News Calm Down, Seattlest
posted by on January 2 at 13:11 PM
While just about anything creationists do is enough to get me hopping mad, I have to say the press release Seattlest just linked to doesn’t quite do the trick.
Contrary to the inflammatory language, I see nothing to indicate Grand Canyon park rangers aren’t allowed to tell visitors the estimated geologic age of the canyon. What’s happening is the the National Park Service overruled an attempt to remove a creationist book, Grand Canyon: A Different View, from the gift shop. Now, I’d rather the book not be in the gift shop, but that’s hardly a gag order.
Now, please enjoy this outrage at the supposedly agnostic Discovery Institute over a Sistine Chapel parody that substitutes the Flying Spaghetti Monster for God. (This is meta-meta-meta hilarious, so, some explanation: The FSM is meant to mock the claims of the intelligent design movement than any higher intelligence—aliens, God, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever—could have been the designer of all creation. The ID movement’s claim is in fact a legal strategy designed to get around the Supreme Court ruling in Aguillard v. Edwards that the teaching of creationism in schools violated the separation between church and state. Nota bene, Discovery Institute: Getting all mewly about the sanctity of the Sistine Chapel is a pretty good indication that you’re defending a Christian perspective.)
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Update: Seattlest takes it back.
Replacing the word “God” with “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or even “Zeus” does show how crazy the whole religion thing is, doesn’t it?
The problem with the creationist book at the Grand Canyon is that it is purporting to serve a scientific explanation of what you're seeing, but it's actually full of shit. Would you be upset if you went to the Holocaust Museum and found a copy of The Protocols in the gift shop? Now, would you be upset if the Protocols was the only book approved for sale this year, while several thousand legitimate books on the subject of Jews were rejected? That's the situation at the Grand Canyon. There are scientific books for sale there, but no new ones have been approved for ages, while this creationist garbage has been. It should be removed.
Oh, of course it should be removed. But that news has been floating around for a while, and a purposefully misleading press release (see Seattlest's interpretation) is not the way to inform people about the situation.
I for one welcome our new anti-science park ranger service, and look forward to historically reenacting their biblical stonings in the near future.
NPS knows better. Here's what they say on their own website. On their own website, NPS.gov, there's a link to a neutral discussion. Go to ... grca/naturescience/naturalfeaturesandecosystems.htm
Jeez, can't a girl blows off a little steam? (Yes, I dug around the NPS site and found the same page that Ronald found.) But if you read PEER more closely, the complaint is two-fold: there's the damn book (that issue dates back to 2003) and then there's the claim that, under previous NPS leadership, Grand Canyon rangers were pressured to tiptoe around the science if asked. I don't know that this is true, but when I hear back from the science and PR offices at the Grand Canyon (they are closed today because of Gerald Goddamned Ford) then I'll write more. Yes, this isn't brand-spanking new stuff: the PEER press release is re-fanning a fire that purportedly folks from the NPS let die down intentionally, and with a new director at the helm (the second one appointed by Bush, I might add) they're hoping to get more traction. Fan away, I say...
I demand that Park Rangers hold daily services on how the lack of pirate fish and pirates is causing the Grand Canyon to get emptier due to global warming.
After all, a thousand strands of spaghetti, as Bush says.
I like how the Discovery Institute guy can't even spell "Sistine" correctly.
Sistein: it's Jewish, right?
RAmen!
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