The Courier Journal is a regular normal every-day newspaper out of Louisville, Kentucky. James K. Willmot is a normal every-day former science teacher at a Goshen Kentucky school. He works in a lab now in Britain, but he’s from Louisville. The following Op Ed in the Courier-Journal by James Willmot should be sobering for anyone living in the readership zone of that paper, or anyone with kids in the area:
There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. The tax-exempt ministry, Answers in Genesis, and its new $28 million creation museum in Boone County has become the de facto source of science information to thousands of Christians who are throwing away reason and 500 years of scientific inquiry and replacing it with ignorant dogma.
If adults want to believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth, that dinosaurs and humans lived together in harmony (all dinosaurs were vegetarians, you see) and that Noah saved all of the Earth’s animal species by placing them on his ark, then they have the right to do so. What I object to is that thousands of children, particularly the growing number of Christian home-schooled children in this country, are visiting the museum in droves, much to the delight of the museum’s founder, Ken Hamm.
Willmot continues with some comparisons between the US and Britain, where ne now lives, the fraudulent nature of the Creationism Museum, and the issue of reconciling religious objectives including home schooling and science.
The story is located here, and you can certainly go there and add a comment to the growing discussion!
[Thanks Joe for sending on the link]
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Good on the Courier Journal! The comment thread is fairly depressing, though, from a quick perusal. More disheartening even than the high incidence of standard creationist talking points is the amount of space expended on castigating Willmot for being “intolerant.” Even some people who say they disagree with the Creation Museum’s disinformation are chiding the writer for not being nice, or something. Some good sociologist, or media historian or someone like that, needs to write a history of the rise of this goofball conception of tolerance and objectivity, where any forthright critical language directed at someone in public is painted as being intolerant or even oppressive towards them.
That Ken Hamm and his colleagues at the “museum” are lying non-stop about the work scientists do, and more or less accusing them of massive and ongoing fraud, solely because their work doesn’t jibe with Hamm’s religious beliefs, somehow doesn’t strike the commenters as some kind of intolerance.
Either this place has good moderation principles or the fundie nutjobs haven’t found this yet.
In case it’s the former let me say “Yay science bloke, welcome to the sane side of the pond”
I case it’s the latter let me say “Anyone criticizing Ken Hamm is going straight to hay-ell, of course dinosaurs were veggie, whenever anyone suggests otherwise it makes the Baby Jeebus cry”. Now move along Christians, too many long words for you here…