I bring no threats of any sort. No eternal torment from me or any of my atheist friends. I certainly will continue to tell my online friends that you guys are a really cool bunch of blasphemers, heretics, and infidels. And that every one would feel welcomed here. Some of us are planning a trip to Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum. Want to join us?
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That would be a total blast, to go with “your crowd,” as long as we all agreed to be “peaceful humanists.” : )
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I would very much love to go, whether with you and your friends or on my own. (So thanks for the gracious invitation.)
Yet, I just can’t bring myself to contribute money (via my payment for the admission ticket) for something which I consider so extremely destructive to both my homeland and to the progress of the Great Commission. (I suppose if the admission cost was just a few bucks, I might rationalize my minimal contribution, but isn’t one adult admission around $48 plus $10 parking?)
If Ken Ham declared a “free admission day” for his evangelical critics and other “skeptics”, I’d have a clear conscience. Meanwhile, my turning down the opportunity on the aforementioned grounds is just my own personal decision and I have no problems with other people reaching different conclusions about financially “participating” in the Ark Encounter by buying a ticket.
It is probably just as well that I won’t ever tour the Ark Encounter. It would be bad for my blood pressure and I might even be tempted to be less than totally gracious. I still have lots of YEC friends (since my experiences long ago as a “creation science” advocate) and those friends are such good people and effective Christ-followers. But for that very reason I tend to get very frustrated and even angry at how leaders like Ken Ham are exploiting them. (Being uninformed about science and Hebrew exegesis doesn’t make my favorite YEC friends anything but the fine people they are. It just makes them vulnerable to manipulation at times.)
At the very least, I think I would leave the Ark Encounter very saddened by what I saw. At my age I don’t need that kind of discouragement. But thanks for your offer, Patrick!
Sounds like a lot of fun. I’m honestly disappointed I can’t. Wife, kiddo, demanding job, and so forth…
Can you post about this when you go? With pictures?
You should go @AllenWitmerMiller. They can’t survive on just one-time visitors, and need repeat visitors. As long as it doesn’t become a regular family vacation, you are not sustaining them.
Yeah, but in this case you get to hang out with @Patrick and his crew! How often do you get a chance to hang out with friendly, fundo-militant atheists? I’m feeling left out…
I will agree with you there. I think Patrick and I would have some great discussions and touring the Ark Encounter with those of a very different philosophical background would be an absolute hoot.
Not often! I have to think back far too many years, such as when I used to occasionally have lunch in the faculty lounge of the Physics Dept. when I was a very lowly lecturer. (No chance of advancement for me. And admittedly, not all of those atheist physicists were all that friendly. But some were.) However, probably my favorite discussions in those regards were with Doug Hofstadter. I’ve never encountered a mind like his, before or since. Truly a “renaissance man” in terms of breadth of knowledge and talents. He was shocked that I was also a Biblical scholar and I was shocked at how little exposure such a polymath had had to the Biblical text.
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So just go, and tell us about it here! I’ll really look forward to hearing about it =).
That is the joy of being retired, right? You can do stuff like this on a whim.
My crowd is really cool. One guy from the Church of the Giant Spaghetti Monster wears a spaghetti strainer on his head. The same one that the State of New Jersey said he couldn’t take his driver’s license picture with. FFRF sued the NJ DMV and won under Religious Freedom. The law was then changed to disallow all head covering at all including Hijabs. And you can’t smile in your NJ driver’s license photo as it messes with the photo ID software in the video recognition systems.
Most of the atheist from FFRF wear T-shirts that say “Unabashed Atheist - unafraid of burning in Hell” and of course our friends at the Satanic Temple want to give out the adorable Satanic Temple coloring book and crayon to children. Ken hates us but is required to give us the group rate when we purchase tickets in advance. Lately he has been friendlier towards us, taking pictures with us and even touting how he 'bringing Christ to the non-believers" although he still refuses to admit that atheist really exist. It really is a fun group if you like talking to Constitutional Lawyers.
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