導讀： 簡介: INTRODUCTIONDinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005)Thera Is some art-you might even say design-in the waysouthern Ohio rolls itself into the hills of northern Kentucky.The hills build gently under yo 簡介:










INTRODUCTION
Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005)
Thera Is some art-you might even say design-in the way
southern Ohio rolls itself into the hills of northern Kentucky.
The hills build gently under you as you leave the
interstate. The roads narrow beneath fl cool and thickening canopy
as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron, a
small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near
Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the
king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little
bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.
At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant,
there was an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle
of it. Happy, smiling people trickled in through the gate on
a fine summer's morning, one minivan at a time. They parked
in whatever shade they could find, which was not much. They
were almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly.
Their cars came from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and
Illinois and from as far away as New Brunswick, in the Cana
dian Maritimes. There were elderly couples in shorts, suburban
families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle Resistant
and Stain Released. All of them wandered off, chattering
and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a
low-slung building that seemed to be the most finished part of
the complex.
Outside, several of them stopped to be interviewed by a
video crew. They had come from Indiana, one woman said, two
impatient toddlers pulling at her arms, because they had been
home schooling their children and they'd given them this adventure
as a field trip. The whole group then bustled into the lobby
of the building, where they were greeted by the long neck of a
huge, herbivorou~ dinosaur. The kids ran past it and around the
corner, where stood another, smaller dinosaur.
Which was wearing a saddle.
It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently,
this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage competitions
and stakes races. Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of
ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail
almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle. This,
obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.
The dinosaurs were the first things you saw when you entered
the Creation Museum, the dream child of an Australian
named Ken Ham, who is the founder of Answers in Genesis, the
worldwide organization for which the museum is meant to be
the headquarters. The people here on this day were on a special
tour. They'd paid $149 to become charter members of th~
museum.
Dinosaurs, Ham said, laughing, as he posed for pictures
with his honored guests, always get the kids interested.
AiG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story
of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which
means, in this interpretation, and among other things, that dinosaurs
co-existed with humans (hence the saddles), that there
were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had
enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the
Ark along with his wife, his sons, and his sons' wives, to say·
nothing of the green ally-gators and the long-necked geese and
the humpty-backed camels and all the rest.
(Faced with the obvious question of how Noah kept his
30o-bY-30-bY-50-cubit Ark from sinking under the weight of
the dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs
on the Ark were young ones, who thus did not weigh as much
as they might have.)
We, announced Ham, are taking the dinosaurs back from
the evolutionists! And everybody cheered.
This was a serious crowd. They gathered in the museum's
auditorium and took copious notes while Ham described the
great victory won not long before in Oklahoma, where city officials
had announced a decision-which they would later reverse,
alas-to put up a display based on Genesis at the city'S zoo so
as to eliminate the discrimination long inflicted upon sensitive
Christians by the statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated
the elephant exhibit. They listened intently as Ham went
on, drawing a straight line from Adam's fall to our godless public
schools, from Charles Darwin to gay marriage. He talked
aboutthe great triumph of running Ganesh out of the elephant
paddock and they all cheered again.
The heart of the museum would take the form of a long
walkway down which patrons would be able to journey through
the entire creation story. The walkway was in only the earliest
stages of construction. On this day, for example, one young artist
was working on a scale model of a planned exhibit depicting
the day on which Adam named all the creatures of the earth.