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For what it's worth
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: With Thumper
Posts: 6,793
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California Social Conservatives for Giuliani?
Remember when I posted that article from the prominent CA social conservative about why he is endorsing Giuliani? Here is another article by him:
Museum for Creationism In Santee
Saturday 3 February 2007
Never knew this existed. This museum existed.
children should eb allowed to leanr all sides of an issue, especially those that are scientific. We know that science is not exact. Also, we know that what we thought yesterday is found to be untrue today.
The world is not flat, so why should only one theory be taught or told.
This is a great public service for the community, the children and free speech.
Santee museum brings creationism to life Literal interpretation of Bible is illustrated
By Michele Clock San Diego Union-Tribune February 3, 2007
SANTEE – Leafy, plastic vines climb the walls. Fake tree branches dangle overhead. The piped-in sound of croaking frogs fills the air.
Windows in the walls give a view to colorful finches, a shiny scorpion, even a python named Cuddles.
JOHN GIBBINS / Union-Tribune Cindy Carlson, curator of the Museum of Creation and Earth History in Santee, showed the museum’s python, named Cuddles, to a group of schoolchildren from Berean Bible Baptist Church and Academy in Chula Vista. "Who made snakes?" she asked the students. "God!" they shouted. This lush, gardenlike room is part of the Museum of Creation and Earth History, a beige, two-story structure that brings to life a version of history that isn’t taught in public schools. Here, God created Earth as described in the Bible.
Each year, about 15,000 visitors come to Santee’s only museum, deemed the world’s largest creationist museum by the Northwest Creation Network. (A much larger, $27 million creationist museum under construction in Kentucky will soon snatch the title.)
Folks may say they believe in evolution, but they don’t really buy that humans came from other creatures, said John D. Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, which runs the free-admission museum.
“You cannot convince a kid they came from a fish,” he said. “Kids know better and people know better.”
A group of uniformed parochial school students was an eager audience at the museum one recent weekday morning. A chorus of “whoas” and “wows” followed as they wandered into the gardenlike room, which is devoted to Days 5, 6 and 7 of creation.
Caleb Barrera, 8, a second-grader at Chula Vista’s Berean Bible Baptist Church and Academy, moved his little camera as close as he could to the critters, snapping photo after photo. Bible in hand, first-grader Matthew Fernandez, 6, tugged fifth-grader Anthony Diez, 10, toward an exhibit crawling with cockroaches.
Soon it was time for museum curator Cindy Carlson to bring out Cuddles.
“He won’t bite,” she assured. With the brown-and-black snake perched on her arm, she asked the students, “Who made snakes?”
“God!” they shouted.
No government funding Just down the street from the Santee Drive In Theatre and a stone’s throw from an auto-body shop, the businesslike building seems an unusual place to tackle such questions as, “What is the meaning of life?” and, “Where did I come from?”
A member of the institute’s board sold this chunk of East County to the institute in the 1980s. Today, the two office buildings there serve as headquarters for the institute, its graduate school and the museum.
A walk through the museum starts and ends in a small bookstore stocked with not-so-subtle titles such as “God Created the Plants & Trees of the World” and “Refuting Evolution.” A sign at the start of the tour states that the museum accepts no government funding. It isn’t affiliated with any church, either.
Visitors step from the green-hued garden room into the reddish-orange glare of “The Fall of Man.” There, a human skull and a preserved tarantula are on display. A tiger painted on the wall bares its teeth as if poised to attack. The sorrowful cries of a man and baby waft overhead.
The next room evokes the inside of Noah’s Ark. A floor-to-ceiling mural shows animals standing in pens. The sounds of cracking thunder and pouring rain can be heard, and a flashing light simulates lightning.
Noah didn’t need to load the largest animals into the ark, a plaque reads. He could have collected “young virile specimens” instead, which could have allowed 50,000 animals to squeeze on board.
Near the end of the tour, a drawing of a healthy, green “Creationist Tree” is juxtaposed near a twisted “Evolutionary Tree.” Written next to the creationist tree: “Genuine Christianity” and “Correct Practices.” The evolutionary tree: “Harmful Philosophies” and “Evil Practices,” including promiscuity, pornography, genocide, slavery and abortion.
Father of creationism The museum has been around almost as long as the Institute for Creation Research, founded by Morris’ late father, Henry Morris, in 1970. It moved to its current location in the mid-1980s.
Morris is credited with helping to spark a modern creationist movement after co-writing the 1961 book “The Genesis Flood.” The work tried to scientifically explain the theory of divine creation.
The movement has grown from very few followers when the book was published to “tens of thousands” today, John Morris said, citing polls that show most Americans believe God had some hand in creation.
Morris, who has led expeditions to Turkey’s Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark, said his father convinced many that creationism was true. John Morris now travels the country making the case for divine creation and against evolution.
From its Santee home, the institute also spreads its message across the world through pamphlets, radio programs broadcast by 1,500 radio stations worldwide, and a 113,000-circulation monthly newsletter.
Popular with students Students on field trips and Bible study groups are among those who visit the museum most.
Berean Bible Baptist Academy student Erika Fernandez, 8, said she liked the room with live animals because her favorite parts of the Bible describe how God made them.
“No one can make any animal but him,” she said.
The school’s principal, Melito Barrera, said he doesn’t worry about the children getting mixed messages about creation and evolution from society.
He points to a nearby corridor in the museum, where photos of creationist scholars hang opposite those of evolutionist scholars. On the evolutionist side, Andrew Carnegie is described as “cruel and heartless in his own day to competitors and laborers alike.” He’s joined by Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, among others.
“That’s what makes it very clear,” Barrera said. “There’s no gray area. It’s teaching them the truth so that they will know what is in error.”
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