In what started out as a travel article on Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio for the UK tabloid, The Mail, writer Chris Coplans ends with a ‘hit’ piece on the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum. Excerpted below are some of his comments on his visit to the Creation Museum.
Stung like a bee by the Louisville Lip
by Chris Coplans
The Mail on Sunday (UK), September 7, 2008
p. 32-33
On my way back to the airport in Kentucky I made one last stop at God’s answer to Disneyworld, the Creation Museum.
Worried about being stereotyped as Stone Age, Bible-bashing hillbillies, Kentuckians have been reluctant to embrace their newest attraction. Not so the thousands of biblical literalists who make a pilgrimage from all over America to visit God’s own theme park.
ThE state-of-the-art 70,000 sq ft museum is just one exit away from the airport and presents itself as a ‘walk through history’, although it struck me as a walk through fantasy land. For just under £13, you can learn how God made the universe in six days, where the dinosaurs lived on Noah’s Ark and, most bizarrely, how Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust.
I was greeted outside the main building by a large, apparently harmless dinosaur. It turns out the likes of Steven Spielberg and 99 per cent of scientists have been giving dinosaurs an undeservedly bad Press.
One exhibit shows a young child happily frolicking with a couple of peace-loving, vegan dinosaurs, even though they had been extinct for 60 million years before humans came along. The Creation Museum, like Hollywood, doesn’t let science get in the way of a good story.
The museum is packed with hordes of jumbo-sized evangelical Christians, waddling around with their offspring, apparently defying the deadly sin of gluttony. Had Noah let them aboard, their excess weight would have sunk the Ark.
