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Texas Creationist Museum Facing Extinction
gattaca writes "A small Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder. 'If it sells, well, then we can come another day,' Joe Taylor said. 'This is very important to our continuing.'" Meanwhile, the much larger Creation Museum in Kentucky that we discussed and toured when it opened last year seems to be thriving.
Has any fellow European of mine ever come across any serious creationists? Is this solely an American phenomenon?
The KY Creation museum isn't too far away from here and everyone that I've talk to that has gone or wanted to go hasn't done so out of religious belief but out of morbid curiosity or think it's funny. Their success is the same as that of the bearded lady, or so it seems to me. Once people get over the initial shock and humor it'll fade into obscurity.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Say you are a legitimate museum/educational institution capable of purchasing this skull.
Do you:
a) Purchase the mastodon skull to preserve an excellent fossil and put it on display for educational value, including its true age?
b) Allow this absurdity and insult to rational intelligence that is a Creation Museum die?
Though not the GP, I'm a Christian who believes in evolution myself, I'll try to tackle this if you don't object. Please excuse the brevity of the summary below; there is so much left out, I fear I've made it sound rather less structured and nuanced than it really is.
The way I look at it, the "fall" was not a one-time event that blighted the rest of us. It was, and is, and will continue to be, an over-and-over event that blights each of us individually. "Adam" is not an historical figure, but an allegorical one, a representative of our human nature.
We are human, and fallible. Not one of us makes it through life (or probably even through the day) without making some serious error of judgment that wounds another person, whether deliberately or thoughtlessly. Those errors are the things we need to atone for: our deliberately hurtful deeds, our thoughtlessness. No one is immune from this; it is a necessary consequence of our free will.
And in most cases, I think we cannot really make up for the wrong we have done. The errors create wounds that are beyond our power to heal. Yet in a just universe, evil requires an expiation.
As I see it, Christ's death provided that expiation. The salvation of Jesus is offered freely, as a pure gift -- nothing expected of us in return, except to say, "I accept." Without that acceptance, the expiation for the evil I have done then falls on myself.
(DISCLAIMER: Please understand, it's not my intent to proselytize or start a debate. I only expressed my view because the parent asked for an answer. I'm not saying that this is THE answer. I'm saying that this is AN answer, and one that I can live with. If your life, logic, and understanding have led you to a different conclusion about the world -- a different relationship with God, a different God or set of Gods, or no God at all -- and so long as you are harming no others, I won't presume to say that your view should be the same as mine. Go in peace.)
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
I have a question that has always troubled me regarding evolution vs. intelligent design. Is there any meaningful way, or even a need, to differentiate "created" things from "naturally occurring" things? Homo Sapiens may have "evolved" over millions of years, but there are objects on this earth (now even "living" objects) which are 100% the "creation" of us as a species, which would be very difficult to explain from an evolutionary standpoint.
At some point, we may become so advanced, technologically, that there is nothing curently living which is beyond our ability to recreate in a laboratory setting. How would one determine what occurs naturally and what was created? There will be lots of legal issues related to "accident of nature" or "industrial accident" related to when created things go bad, and how to prove they were created versus just having occurred by themselves.
To some extent, this is us "playing God" with nature. Somewhere down the road, a wholly "created" being will gain consciousness, evolve some (if left alone long enough), then wonder where he came from. Then they will have the same argument we are having now.
I'm no fan of ID as having "scientific" merit. But it does have philosophical merit. And some of the thought experiments make my head hurt.
(Posting Anon, because I don't like to discuss my personal politics or religion in public.)
Nope, no problems with any of those. There's nothing factual, based solely on empirical evidence in any of these fields that conclusively proves macro-evolution. Micro-evolution is undeniable -- species are constantly changing. But the jump from a new breed of dog to man evolving from a single-celled organism is just a bit too much for me, given any time frame. There's no interemediary reliable fossil record, even though we've gone through enough rock to have seen that by now (geology), no proof that just because there are (as far as we can tell, and the evidence makes sense) old stars that this somehow proves the evolution of life (cosmology), no empirical proof that carbon dating is even accurate, let alone that this only proves that some creatures are very old if it is accurate, not that they evolved (carbon dating), and I'm missing what in physics conclusively proves evolution.
Creationism and evolution both require faith. I realize that makes you uncomfortable, but perhaps when we can both realize the severe limitations of our knowledge and stop accepting assumptions as fact, we can discover the truth together. This is what science is about, isn't it?
Regarding sexuality and other religions, I do have a problem with ideas that are wrong, as everyone does. That does not stop me from loving people, and listening to and learning from them.
prediction: modded down: -1 disagree
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