Before joining Americans United, Simon was a reporter for Tax Notes, where he covered tax issues for nonprofits and wrote numerous stories on church politicking. Earlier in his career, Simon was a sports writer and he covered a range of sports from professional baseball to professional squash. Simon has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. He is from Richmond, Virginia.

Simon is the author of a blog hit piece published on the AU website: Museum Misadventure: Ky. Elementary School Takes Students To Ken Ham’s Creationist Exhibition. He’s totally outraged over an event, that occurred in 2012, he only found out about while trolling the Nasty Atheist’s blog. One wonders why the Nasty Atheist only found out last week about this four year old school field trip to the Creation Museum. After all, he writes more about Ken Ham and the Creation Museum than about atheism! Over 247 blog posts about Ken Ham alone. Can anyone spell “stalker”?

But, getting back to his partner in crime, Simon Brown… Like many AU employees and supporters, fact checking is too much work. Don’t bother coming to the Creation Museum, just make up stuff. Obviously Simon Brown considers Kentucky “fly-over country” and flunked geography. He says:

“Perfect” belongs in quotes, here, because Lee County Elementary in Petersburg, Ky., has a rather flexible definition of perfection: students could miss one day of school and still qualify for flawless attendance.

Lee County Elementary is in Lee County, Kentucky. It’s actually called Southside Elementary–there are two elementary schools in Lee County. And, the Creation Museum is in Petersburg in Boone County, Kentucky. Southside Elementary is located 150 miles away. Hey, Brown, I guess “perfection” can be rather flexible by atheist & AU standards when you’re lying for Darwin.

One thing we can be absolutely certainly of: Simon Brown, Americans United, and the Nasty Atheist are very concerned with the education of Lee County school children!

CP

The post Simon Brown, Assistant Director of Communications at Americans United appeared first on Creation and Science Chronicle.

Recently, Ken Ham blogged about a new book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, in which the author Brook Wilensky-Lanford, included a chapter about her visit to the Creation Museum. Her book is about the search for the location of the Garden of Eden in ancient and modern history–similar to books about the search for Noah’s Ark. Ken was critical of the author for making up several “facts” about Kentucky and the museum. Brook claimed that northern Kentucky had mountains, the Creation Museum was hidden behind a jagged mountain peak, and the area has abandoned factory smokestacks and blown-out ghost towns. Apparently she mistook the nearby Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America corporate headquarter buildings as “abandoned factory smokestacks.” (That facility employs 1,055 with an annual payroll of $113 million.) Ken discusses other interesting “facts” the author cited about the museum. As Ken says: “…did she deliberately distort her text just to be more colorful in her writing to help her polemic against the biblical creation position.”

And we have to ask…what was she smoking?!?

Earlier this month, the so-called “Friendly Atheist” posted a guest blog by Matt Cowan about a trip to the Creation Museum. Matt is a junior at Indiana University and member of the Secular Alliance of Indiana University. Matt and his fellow Secular Alliance friends regular post guest blogs expressing their annoyance with Christians and the Bible. What’s so amazing about this posting are his comments about dinosaurs at the Creation Museum:

When you come up to the gates of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, one of the first things you notice is a pair of dinosaur statues positioned on each side of the main gate. When you walk into the Creation Museum, one of the first things you see is a giant model of a flying dinosaur, perhaps a pterodactyl, hanging in the air, posing as if in mid-flight. [Pterodactyls, or “pterosaurs”, are apparently not dinosaurs, but my inner child rejects this new scientific fact. Ed.] As you begin to walk through the exhibits, something sticks out: these people like dinosaurs. They really like dinosaurs.

Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist blogger, injected a comment about Matt’s confusion about what’s a dinosaur. Somehow Matt got the idea that the pterandon above the Dragon Hall Bookstore entrance and over the Foto FX area is a dinosaur. Poor Matt. If he could read the signs accompanying the exhibits and displays, he’d know the difference!

Or, perhaps all this misinformation is due to the increasing legalization of medical and recreational marijuana use in the United States?

CP

The post Telling Lies for Darwin: The Friendly Atheist Blog appeared first on Creation and Science Chronicle.

You see, Scott put up a post on January 23rd titled, WE NEED A WISE CRYPTOZOOLOGIST FOR THIS CONSPIRACY!.  (All caps are his.)  Scott used the post to make a rather rambling rant against creationist Kurt Wise, Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, Kentucky, and Texas.   Now, this is nothing out of the ordinary for the typical atheist high school biology teacher pajama blogger, but Scott somehow has come to the conclusion that the 1925 Scopes Trial took place in Dayton, Kentucky.   He even shows us a nice image of the ‘real‘ location of the 1925 Scopes Trial, with a paragraph of explanation in case you don’t get it:

“In case you don’t know, Dayton, Kentucky is where the original ‘monkey trial’ showdown of Darrow and Bryan took place, with a chilling effect on science education. To cap it off, the most famous ‘creation scientist’ of Kentucky origins is none other than former Bryan College (Dayton) professor (and Answers in Genesis consultant) Kurt Wise…”

Of course, Scott assumes Bryan College is in Dayton, Kentucky and thus, that Kurt Wise is also from Kentucky.

