Thursday, January 20, 2011

Of Dragons and Unicorns


The screen shot below is taken from an Answers in Genesis facebook page. Ken Ham, AiG Supremo, is asking for some (favourable) testimonies regarding the ministry of AiG and in particularly his Kitsch Creationist Extravaganza, the Creation “museum”.


(Click to enlarge)

The visceral spiritual superlatives come in thick and fast:

“God bless your ministry”, “One of the most peaceful places I know” “I’m am so blessed by …YOU”, “Praise God for your ministry and good example”, “I could feel the presence of God” , “God made sure I stood firm in trusting a literal Genesis as a sure foundation”, “This is the proof that the Holy Spirit leads us into truth”, “it is an amazing place and the anointing is very strong there”.

Clearly these people went in with their expectations and hopes fulfilled thrice over. The world they have come to believe has been made palpable by a stunning spectacle of foam rubber, glass fibre, and plaster exhibits with a backdrop of painted wooden facades and atmospheric lighting. The cosmos of their imagination has thus been brought to life; they can almost touch it: But smell it? No.

But we must set beside this testimony the fact that many Christians don’t believe in a Ken Ham’s Young Creationist cosmos. To them the glitzy Bible Disneyland of AiG is to the Earthy Biblical World as a Star Trek convention, with its plastic phasers and communicators, is to Astronomy.

Having said that we now have to grasp the nettle: There is a contingent of Christians out there who are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the physical world and yet they are able to dress up their error in the language of intense devotion, ecstasy and epiphany. That they can be so utterly vehement, so utterly sure they know the Divine Will  and yet so utterly vacuous debases the first person language of religious testimony almost beyond recovery; almost.... 

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