It was a rather depressing trip to the Creation Ministries of the Ozarks yesterday. It’s a cheesy little place which slavishly follows the dogma of Answers in Genesis — the first people I talked to there parroted the Ham Party Line. It was all presuppositionalism, worldviews, “we’re just interpreting the same facts that you do, only through a biblical lens,” all that relativistic bullshit that they use as an excuse to avoid facing the fact that they deny almost all the evidence. I did get the one guy to admit that their method is to accept the Bible as truth and then glean through the scientific evidence to find the bits that fit their predispositions, but even that minor triumph was hollow: he thought it was a virtue of creationism!

They generally seemed like very nice people, who were pleased to have this crowd packing their little place. They offered us cookies and juice. I think we made their month.

I was dismayed at one bit of conversation with Dr Rod Butterworth, head of the place. He was trying to explain how the bloody god of the Old Testament really wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.

“You don’t understand: all those people he had to kill, were horrible people. They deserved to be killed!”

To which I replied, “But that’s exactly the excuse Hitler used to murder the Jews!”

“No…” He seemed slightly nonplussed.

One of Mattir’s spawn was there, and she explained to him that it was true, that Jews were accused of blood libel, and the Nazis claimed they used Jesus’ blood in evil rituals.

“Oh, well, there probably were Jews who did that, who hated Christianity, and those Jews would have deserved it.”

You could have knocked me flat with a feather.

I pointed out that his god, according to his myth, exterminated the entire population of the planet, except for 8 people. Was he really arguing that all of those people, even the babies, were all so wretchedly evil that they deserved death?

He replied that yes, they did, because they refused to worship god, and god as their creator had every right to do with them as he will.

I chose not to mention that his “museum” was full of people who refuse to worship his tyrannical god, and considered those acts immoral, no matter whether they were done by a creator.

Maybe they weren’t such nice people after all. I didn’t want to give him an excuse to commit justifiable homicide.