Ark Encounter Sold Fewer Tickets This September Than Last September

[Dan_Eastwood]

@swamidass

Part of the puzzle of this article is the odd fixation of atheists on the Ark. I’m not saying this isn’t interesting. Someone really cares though, enough to carefully catalogue all these details. RTB and BioLogos are not doing this. Why do atheists care so much? Perhaps they see things more through the “follow the money” lens?

Indeed, there is a lot of money in in some ministries, and some religions. To most atheists it’s ministries like AiG that are miseducating people and scamming them for the money. When AiG gets tax breaks to build the Ark park, that’s coming at the expense of public tax dollars. Yes, I know this has all been done with careful maneuvering to make sure it is legal, but that doesn’t make it right.

RTB and BioLogos are not doing this, but maybe they should be.

@PdotdQ

The Church is not a business whose goal is to maximize the number of customers.

But isn’t the Catholic church also very wealthy? I don’t have great sources on this.

@Patrick

It is the pseudoscience aspects of this that get atheists in a rage. Ken Ham says that a global genocide happened 4350 years ago. All geological, anthropological, genomic data says it didn’t happen. Ken Ham keeps wanting to bring children there. Atheists oppose this in any way that we can. I am really surprised that there isn’t a Christian backlash to Ark Encounter. It reflects on Christianity terribly. It is divisive and gives the view that Christians are morons.

Pseudoscience, and the political manipulations to allow Creationism to be taught in the public school science curriculum. There is a lot of money behind that effort. So far, the only major successes are Louisiana and Tennessee, but they are still trying.

@Mung

Or profits prophets.

Fixed!

@AllenWitmerMiller

We are not many years away from the first generation of “I was an Ark Encounter kid” stories being published by young adults who were raised in those environments—and reporting that their trek out of the fundamentalist Young Earth Creationist culture began the day that they visited the Ark Encounter.

I’ve been seeing this for years already …

Accordingly, I think Ken Ham is sowing the seeds of a lot of future disenchanted adults and even many atheists.

… and I suspect it been going on longer than that, fueling the rise of militant atheism.

I have long said that I believe Ken Ham is producing more atheists than Richard Dawkins ever will. I hope I’m wrong but I suspect that this is a reality.

Correct again (I says this too). I wish you were wrong, because we already have enough angry atheists.

@AllenWitmerMiller, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression: I agree that what people like Ham do is a travesty. In the atheism groups I see the people who are essentially refugees from religion, fleeing abuse from their friends, families, and community for the crime of seeing science as it is. It should not be this way. I’m not cheering for Ham to create new atheists because 1) I think it’s a bad way to come to that decision, and 2) I can’t condone the abuse that happens just because it creates new followers for the cause (whatever that is).

My own biggest criticism of many atheists is they do nothing but complain about religion. That’s not helpful, and even actively unhelpful. If I want to make things better, I need to be able to talk to people, and encourage the more reasonable voices like yours and many others. That, in a nutshell, is why I am here at PS.

I seem to have ranted.