Note to Scott: Next time READ the articles you link to in your posts.  Than you can at least get some of the basic stuff correct!

Let’s hope you are more careful in your Fresno, California high school biology class than you are with geography or history…

The post Atheist Scott Hatfield and the Scopes Monkey Trial appeared first on Creation and Science Chronicle.

Meek was interviewed by Rebecca Thomson for Hutt News in which he makes an outrageous and historically inaccurate statement:

“Darwin’s best friends were killed because of it [Origin of the Species], his health deteriorated, his family was torn apart — it’s a huge story.”

Darwin’s best friends were “killed” because of Origin of the Species? If that were true, we would have expected the evolutionary community to be howling this from the rooftops for the past 150 years!  And, he’s not talking about his play!

You can read another interview, Genius scientist’s longest day, in which Meek repeats the same whopper, although he adds this rather bizarre statement: “…I decided early on that I wanted the play to be more about the truth than the facts.”

But, telling lies for Darwin is better than telling the truth or the facts!

cp

The post New Zealand Playwright Arthur Meek Telling Lies for Darwin appeared first on Creation and Science Chronicle.

Our contribution to these festivities will be a series of posts exposing just a few of the lies, half-truths, and distortions made by bloggers, reporters, and the evolutionary community on behalf of Charles Darwin.

See these previous posts for examples of what to expect:

Creation Museum Archaeopteryx Reconstruction: Does It or Doesn’t It Have Teeth?

Martha Heil — Was She, or Wasn’t She?

Awesome Article at AiG’s New Online “Answers Research Journal”

Enjoy!

cp

The post Telling Lies for Darwin Month appeared first on Creation and Science Chronicle.

The all too predictable pajama bloggers such as PZ Myers and even film critic Roger Ebert are beginning to stoke the flames of controversy over the film’s premier at the Toronto International Film Festival. But it all really started with a rather breezy article in the UK’s Telegraph: Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’.

Telegraph “Showbusiness editor” Anita Singh (as opposed to ‘journalist’) says:

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

How does she know it was “too controversial for religious America”? The Telegraph does not offer ANY proof. Not even a quote from a film distributor. This is just a cheap stereotype probably being used to garner publicity and support for what may well turn out to be a dull film.

Perhaps including the Gallup Poll is proof enough. This is truly a leap of logic that only a “Showbusiness editor” could make!

Besides, American film makers and distributors have no problem marketing films that offend the sensibilities of religious people in the U.S or elsewhere. One need only check the weekly movie listings for evidence of this.

Could it be the film will be a flop?  Even PZ Myers struggled to say anything positive about the film…and he most likely hasn’t even seen it:

Although, to be fair, this is only part of the story. One reason it probably isn’t getting picked up is that it isn’t a blockbuster story — it’s a small film with a personal story. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, but it’s not a Michael Bay noisemaker with car chases and explosions, or giant robots, or a remake of a 1970s cheesy TV show. That makes it a tougher sell.

Also, while it’s going to generate a little controversy from the know-nothing brigades, it’s not a movie that embraces the controversy and makes a lot of PR waves. I suspect it’s falling into the valley of the dead movies, where it’s got just enough negative vibe to turn away a segment (a small, stupid segment, of course, but theaters don’t care about the IQ of the people buying popcorn) of the population, but not enough shock value to make it a must-see movie for the controversy alone.

Film critic Roger Ebert (who hero worships Darwin and has been attacking creationists in the past year) notes that people were walking out of the press screen showing!  Apparently it was a boring film.  Very revealing is his comment that he hopes it wasn’t from boredom they walked out.

Maybe the U.S. film distributors know something we don’t know – it’s a box office disaster and will lose money. Certainly not because it’s “controversial for religious America.” The market is probably the History Channel or a PBS broadcast. Something for the wine and cheese crowd or local atheist clubs…

Like the play and movie Inherit the Wind, we now have another Hollywood history brainwashing.  But in this instance, from the United Kingdom…

As a final note, another film showing at the Toronto International Film Festival is “Antichrist.” It’s not had any problem getting a U.S. film distributor. It is much more controversial than “Creation”:

Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” is poised to detonate at the Toronto Film Festival. This willfully controversial director will inspire, as he often does, a storm of controversy, debate, critics clamoring to get into advance screenings that are already jammed, and a contentious press conference. Of the 400 or so films at TIFF this year, “Antichrist” was the first that sold out in advance. It was the same last May at Cannes, and that was before it has even been seen.

“Von Trier was nothing if not canny in his title for the film. By naming it “Antichrist,” he provides a lens through which to view its perplexing behavior. By naming his characters only He and She, he suggests the dark side of an alternative Garden of Eden, and then disturbing his ending becomes a mirror image of Christ welcoming the faithful into the kingdom of heaven. The title instructs us where to begin. If he had named the characters John and Mary, and titled the film “A Nightmare,” what conclusions might we have arrived at?

It even has two versions – one for Catholics and one for Protestants. 

(NOTE:  even some liberals were repulsed by the graphic sexual & mutilation scenes in this film.)

I rest my case…

cp

The post Telling Lies for Darwin appeared first on Creation and Science Chronicle.