It was this sign that stopped Mary Alice! and I dead in our tracks before we set foot in Northern Kentucky’s infamous Creation Museum on May 1, 2010. (Click here for an explanation as to why we were in the area). We were already nervous by the time our friend Brian dropped us off at the place, and this didn’t help. We were both glad that we got dropped off and had no choice but to forge on, because we started to have second thoughts about the whole endeavor. We smoked a cigarette, took a deep breath, and entered the establishment…
We were greeted by a kindly old man who gave us our “schedule” for the day. (It was nothing we had to follow, but I was already scared. Don’t ask me why). We then proceeded to the main museum tour, which began with a compare & contrast of theories of God/The Bible and “Human Reason.” It seemed genuinely fair; It seemed to say, “Here’s what we believe, here’s what they believe, it’s all good, let’s go get a beer.” We were a bit taken aback by the apparent fairness of it all, but also a bit suspicious. They even had a video of both a Christian and secular scientist studying together. Here’s me watching the video (real pose):
The scientists were hanging out, digging bones, and being cool to each other. No big whoop, eh?
We learned about how the Universe was not 6 million+ years old, but rather a mere 4,000 years old. A big focus of Earth’s time line was The Great Flood, where God washed away everything so he could start over. The Great Flood (which occurred about 35 years ago?) was the cause of many of the modern earthly miracles we see today.
Then they hit us with the hard stuff.
The tour took a dark turn, as we walked through halls plastered with magazine clippings and 80’s graffiti. “Racism! Genocide! Abortion!,” the walls screamed at us. It was a virtual time line of the 20th century, a time where humans abandoned the teachings of the Bible, subsequently leading to catastrophic events. (Note: Racism, Genocide & Abortion did not exist prior to the 20th century). We then ventured into a dimly lit room where a portrait of a suburban home was painted on the walls. There were several looping videos where the house windows should be, each illustrating the family’s declining morality at home. I personally got stuck on the first video, which featured a teenage boy and his younger brother in their bedroom. The older brother was smoking pot and looking at internet porn, while the younger brother was playing violent video games. The older brother expressed aloud that he felt the word “porn” was crass, and that he preferred referring to the images on his computer as “art.” I felt like I was hanging out with my friends. While I was watching the video, Mary Alice! was standing near the other end of the painted house, when a loud booming voice from a loudspeaker paralyzed her with fear: “50% OF WOMEN HAVE SEX OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE!!!” We ventured on, confused and frightened.
After walking past a few random plaques featuring anti-Semitic and anti-Cannibal messages (don’t ask, because I don’t know), and some pictures of tornadoes and heroin users, it was time for the Garden of Eden. The garden featured Adam & Eve hanging out in a forest with many breeds of animal, including the native Antarctic penguin. Eve was totally hot. Adam totally had a mustache. There were apples hanging from the tree, but we chose not to eat any of them out of fear of repercussions.
The coolest part of the tour was going inside Noah’s Ark. There were a bunch of animatronic robot men yelling at each other with modern Jewish accents, simulating the building of the ark. Here’s me surfing the ark when nobody was watching:
We then had lunch at Noah’s Cafe. We had pizzas that tasted like ketchup and cheese whiz.
We were both getting pretty tired after lunch, so we budgeted 30 more minutes to cruise around. We saw a video about how dragons/dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and how humans killed them with spears in a manner of “showing off.” We then toured the dinosaur museum, which told of how the Stegosaurus had dinner with your great-great-grandfather in 1785, blah blah etc. We hit the gift shop, bought a bumper sticker for Brian that read “I believe now” or something, and got the hell out of there.
My goal when starting this endeavor was to not be freaked out by the scary fire & brimstone religious stuff, and I wasn’t. I grew up in a religious household, but this place was SO way off that it didn’t even matter. I only recall getting anxious a few times over thinking about the purpose of life, but that’s about it. Mary Alice! was a bit more freaked out, because she didn’t grow up in a Protestant house like I did. A lot of this stuff was familiar to me already, so I was happy to explain how Methuselah lived to be 969 years old.
The museum itself was actually pretty dull at times, because there wasn’t a lot of actual learning going on. As Mary Alice! put it, it didn’t have the usual type of artifacts you find in a museum, but instead a lot of charts and graphs offering The Bible’s version of history. Most everything could be explained away as follows: “Want to know why this thing is that way? Why it’s because of God, of course!” We kept arriving at the same answer with everything. At least it wasn’t confusing.
The museum visitors? Well, we were surprised that we seemed to be the only ones there as a social experiment. We tried to snicker quietly so as to not offend the other patrons. Most of them were quiet zombies who didn’t seem to mind that they were bumping into you or standing in your way. We didn’t want to be confrontational (see the above sign), so we kept to ourselves much like the others. Sorry I don’t have any more on the fellow visitors, they all kind of blended together.
This is getting quite long, so I’ll just end with this. Long live the Creation Museum, the creator of fun on a Saturday.
