I hate to say this, but building a Noah's Ark-Themed Amusement Park in Kentucky to re-invigorate the economy really isn't really that bad an idea.
The Ark Encounter, a proposed theme-park brought to you by the same folks who brought you the Creation Museum has received encouragement from Kentucky Governor Steven Bashear, who proposes giving tax breaks to any investors, on the grounds it will stimulate the state's economy.

I think it's a good idea for two reasons:
1) Americans have always had a knack for creating good artificial paradises--from the frosted spires of Disney World to the post-modern Sodom that is Las Vegas. Foreigners flock to those places like pilgrims to Lourdes.
2) The Biblical Creation Story is really no less hairy an article of faith than the much more (ahem)"liberal-friendly" melding of particle physics with New Age models of consciousness--the kind espoused in a movie such as this one.

My lifelong intellectual battle with people who think Adam and Eve rode to church on the backs of dinosaurs ended with an argument that came from a carpenter, (No, not that one. An actual carpenter.) We were smoking cigarettes in front of the courthouse debating the nature of the universe and things immaterial as ex-stoners are wont to do. I spat something along the lines of "Why don't you hillbillies just look at the freaking trilobites in the fossil record?" He snorted and shot back, "Land-o-Goshen!" (O.K. he didn't actually say that, but once you start paraphrasing some people, it's hard to stop)"I often figured God just changes up the rules of the universe every thousand years or so just to f*ck with our heads."

In terms of paradigm shifts, it was kind of a stunner. I had never had it put to me like that. I actually like the idea of a deity who meets our advancing pursuit of knowledge by making the cosmos that much more complex and unfathomable. Providing he doesn't send us to Hell for buying into it--as envisioned excellently by the late Bill Hicks in this funny bit

However, as Heraclitus said (a mere 5,000 years after Adam and Eve left the Garden), "God is a child at play with little colored balls." It's personally kind of fun to imagine a host of seraphim and archangels painting those gamma bubbles just as the Fermi Telescope trained its lenses at the center of the Milky Way a couple of months back.

I had, of course, grown up in Appalachia a stone's cast from the Scopes Monkey Trial--where you actually had arguments on the playground and at church suppers about whether the universe was 12,000 years old or not, and sometimes I even had to read about those archaelogical uncoveries! where fundamentalist paleontologists find the remnants of Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark, or the Tower of Babel at undisclosed locations near the Red Sea. The funny thing about that brand of Christian "Edu-tainment" (around which an industry has spawned) is that particular brand of Bob Jones science always seems glossed with this patina of Hollywood productions,particularly Stephen Spielberg. It's as though they want to convince us that while all those tweedy Harvard types are translating Greek in the library, the "real" scientists (with advanced degrees from Bob Jones University) are actually decked in pith helmets and bomber jackets looking for the literal Ark of the Covenant, coz that's what Indiana Jones was doing and imaginary archaelogy is a helluva lot more interesting than the real type.

You know, this may sound pretty snarky, but I'm somehow pondering whether many of the companies which produce that sort of dross, also shoot high quality pornography. After all, the production values are very similar (You know, leather thong straps and bad CGI), and there are only so many plastic totem poles and terrible special effects out in California for people not to have to share.

But, anyways, like many rural teenagers hammered with opaque religious arguments and shoddy, low-brow pseudo-science, I found solace in magazines like Discovery and Scientific American. I was drawn to the fractal-heavy covers and the spiky terminology which inspired eyeball kicks whether or not I could even get my head around them. Wormholes! Nth Dimension! Pocket galaxies! Buckminster Fullerene! Some mathematicians, like Rudy Rucker and Neal Stephenson, even wrote really amazing science fiction to accompany their ideas. I was also heavy into Pink Floyd at the time, which somehow seems relevant.

If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the early 1990's and made the decision to refute God, (He, after all, gave you terrible acne) there were four false idols to worship. For pagans, there was Jim Morrison (the Oliver Stone movie painted him as the resurrected Bachhus), for existentialists: Kurt Cobain (suicide's often the only answer when Hell is other people), for Satanists, there was Slayer (or Marilyn Manson if you were dealing with homosexual urges). Then there was Pink Floyd, whose music was a pastiche of astronomy, alchemy, and childhood trauma endlessly appealing those of us who spent many Saturday nights in smoky basements reading neon hieroglyphics in the threads of our Levi's and glimpsing spiral galaxies in our navels. Their aesthetic embodied all the weird mysticism of physics and astronomy, and it's no surprise that museum observatories frequently host laser light shows devoted to Floyd's music. Astronomers dig Floyd. Their seemingly endless resources and weirdness gave rise to arcane legends--(one I was reminded of recently was that the LED light on the Pulse album was engineered to blink for exactly 100 years).

However, adolescence comes and goes, the chip one has on his shoulder against others' beliefs falls, as does the notion that one might be important in the cosmic scheme of things, and Pink Floyd's music seems ridiculously narcissistic when I listen to it now. I prefer the Statler Brothers nowadays because they're weird, narcissistic, AND spiritual. I bet the kind of people who would buy tickets to feed tamed camels in a plaster ark probably dig on the Statlers, too.

To be honest string theory seems kind of loopy,too. He really must be messing with our heads.

Anyways, here's to Disney World, Las Vegas, and the Ark Museum. Peacable, plastic Edens where well-fed humans dwell side-by-side with trained animals. Here's to the efforts of theorists, from both M.I.T and B.J.U., for making the world something more precious than a market, a zoo, and a battleground. And here's to our Creator, for breathing wonder into every facet of our ever-broadening cosmos--stranger not only than we suppose, but than we can suppose..