Let's see, Wednesday...Yep! Ken Ham's day to piss me off!

But first, my class and I were discussing "writing reviews" today. I was in freestyle mode today, just bouncing along with the discussion. At some point we got onto the subject of album covers and evaluating them against one another. Well, on the overhead projector, I brought up the cover art for Dark Side of the Moon. One girl in the back said, "Oh, I saw that on a t-shirt!"

"Yeah, but you did know that it was an album cover first, right?"

Thunk. <-- That's my head hitting my desk

Oh, Ken Ham. That's right. I was wondering what this bilious aftertaste was, and then I remembered that I had read some more of Ken's drivel tonight.

First, Ken's bitch, Paul Taylor of Idiots in Genesis UK, complains that the UK may be enforcing educational standards. He's bitching about parental rights. Dude, you have no right to fuck up your kids' minds, to keep them in ignorance by force, just because you squeezed them from your genitals. I find it as deeply appalling as I do holding their heads underwater. These are the types of progressive policies that will leave the US at a competitive disadvantage unless we seriously get our shit together. Three cheers for the UK, and a boo-sucks to Paul Taylor!

But mostly what precipitated my goatlessness (for it had been gotten proverbially) was the spurious charge of hypocrisy Ken himself leveled against his better, Richard Dawkins. You see, Dawkins is establishing a camp to teach kids to be independent thinkers and to instill a sort of curiosity not doomed to lead to the loathsome, solipsistic, and masturbatory mental inbreeding of creationism. But Ken takes this personally, as, of course, he should.

Quoth the tit:

After the group of around 70–80 secular paleontologists visited the Creation Museum recently, some comments were made to the press (several media outlets were here that day) concerning the Creation Museum attracting so many children and how terrible this was—that we were educating children this way. [...]

Recently I wrote a blog item about a person who was complaining about the new Creation Museum billboards, stating:

I hate that the Creation Museum has dinosaurs ripping at their billboards, an obvious ploy to attract more kids to brainwash to Christianity.

Yesterday we came across a blog entry by an associate professor of mathematics in Harrisonburg, Virginia,who visited with the group of paleontologists. He blogged:

I have made several visits to the museum, and it has been crowded each time. But even I was taken aback by the mob scene that greeted us. Things were so clogged it was sometimes hard to work your way through the labyrinth of exhibits. Very depressing. Even more depressing was the ubiquity of small children from various camps and schools: Well isn’t that charming. Getting ‘em while their young is a big thing with creationists.

Of course, what he means is that Christians shouldn’t be teaching children—that it needs to be left up to the atheists/evolutionists. If this professor agreed with what we teach, it would be okay to teach children—but he doesn’t agree; so, it is not okay for us to teach children.

Ah, but you see some people are genuinely more qualified than you are to teach. These "secular paleontologists," by which you mean, "real paleontologists"--how the fuck do you know whether or not they are religious, you overgeneralizing...sucker...of...yams?!--are scientists presumably teaching at real universities, not pseudoscientists like Allan L. Gillen, who teaches something that is only superficially like biology at Liberty Novelty University. Surely kids are best served by receiving instruction from the best teachers, right?

It's not our fault that you have condemned yourself to being a huffy lunatic. Really, when are you going to give up on this Jesus guy? (I think it the answer is probably when it stops being profitable.)

HJ