Via Russia & India Report:

A group of Creationists staged a publicity stunt in Moscow’s Darwin Museum, unfurling a Christian banner, distributing leaflets, and singing hymns. This is the latest in a string of attention-seeking performances by self-proclaimed ‘Orthodox activists’. At 3 pm on Saturday, a group of young people hoisted a banner over the building of the museum that read “God created the world”. A few minutes later, protesters released several hundred leaflets from the balcony in the main hall onto an unsuspecting audience of mostly children, as several sang traditional Orthodox hymns. “Let’s protect our children from lies! The Universe was created by God 7522 years ago. The ‘Theory of Evolution’ is a pseudo-scientific myth, an inadequate and unproven theory that has been used to justify the murder of millions,” read one of the flyers. Within minutes, the participants of what was advertised online beforehand as a “missionary flashmob” began to gather the dropped leaflets, and escaped to the nearest underground station where they burnt them. Within hours, the organizers, who call themselves God’s Will, posted a video of the stunt, titled “Checkmate, atheists!”

The response of the Russian Orthodox Church was telling…

Russian Orthodox Church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin refused to condemn the stunt, saying simply that “it was a little more aggressive than it needed to be” in a TV interview on local Dozhd channel. In contrast, renowned biologist Aleksandr Markov, who witnessed the event first-hand, was scathing. “They are pathetic. I think they were aiming to produce a symmetrical response to Pussy Riot, but with one difference – they are not likely to face any serious punishment from the state,” Markov wrote in his blog. ….The ideologue of the museum stunt, Dmitriy Enteo, became famous on the back of several stunts directed at Pussy Riot and their supporters, and has admitted that he consciously uses the same art performance aesthetic, but for opposite aims. Over the past year, Enteo’s Orthodox Patrol or Inquisition, as he variously calls his band of active supporters, numbering several dozen, has accosted people on the streets wearing what they deemed to be inappropriate t-shirts, broke into an abortion clinic, interrupted a theater play sympathetic to Pussy Riot, and blockaded an art exhibition.

Like so many of such people, Enteo seems to have been on some sort of spiritual journey:

24 year-old Dmitriy Enteo’s (real name Tsorionov) path to salvation has not been straightforward. The son of a university professor, he was previously a Hindu, a Buddhist, and a devotee of trance music. The pseudonym Enteo was derived from entheogen, a member of a group of psychodelic plants, such as peyote, used by shamans.

But holy fools have their uses: