A new museum for the ages

Did you know that Tyrannosaurus rex used to be vegetarian?

Were you aware that baby dinosaurs were on Noah's ark?

Undoubtedly, when you were in college, you studied the difficult hard sciences such as post-Babel studies, floodology and post-diluvium studies, in addition to your creation sciences class. Perhaps you even took a museum-sponsored field trip to the mountains of New Guinea to search for living pterodactyls. And you'll always remember that test question you missed—you knew the earth was created in the year 4004 B.C., but you missed the correct date of September 17 (extra credit for knowing it was 9 a.m.).

Do you think I'm on drugs? Am I having a bad trip or a wild nightmare? I could only hope.

As we speak, a new $25 million museum, complete with animatronic dinosaurs and a theme park with a lake, is being built in Cincinnati, Ohio. The "Creation Museum" is slated to open in early 2007. Nearly $20 million has already been contributed towards construction costs, and organizers anticipate that the remaining $5 million needed will easily come in during the next year. They anticipate that the museum will host hundreds of thousands of visitors, visitors who are coming to hear "scientific" proof of the biblical Genesis version of creation. And, this organization is not unique—there are at least another half dozen groups supporting creationism with scholarly publications, internet web sites, and even radio stations in this country alone.

The Washington Post recently reported that in polls taken last year, 45% of the American people believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. It also said that another poll indicated that 65% of Americans want creationism taught side by side with evolution in the public schools.

Vast segments of the country are falling victim to a dangerous religious fundamentalism. We sit here and criticize Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran for oppressing women and enforcing strict sharia law based on the Qur'an, while at the same time, we are creating our own superstition, prejudice, and oppression out in the Heartland with a Christian American Taliban that creates its own interpretation of the Bible and persecutes anyone who does not believe in that interpretation. Much the same as many Muslims follow the twisted philosophies of a renegade cleric, many Christians totally believe, totally trust, and totally follow the rantings of their chosen televangelist or local pastor to follow their own Christian jihad.

Our Christian jihads range from the outrageous to the insidious. Lately several fundamentalist Christian groups have been preaching that God sent Hurricane Katrina to destroy wicked New Orleans, some claiming it was because of the "decadence" and "promiscuity" of the city (yet I notice that the primary site of the so-called decadence and promiscuity in New Orleans, the French Quarter, went largely unscathed by the storm) and others claiming it was God's vengeance for the United States forcing Israel out of Gaza. We've all heard the recent news about Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of the president of Venezuela and how Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church members have been picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq because "God hates America," a theme he somehow ties to his incessant campaign on "godhatesfags.com." In Kansas, the Fundamentalist-dominated state Board of Education has previously voted in 1999 to teach creation science in the public schools, and they are slated to vote again next month on science education standards which will further undermine the teaching of evolution. Several political commentators have attributed the re-election of George Bush to the presidency last year to Evangelical Christian voters motivated by their pastors to oppose the rising discussion of marriage for homosexual couples. In northern Virginia, there is a local school board with two Evangelical Christian members who are working to "christianize" the curriculum all the while home schooling their own children and not putting them in the schools which the board members were elected to lead. Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft spent thousands of taxpayer dollars to drape the classical sculptures of Lady Justice in the lobby of the Department of Justice building because she was unclothed. An unrepentant Eric Rudolph was recently sentenced to prison for his bombings of abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympic Park, yet his and several other churches continued to support him and his goals of stopping abortionists with lethal force if need be.

Some of the jihads are less negative but potentially just as misguided. The Creation Museum has collected millions of dollars to support their cause in gifts averaging just $70 each. A megachurch in Houston has raised millions of dollars to convert a former basketball arena into a church space. And we all remember the 900-foot tall Jesus televangelist Oral Roberts saw when he was raising money for his university and City of Faith hospital complex.

Recently, some religious leaders have hedged a bit on the hardcore creation science gambit and started the new creation theory called "intelligent design." Frighteningly, President George Bush has jumped on the intelligent design band wagon. Intelligent design proponents seem to be trying to modify pure creationism to a form which will appear to be less based on the Genesis stories believed by the Abramaic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) so as to pass muster in the courts hearing separation of church and state cases. Intelligent design isn't fully accepted by all Christian extremists, though, as many of them reject it in favor of pure creationism.

Many of you know that before I moved to Washington to work for the federal government, I taught law and humanities for several colleges and universities in northeastern Oklahoma. Tulsa is sort of the buckle on the Evangelical Bible Belt, so I had plenty of students with strong religious convictions. The naïveté of most of my formerly-home schooled students was appalling. Those who went to Evangelical high schools were often deficient in skills of academic thought and analysis. Many of my hardcore Christian students were fully versed in quoting the Bible, but sadly deficient in their classical and cultural educations--they didn't know of Greek mythology, they'd never read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, they thought Roman Catholicism was a small, non-Christian cult, their sex education was laughable, and they'd never read or seen Harry Potter.

When we talked about pre-historic cave art such as the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux, France, they refused to believe that it was old art or that it was created around 15,000 B.C. When we talked about parallels between the Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh (written about 2500 B.C.) and the Book of Genesis (written somewhere between 1000 and 1500 B.C.), they would bring me notes from their pastors explaining my "errors." When I asked them to compare and contrast the writings of various ancient Greek philosophers, they would discount the Greeks and begin to witness to me and explain Jesus's true philosophies. When we studied Augustus Caesar and the then-predominant religion of Rome, Mithraism, they rejected outright my suggestions that the early Christians chose to celebrate Christmas on December 25 because that was Mithra's birthday and they wanted to distract converts from Mithraic and Saturnalian celebrations. Should I even discuss the creation of the universe, and how the words we translate into English as "God created the Heavens and the Earth in six days" really means "six periods of time" when one examines the original Aramaic language writings? Of course, as you know, God personally dictated the Bible to King James (a notorious homosexual, by the way) in Renaissance English.....

And, I can't image all the crises I created when I asked them to think about the origins and purposes of their Christian beliefs and traditions. Baptism, wedding rings, and communion bread were Jewish? Scandalous! Allegories of God as Light and the original concept of heaven and hell were Zoroastrian? Preposterous! The early church became "Christian" instead of remaining Jesusite Jews because converting Roman soldiers didn't want the tips of their penises whacked off in Jewish circumcision? Untrue! Christmas trees were Druidic and Easter eggs were pagan in origin? Laughable! Trinitarian doctrine and the idea of a Holy Breath (or Ghost or Spirit) as an element of a tripartite God came about merely so we could worship Jesus as divine? Heretical! Catholic priests had to become celibate because of feudal politics and primogeniture? Excommunicatable! American churches stopped believing in the Apostolic Succession and hence confession and absolution because the Church of England stopped supplying priests to the colonies? Unacceptable! These kids were trained by their pastors not to think for themselves. Their only acceptable form of religious thought was to blindly accept the statements of their pastors as preached from the pulpit. They could not fathom any variation on religion different from what Preacher told them.

Now, I don't want you to think that I am an enemy of God or of Christianity. I actually go to church nearly every Sunday, even though I know a lot of Fundamentalists would question whether or not we Episcopalians (much like Catholics) are truly Christian or not. The liturgical churches believe that a person is reborn in Christ during the sacrament of baptism, so I can even say to the Fundies that I am a "born again Christian," just like them, and that not only was I baptized as a child, I chose to ratify my faith through the sacrament of confirmation. I can still see and feel the majesty and mystery of God. I just have a hard time tolerating ignorance.

Which brings us back to the Creation Museum. I am appalled at the idea of such an "educational" experience. I am saddened that so many people are wasting their money to support it. Do I believe in creationism? No, certainly not as it is promulgated by the religious Fundamentalists. Do I believe in evolution? Probably. The facts certainly seem to support Darwin's ideas and the whole concept seems logical and a whole lot more believable to me. Religion has long been used to explain the unknown, to deal with natural phenomena. Of course, we tend to call these old religious beliefs "mythology" once they have been debunked by evidence and knowledge. No longer to we think lightening bolts are thrown by the Nordic god Thor or that tsunamis are the evidence of the anger of the Greek god Poseidon. We know that most illnesses are caused by viruses and bacteria rather than a displeased deity and that the mentally ill have neurotransmitter imbalances in their brains and are not inhabited by evil spirits.

In 1996, Pope John Paul II issued a statement that said that "evolution is more than a hypothesis." He supported the "big bang" theory of creation of the universe, considering that to be the beginning of time, and he admonished scientists meeting in Italy not to look beyond the big bang, because that was God's moment of creation and not for them to examine. One of John Paul's predecessors, Pius XII, even issued an encyclical in 1950, Humani Generi, which stated that "nothing in Catholic doctrine is contradicted by a theory that suggests one specie might evolve into another—even if that specie is man."

When the creationists try to support the idea of a 6,000-year-old earth and to discredit the fossil record and carbon-14 dating by claiming that it's all part of God's plan, that He created the world with such mysteries in place and that those fossils and radionucleotides are red herrings to throw off unbelievers, I simply find the creationists to lack credibility. Do I claim to have all the answers? Do I know how the universe was created? Certainly not. The universe is a mysterious and a wonderous thing, and I certainly think there is room for God in explanations as to its creation. I definitely think the proponents of creationism and intelligent design are dead wrong, though, and we cannot continue to tolerate their intrusion into our public educational systems. Institutionalized mythology is not the answer.

So, why am I writing this? Is it enough simply to alarm you with the rising tide of ignorance and miseducation? Is it merely to make you shake your head and be sad? No. There are things we must do. We must stop this outflowing of uneducated religious superstition in our public schools.

The first thing you can do is vote. Remember, the Evangelical Christians are motivated and organized and they vote in almost every single election. Most of my liberal and agnostic friends and acquaintances love to bitch, whine, and moan about the state of the nation and our elected politicians, but they, for the most part, don't bother to vote—and when they do vote, they ignore the primaries and the local municipal and school board elections. So, very simply, you must vote. Do not let the religious demagogues get elected. Even when you feel the odds are in their favor, don't let their "mandate" go unchallenged and show large majorities.

The second thing you can do is write to your politicians. Don't email them. Don't telephone them. Don't mail in a pre-printed letter or postcard. Sit down and write them a letter in long-hand, because those letters actually get more attention than letters deemed to be a part of some special interest group's mass marketing campaign. Send letters of support to politicians who make intelligent decisions. Chastize the politicians who vote in ways detrimental to the long term benefit of our country.

Third, if you are Christian or even predisposed to Christianity (Christmas and Easter? Weddings and funerals?), join and financially support those denominations which are sane.

Fourth, be aware of dangerous governmental policies which support radical Christian Fundamentalism. These include school vouchers, abstinence-based sex education, faith-based programs for charitable work with government funding, stem cell research, and tax deductions and advantages for Evangelical church programs and PACs. Women, particularly, need to be aware of the erosion of their civil rights by Fundamentalists in religions created thousands of years ago when females were merely property, whether those religions be Christian or Islamic.

The stakes are high. If we aren't careful, the creationists will force us into another era of the Dark Ages. Be on guard. And think.