This ******** would be simply silly if they weren't so adamant about brain-washing folks. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,783829,00.html?cnn=yes [At] Dinosaur Adventure Land, [is an] exhibit ... that illustrates another creationist article of faith. It consists of a long trough filled with sand and fitted at one end with a water spigot. Above the trough is a sign reading “That River Didn’t Make That Canyon.” When visitors open the spigot, the water quickly cuts a gully through the sand, supposedly demonstrating how the Grand Canyon was created, practically overnight, by Noah’s flood. ... Tom Vail, who with his wife operates Canyon Ministries, conducting creationist-view tours of the canyon. “For years,” Vail explains, “as a Colorado River guide, I told people how the Grand Canyon was formed over the evolutionary time span of millions of years. (Most geologists place the canyon’s age at some six million years). Then I met the Lord. Now I have a different view of the Canyon, which according to a biblical time scale, can’t possibly be more than a few thousand years old.” There's more, but its too damn depressing to even copy and paste here. Read on.
No, he's right, the Grand Canyon is only a couple of thousand years old, which is why those sand walls of the canyon keep collapsing and why it gets several meters deeper every few hours.
It's one thing to have scientific facts guide your religious beliefs. It's a whole nother thing to let your religious beliefs blindly refute scientific facts.
Problem is, he's not tested the science, so for him, as it is for most folks, the fundamentalist POV is just as valid as the scientific view. But even without knowing the specific science as a matter of course, you'd think he'd go TEST the science before meeting the Lord and, apparently, telling the Lord to go to hell and getting behind the "science" in that Gideon-peddled work used as the controllable conduit to accessing the Lord. "Met the Lord." Where, outside Waffle House? In that case, I've met the Lord too. Except my Lord was wearing a fugly blue dress and white pointy shoes, and was asking me if I wanted some fellatio so that the Lord and the Lord's mom could get a taxi to church. True story. Well, everything except them being the Lord. And the white shoes. They were more of a Pantone "wheat."
No one has mentioned the most disturbing aspect of the story - that the Park Service is selling books creationism-based "geology" books in the Park Service book stores. When a group of NPS administrators tried to have the booked pulled they were overruled by the PTB in Washington. It seems that the Bush administration doesn't seem to mind that religion is being taught as science in our national parks.
I went on a 5 day rafting trip down the Colorado through the Canyon several years ago. The guides were really knowledgeable regarding the geological origins of the Canyon and were always pointing out interesting things. I actually asked one of them at one point if they ever guided any Creationists who disputed them on the Canyon's age. He said, "Nah, not really....they have their own tours...." I thought he was kidding.
I thought that the Grand Canyon was created when Pecos Bill had to pee in the desert. Or was that the Rio Grande?
Methinks there was probably a joke there, and me, in my current state of tiredness, didn't notice that before I posted. Oh well.
I think it was the Rio Grande because the Grand Canyon was created when Paul Bunyan got tired and couldn't carry his axe on his shoulder so he drug it behind him. True story.
What annoys me the most is that these religious nincompoops don’t give God any credit for being smarter than them. They assume He works in a way which can be explained in a book for third graders. I would think the Lord is rather annoyed that these people think belief is a reason to turn off their brains.
Part of me finds credible the notion that an Uncaused Cause that could enact everything that IS might just a bit outside our ability to comprehend, and certainly might be above submitting things like "I tolerate no rivals; mess up and I'll punish your whole family down three and four generations!" That God, being God, is possessed of a logic beyond exponentially different from our own, and thus we cannot understand God, in the same way we could not see the Earth was curved...until science! Until the Ten Commandments are burned into the moon, or the sun turns into the shape of a cross, it has to be a matter of belief in any case.
There was a related story about "fundamentalising" history on one of the nightly news programs. A leader of one of the Baptist groups saw a video at the Lincoln Memorial and was driven batty by clips of pro-choice & anti-war demonstrators. The video probably had something to do with the right of Americans to protest their govt. Some of those annoying little liberties most of us take for granted. Of course the Reverend thought that it had no place in a public memorial. So he's going to pressure the National Park Service to edit the "offending" clips out of the video. I imagine a tape loop of a flag blowing in the wind as America the Beautiful plays. Cashing in some political capital is how Dubya puts it IIRC.
I found a new authority for allowing scientists to find the truth by looking at the ground instead of relying on the words of preachers: the Bible. Psalm 85:11 Truth shall spring out of the earth