Now comes this Indian fellow, Krish Ashok, paying a visit. Coming from a heritage which includes the most baroque religious traditions in the world, he seems to be a little tougher to freak out.
Most people in the queue did not strike me as fundamentalist nutjobs out to destroy the Western intellectual tradition. They struck me as tourists who thought it might be a decent idea to take their kids to a museum that advertised dinosaurs. Now, lifetime members are a different species altogether. They pay $495 and are people who seriously believe that (barring the engineering that built the museum itself) science is generally bad and that (a specific English version of ) the Bible is literally true. But then I have met VHP-RSS type uncles in Chennai who believe that India had the Pushpaka Vimaana thousands of years before the Wright brothers. And people drop jewellery into the Hundi at Tirupati, so to each his own I guess.
Doubtless because of this ancient hodge-podge of a heritage, which isn't so hung up on establishing underlying unities as the Abrahamic faiths are, he is gallantly forbearing of the museum's patrons:
So hahaha, LOL and all that at all these creationist duffers etc. But then, the only difference between a 21 million dollar Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY and people who consult astrologers is budget. It’s easier to laugh at dinosaurs eating pineapples than it is to smirk at someone breaking coconuts for Lord Ganesha. One’s own way of life is always superior no? “Our” philosophy was more advanced than this sort of simplistic nonsense no?
It was interesting that I did not find the sort of people Richard Dawkins always seems to find when he goes about pwning creationists. I just found regular folk who didn’t particularly care much about the complexities of the origin of life, the universe and everything else, not even two score and two times. To them one explanation is as good as the other and while we can bemoan this collective failure of rational thinking, there isn’t much one can do except build a better real science museum right next to this one. Even then, I’ll still visit this place to feed the alpacas.
Very sporting. It's more than I can manage, whenever I visit Answers In Genesis online. Teh stoopid, it burnnnsss...
