The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.

But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.

It hasn’t taken the atheist left to jump all over this as “proof” that every God-fearing Christian is a rabid wide-eyed idiot kook (not surprising really, anti-Christian bigotry is never frowned upon in this country anyway and stereotypes are no different) that thinks Tyrannosauruses high-fived Joseph and Mary.

Here’s the truth: 99% of Christians think this is complete and utter bullshit, and most Christians question how to reconcile Dinosaurs with humans if God created humans first. Most Christians struggle to reconcile what the real world presents with what they believe as far as their religion.

Most importantly, most Christians, if you asked an educated one or two, would probably laugh their asses off at the sheer idiocy of this “museum.”

Not that that’ll stop the bigotry, hatred, and mocking, but it’s worth trying to put into words nonetheless.

via the NY Times

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