, right after the K/T event, and we should smell the ash and the decay and hear the insects buzzing over the remains of the dinosaurs, and we should watch as the small mammals begin to take their first steps toward dominating the planet.
Science museums should take us on this journey. But they don’t. Instead they take us through halls and halls of taxidermied animals in glass cases.
Ken Ham knows that he can tell his story far better than science museums are able to.
Which is why, today, our best museum in the nation is a 27 million dollar high-tech journey into the Book of Genesis, while the American Museum of Natural History couldn’t find ONE corporate sponsor to back a 3 million dollar exhibit on Darwin.
-Siamang