Yes, you have heard of it, it has been in the news here and there for several years. I always expected them to fail by now, but no. They have continued to build the place, but I still hold out hope for them to fail in a spectacular manner.
The article is from Newsweek. It is detailed and well-written and of moderate length. Fair-use allows only a part of the article so you pretty much have to go read the whole thing.
Imagine the Titanic minus the smokestacks, framed out of timber rather than iron. Imagine that instead of a doomed ocean liner bustling with well-dressed elites, it’s home to 2,000 seasick animals, a handful of teenage dinosaurs and one patriarchal family headed by a 500-year-old man bent on saving the world. Cultures all over the globe share the legend of Noah’s Ark, but this summer one especially enthusiastic Christian ministry will try to convince you that it looked exactly like this—dinosaurs and all—when it opens its biblical theme park. Its pièce de résistance is a 510-foot representation of Noah’s giant boat. (OK, the Titanic was bigger, but you get the idea.) Tickets for the July 7 opening go on sale January 19, and the ministry folks are betting big—with borrowed money—that people will want to see the show.
The masterminds behind this monument to theological devotion are fundamentalist Christian organization Answers in Genesis (AiG) and its Australian-born president, Ken Ham. For the unfamiliar, Ham, AiG and their followers believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible and disparage anyone who doesn’t. Dubbed the Young Earth Creationists, they maintain that the Earth and its universe were created 6,000 years ago in six days, as described in Scripture. And while they argue that their worldview deserves as much classroom time in public schools as science, for now they are focused on molding young minds through their oft-mocked Petersburg, Kentucky, Creation Museum and the forthcoming Ark Encounter theme park in nearby Williamstown. By AiG’s calculations, dinosaurs and humans roamed the planet in harmony because God said in Genesis that all the animals were made in one day, which seems to indicate that they were made simultaneously. Ergo, dinos on the ark.
I seldom use the “h-word”: hate. I hate disco. I hate Brussels sprouts. I hate garden peas. (But I love snow peas, go figure.)
I hate creationism. Hate it. Because creationism is nothing but stupid. It was always stupid, it will never be anything but stupid. There is nothing that can be done to make it less stupid, nor more stupid, actually.
Well, you could build a damned theme park based on it and that would be even stupider.
And that is what Ken Ham has done. Built a friggin’ theme park based on utterly nonsensical ideas.
A scam, if you ask me.
And like most religious things anymore, it’s got a big scam built into it.
Ham is a wingnut, basically and wingnuts have been trained to disregard, disrespect, and be suspicious of and paranoid about “the media” and “journalists.” People who document reality aren’t welcome with creationists, particularly Ham.
There is the issue of the “Answers in Genesis” theme park labor being forced to sign “testaments of faith” so that only religious nuts would be working for Ham. This was against the law—something about unfair and discriminatory labor practices. More liberal interference, of course.
And he was accused of financing his private religious debacle with taxpayer money. He said no, it’s not.
Ham is telling the truth, but it’s a literal interpretation of the truth. The money used to build Ark Encounter came from donations of almost $30 million, plus $62 million in high-risk, unrated municipal bonds backed by the project’s future revenues. If Ark Encounter never makes significant profits (and bond documents warn that it may not), neither the city nor AiG is on the hook for the bond money. However, according to Mike Zovath, chief actions officer for AiG and Ark Encounter, the millions in tax dollars that will be rebated through the formation of the aforementioned TIF district could go toward repaying the bonds and funding future attractions. What neither of them mentioned in conversations with me or in their many blog posts on the subject is that, as part of the TIF agreement, employees working within the TIF district will be subject to a 2 percent employment tax on gross wages for the next 30 years. In other words, $2 out of every $100 earned by people working at or around the park will go directly to paying off the attraction. So while tax dollars might not actually have been used to build the ark, a boatload that would otherwise go back into the community will instead be used to pay off Ark Encounter’s debt.
Nothing, it seems, is truly “religious” until there is a scam devised to screw people out of money and plenty of dumb people to send them that money The teabagging dingaling that Kentucky just elected is all for supporting this clear violation of the First Amendment separation of Church and State and, of course, they don’t want to comment further.
There’s more than just public money at stake. Other Ark Encounter attractions will reportedly include a petting zoo, a first-century village and so-called teaching exhibits with titles like “Flood Geology” (how the separation of continents and marine fossils found on mountaintops “are a direct result of the flood” ) and “The Ice Age” (AiG insists there was only one). Famed scientist and educator Bill Nye, who came under fire from some scientists in 2014 for dueling with Ham in a televised evolution vs. creationism debate, warns that using commonwealth dollars to suppress science is bad for the whole country. “Raising a generation of young people who are confused about the natural history of the Earth is not in our best interest,” he says. “This project is going to slow the response of voters in the Commonwealth to climate change and it’s going to hold us all back.” Given the way AiG rejects scientific evidence, he thinks it might not be so bad if the ark park goes the way of the Titanic.
A tax-dodging scheme, blatantly discriminatory hiring practices, and vast sums of money being made available to spread the utter stupidity of creationism, and possibly, per Mr. Nye, spreading the denial of climate change, which is rife among the ultra-religious.
I, of course, hope this monument to Stupidity fails.
Creationism, being false, is utterly irresponsible, a complete waste of time, should not be taught to children, and people who talk about it should always be told to take it somewhere else or to SFTU. Life is too short to be wasted on “creationism.”
Now for a tour of the Bigfoot museum.
PS: Go look at the article and see the huge logs they are using (wasting) to build this thing.