If someone had a gun to my head and demanded that I visit one of these museums or else they'd pull the trigger, I'd tell them to shoot.
These places are a shameful display of stubborn ignorance, and are an embarrassment to our nation and to the human race as a whole, as well as to the Christian tradition in particular. It's bad enough that some people are in such a state of denial about science that they actually have museums with people riding dinosaurs and such (Save it for the next Jurassic Park sequel), and apparently think the Flintstones was a documentary, but what's even worse is that children who should be learning about the wonderful processes and great archeological ages that progressed from single-celled organisms to the great diversity of life that exists today, are instead being lied to. They'll either come to a point where they understand they were being lied to and probably lose their religion with their beliefs on this subject, because it was all tied together as a package for them at an impressionable age, or they won't ever understand that they were misled, and I honestly don't know which is worse.
I'm not going to call this being taught to children uncritically child abuse, and adults do have the right to believe what they want and to have museums to this stuff if they want, I believe in freedom of speech, but, to be honest with you, if I ran the world, I'd much sooner restrict museums like this to people 18 and older than I would an R-rated movie. If children see a movie that contains brief partial nudity or a fake explosion, I think they'll turn out okay in the long. If children are exposed to these type of creationist museums, though, I'm afraid the effects could be much more profound and lasting.
It feels like there are some parts of the country that want to re-litigate the Scope's monkey trial.
You know, to me, evolution isn't something that discredits spirituality, because it's actually a really sublime thing to think of all these different creatures and time periods and things evolving and leaving the sea and building up to the dinosaurs and so on and so forth. I was sitting in a parking lot a few months ago in a car, just staring down at a small bird that was wandering around at the parking lot, and I got this like weird almost flashback when the thought occurred to me that a hundred million years ago, that bird's dinosaur ancestor may have been staring down at my small mammalian ancestor.
There's a lot more true religion and spiritually in evolution, which is the truth of creation, than in "creationism", a small-minded untruth. I love the Book of Genesis as poetry and as sacred scripture, but it's not a historic textbook, and it's not a science textbook, and it was never meant to be. Creationists are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
I'm sorry if that was a little too diplomatic. Maybe someday I'll tell you all how I really feel about this subject.
