{"id":15957,"date":"2016-01-18T18:35:12","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T23:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=15957"},"modified":"2016-01-18T18:35:12","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T23:35:12","slug":"what-would-101-million-buy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/what-would-101-million-buy\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would $101 Million Buy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"ArkThe answer to that question could be very long.<\/strong>\u00a0I’ll bet among all the things you thought of buying with that much, you weren’t even once<\/em> thinking it could buy a 510-foot replica of the mythological Noah’s ark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But that’s what it is buying\u00a0the folks who run the Ark Encounter<\/a> theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. You can see video “encounters” of it being built. Sort of (they wouldn’t work for me, but I’m an evolutionist, so their god probably stopped me from seeing them…)<\/p>\n

The park will open in July and, its creators promise, it will attract 1.4 million people annually. That seems a bit of a long shot, don’t you think? Are there that many people who would pay to see something made up, based on an allegory? But that will attract 16,000 guests a day, says Ken Ham.<\/p>\n

Yes, that<\/em> Ken Ham: the vocal young-earth creationist, president of the fringe group, Answers in Genesis (AiG). The guy behind the wacky\u00a0creationist theme park<\/a>. So now you understand. Yes, they’re at it again.<\/p>\n

Stop laughing.<\/strong> Creationism isn’t just a flighty wingnut conspiracy theory: it’s a serious challenge to our educational system. Well, by “our” I really mean the Americans because Canadians don’t allow that sort of claptrap in public schools. We just look on in wonder at the stupidity. And a bit of horror. But I digress.<\/p>\n

Ham and his wingnut friends have raised a lot<\/em> of money to make a tourist attraction instead of doing something Christian with it. Feeding or housing the poor. Medical care for the homeless. You know, something unselfish and caring for the greater good.<\/p>\n

$101 million is really a LOT of money (jumping up from $50 million in 2012<\/a>\u00a0then to $73M million in 2014<\/a>\u00a0and still climbing). It could do an enormous amount of good in the world.<\/p>\n

Apparently Ham isn’t that<\/em> kind of Christian. He’s the theme park fun-ride, promote your own agenda kinda Christian. But take heart: they’re making a “Ten Plagues” ride<\/a> in the new park so you can have fun while not thinking about the real good $101 million could do in the world.\u00a0Or about how you’re making Ham and his friends rich.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the biggest problem with this wacky entertainment site is that apparently\u00a0American taxpayers are going to shoulder a lot of its cost<\/a>. As Newsweek<\/a> also told us:<\/p>\n

The money used to build Ark Encounter came from donations of almost $30 million, plus $62 million in high-risk, unrated municipal bonds backed by the project\u2019s future revenues. If Ark Encounter never makes significant profits (and bond documents warn that it may not), neither the city nor AiG is on the hook for the bond money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The state of Kentucky isn’t quite as giving as the city. According to a story in The Telegraph<\/a>, Ham’s group got the cold shoulder\u00a0for tax breaks from the state:<\/p>\n

The most recent setback has come from an apparently unlikely source \u2013 the state of Kentucky, one of the most conservative in the country \u2013 after it refused to grant AIG tax incentives because it required staff to sign off on its religious precepts.
\nAIG was counting on the help of an estimated $18 million in tourism tax rebates to build the park, but Kentucky this month turned these down, citing the group\u2019s allegedly discriminatory hiring practices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And why did the state do this? Newsweek<\/a> again explains:<\/p>\n

Because AiG posted Ark Encounter job listings on its website requiring a \u201csalvation testimony\u201d and a creationist statement of faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No separation of church, state and labour laws for these folks. Despite this setback, Ham told an onsite media conference<\/a>,<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll certainly be one of the biggest Christian attractions in the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, I bet. Outshine the Vatican, St. Paul’s cathedral, Notre Dame and Bethlehem combined. But wait, Ken, you probably didn’t notice this, but the Noah fable is from Genesis<\/em>. Not the New Testament. It’s Jewish<\/em>. Not Christian. And if you think it’s okay to eat bacon and shrimp, then you don’t get rights to any Jewish stories.Fables or not.Cherry-picking what you want to obey from the Bible isn’t kosher.<\/p>\n

Ham himself is apparently confused<\/a> about the source:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe make no apology about our Christian message,\u201d Ham said in a post on the organization’s website last week. \u201cWe have never hidden the fact that our purpose is to spread the truth of God\u2019s Word and its life-changing gospel message.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Noah and<\/em> the gospels? Mixed metaphors? Or mixed mythologies? Hmmm. Ham needs to do some ‘splaining as to how that works. (unless the connection is that neither\u00a0Noah nor Jesus were\u00a0allowed to eat bacon…)<\/p>\n

And just to make it even\u00a0wackier than you imagined, Ham’s buddies are putting \u00a0dinosaurs<\/em> on the ark. Yep, that’s right: creatures that died out 65 million years before proto-humans ever banged two rocks together. A modern day Jurassic Park, without all that messy cloning stuff. Newsweek<\/a> reported:<\/p>\n

Imagine the Titanic minus the smokestacks, framed out of timber rather than iron. Imagine that instead of a doomed ocean liner bustling with well-dressed elites, it\u2019s home to 2,000 seasick animals, a handful of teenage dinosaurs and one patriarchal family headed by a 500-year-old man bent on saving the world.*<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some people, eh? Imagine making a gigantic “life-sized” model of Godzilla. Or King Kong.\u00a0Telling people\u00a0these were real creatures who walked the earth. And then showing where they slept while on the boat.<\/p>\n

I know, it’s easy to make fun of Ham and his bag of mixed nuts, but I can’t help it. It’s just too easy to do.<\/p>\n

We all know the ark story was an allegory, not fact. You know, a story told to teach a moral lesson. Like Cinderella or Goldilocks. Well, all<\/em> as in everyone but Ham and his wingnut literalist friends. The rest of us aren’t confused about it. But it could\u00a0influence\u00a0the younger minds of children, and therein lies the menace. Children deserve education, not claptrap.<\/p>\n

Science Guy Bill Nye summed it up in a master stroke of understatement:<\/p>\n

Raising a generation of young people who are confused about the natural history of the Earth is not in our best interest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

~~~~~<\/strong>
\n*<\/span> The Newsweek article also incorrectly states, “Cultures all over the globe share the legend of Noah\u2019s Ark…” which is not correct. Only Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures share that fable because it comes from Genesis. Some<\/em> (by no means all) cultures also have a flood story, but not the ark and Noah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The answer to that question could be very long.\u00a0I’ll bet among all the things you thought of buying with that much, you weren’t even once thinking it could buy a 510-foot replica of the mythological Noah’s ark. But that’s what it is buying\u00a0the folks who run the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. You can see video “encounters” of it being built. Sort of (they wouldn’t work for me, but I’m an evolutionist, so their god probably stopped me from seeing them…) The park will open in July and, its creators promise, it will attract 1.4 million people annually. \u2026…… click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[155,557,446,261],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-balderdash-and-hoaxes","category-christianity","category-creationism-critical-thinking-2","category-critical-thinking-2"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":8526,"today_views":0},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15957"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15960,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15957\/revisions\/15960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}