Way back in June, John Scalzi posts about how the creation museum opened up down the street from from him, and how he refuses to visit. This of course, incited one particular reader of his blog who said that
"Scalzi should not be allowed to get off so easily. The Whatever Community needs to rise up and DEMAND he pay a visit to this important cultural center ASAP. In fact, we need to give him an irresistible reason to go. Here's my idea: not only will I pay the price of the Scalzi family tickets to the Creation museum, I will donate an amount matching the price of those tickets to the charity of John's choice... but only AFTER he files a comprehensive report about his visit on the Whatever.
Are there any other Whatever readers willing to make a modest donation to a Scalzish charity to compel a Creation Museum visit? C'mon, let's pass the digital hat. Who's in????!?!?!"
which followed in a counter by Scalzi, who put his going price by raising $250 by the end of the week to force a visit.
I will go to the Creation Museum and file a full, detailed and delightfully snarklicious report of the trip IF AND ONLY IF I receive at least $250 in donations via PayPal by 11:59pm NEXT FRIDAY, June 15, 2007. ALL the proceeds (minus PayPal's processing bite) will then be donated to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an organization which for sixty years has striven to keep the chunky peanut butter of religion out of the dusky chocolate of good government.
Not only did the donations hit the $250 mark, it raised 256 times that amount, $5,118.36 to be exact. True to his word,
Scalzi then wrote a full report of his tour, complete with commentary and photographs , including gems like this one about dinosaurs being in the museum:
Are dinosaurs 65 million years old? As if -" the Earth is just six thousand years old, pal! Dinosaurs were in the garden of Eden -" and vegetarians, at least until the fall, so thanks there, Adam. They were still around as late as the mid-third millenium BC; they were hanging with the Sumerians and the Egyptians (or, well, could have). All those fossils? Laid down by the Noah-s Flood, my friends. Which is not to say there weren-t dinosaurs on the Ark. No, the Bible says all kinds of land animals were on the boat, and dinosaurs are a subset of "all kinds." They were there, scaring the crap out of the mammals, probably. Why did they die off after the flood? Well, who can say. Once the flood-s done, the Creation Museum doesn-t seem to care too much about what comes next; we-re in historical times then, you see, and that-s all Exodus through Deuteronomy, ie., someone else-s problem.
But seriously, the ability to just come out and put on a placard that the Jurassic era is temporally contiguous with the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt -" well, there-s a word for that, and that word is chutzpah. Because, look, that-s something you really have to sell if you want anyone to buy it. It-s one thing to say to people that God directly created the dinosaurs and that they lived in the Garden of Eden. It-s another thing to suggest they lived long enough to harass the Minoans, and do it with a straight face.
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