Bones, BS and Ken Ham

A writer for the Guardian in the U.K. tells of his experiences traveling about the country with Ken Ham, the creationist wingnut who head up the wingnut religious site, Answers in Genesis, and is responsible for the medieval atrocity, the mis-named creation museum in Kentucky.

Our writer says spending time with Ham "is a profoundly disorienting experience.

"He inhabits a world that was created in six days, is around 6,000 years old and that started out with a pair of humans sharing a garden with every kind of animal on the planet - including fruit-eating dinosaurs and cuddly vegetarian tigers."

All of this is based upon a literal interpretation of the the book of Genesis.

Ham has been in England pushing his version of reality upon the ignorant and the unsuspecting. Without too much luck, evidently, as the crowds that came to hear him tell his tale of non-scientific nonsense, were relatively small: 600 at one place; 250 at another.

This creationist preacher tells audiences that the Bible is true and science is all wrong. When asked about "radiometric dating methods applied to rocks from thousands of locations around the earth [which contradict the notion of a young earth]" and about the fact that radiometric dating relies "on the rate at which certain radioactive forms of atoms decay, and point to a 4.5 billion-year-old planet," Ham says that can't be right as it contradicts the Bible.

Simple, right?

Ham also said, "Ninety per cent of those dating methods actually contradict the idea of millions of years and billions of years." That is a lie, and Ham knows it's a lie!

Ham is full of this kind of unmitigated horse-hockey, but where he really shows his colors is when he claims that without god there is no purpose and meaning in life, and that people without god have nothing stopping them from killing their neighbors, having abortions, choosing to become homosexuals or becoming drug addicts.

[Hmmm. George W. Bush believes in god and he has been involved in killing hundreds of thousands of people. Cheney's daughter believes in god and she's a lesbian. Rush Limbaugh believes in god and he's a drug addict.]

For Ham, it all comes down to this: "...if you start cherry-picking from the Bible (including dismissing Genesis as a metaphor) then you are a slippery slope to moral ruin." What he doesn't say or suggest, of course, is that everyone cherry-picks the Bible. He's no different.

Our writer concludes: "It's the familiar insulting and false idea that humanists and atheists are inherently amoral because we don't have a big God-shaped stick poised over our heads to beat us if we misbehave. Ken Ham's vision of a frugivorous T rex sharing Eden with Adam and Eve requires some breathtaking intellectual dishonestly to sustain it. If this is the foundation for his moral edifice, I want no part of it."