This week Al Gore releases his new book, The Assault on Reason, a broadside attack on America’s dumb-downed culture which has eroded our democracy to such an extent that Americans are more concerned with Britney Spears’ hair than in the impact of an illegitimate war, or the fate of our constitutional rights under an administration that has demonstrated contempt for the rule of law.
As if to underscore Al Gore’s basic argument, this week also marks the grand opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg,Kentucky. The $27 million building is dedicated to evangelical Christian doctrine which denies the validity of evolution. Here visitors may view elaborate exhibits that depict dinosaurs frolicking with human children.
The New York Times has a review:
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.
It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.
Maybe the Republican Party can hold the next debate of its candidates for president at the Creation Museum.
