Submitted for your amusement, Ken Ham's Legendary Ark Encounter, a $107 million tourist attraction being built in the heart of Kentucky (God's second favorite place) and just about ready to open its hatch to homo-hating, gun-toting Bible literalists throughout the land.
Spoiler Alert: Iffin' you are an Abrahamic believer and take offense easily, I suggest you stop reading cause shit's about to get real. Unless the Lord strikes me down as I take to the keyboard and lay waste to another one of his soggy pulp fiction, human-spiting stories. Which would actually be a cool way to go now that I think about it.
First off, kudos to Ken Ham, the Australian Genesis-guided evangelical who spearheaded this important work.
Mr. Ham, an appropriate name if there ever was one, is a strict follower of the first book of the Old Testament, a collection of funny stories written by a bunch of old Jews before they got around to Seinfeld, Blazing Saddles and Everyone Loves Raymond.
Ham felt that by rebuilding Noah's very big boat, he could inspire people and bring them back to God's law, faulty in logic as that may be.
If, for instance, the world as Ken knows it was created in 6 days how did God measure a day, which is the time it takes for Earth to complete one rotation? But according to Ken's book the sun is not created until Day Four, so how can you define a day previous to its creation?
It boggles the mind.
But it is not nearly as confounding as the fact that the good people of Kentucky (again, God's second favorite place on Earth) could shell out, in the form of tax credits, millions of dollars so that Mr. Ham could erect his biblical petting zoo.
Think of how that money could have otherwise been spent.
Just a thought, a Christian thought, they could have fed some hungry people. They could have housed some homeless folks. Or, and I'm just spitballing here, they could have used the money to buy new textbooks for the schools -- updated textbooks that include descriptions of a round, not flat, Earth, Charles Darwin and this new science-y thing called carbon-dating.
And then of course, there's the Ark itself.
Supposedly, it housed a pair of more than 5,000 species of animals. Including, according to Mr. Ham, dinosaurs which roamed the planet the same time Noah was putting the finishing touches on the Ark bathrooms. Which brings up the care and feeding of all those creatures.
According to Ken Ham's "scholars", they had enough food onboard to feed all the animals for a full year, until all the rain waters had receded. I'm just doing the math in my head and have got to believe it would take a better part of a 24 hour day to feed all those damn critters. And then what about cleaning up after them?
I've seen those news reports of sewage problems on a Carnival Cruise Line and it's not pretty.
Maybe Noah and Mrs. Noah were built of stronger stuff than me, but if God told me to live on a boat for a year with 10,000 smelly, eating and constantly-pooping animals, I'd ask to see what was behind Door #2.
BTW, I know you're dying for a closer look at this monstrosity, so here's a promotional video of this faithfully recreated biblical miracle. (I had no idea they had Tyvek protective sheathing back then. Just another one of the Lord's miracles)
The opening was covered in an article in an Australian newspaper.
ReplyDeleteIt included a quote from Ken who said, when asked why he hadn't built it in his home state of Queensland, that "there weren't enough people likely to want to come and visit it there".
So he built it in Kentucky instead.
He may be batshit crazy, but he certainly isn't stupid.