Fine, but why does he care about the media reports?
Because Ken Ham looks like a charlatan and a Ringling-brother’s shill to the world and to his fellow YEC Christians. I don’t know how Ken Ham thinks, but he is certainly blaming the “atheist” for killing attendance. And we thank him for honestly acknowledging our work on that.
When you say “work on that,” it brings back room antics to mind, honestly. Yet, your letter campaign was legit. Why do bad ideas need to be actively opposed by “work,” instead of being allowed to die of their own accord? Wouldn’t a far more compassionate response be to print and distribute, for free, a fact sheet countering the most outrageous of the museum’s claims? Truthfully, the church should already have done that, somewhere. I’ll have to go looking… “Unraveling the Ark Encounter Debacle” or some such. Publishers, take note. : )
Did find this: a lesson in non-profit legal leveraging.
Take notes, Patrick --you may be able to start your own “Flying Spaghetti Monster Encounter” when you see how it’s done. I get dibs on the meatballs…
I say “work on that” because it was hard work to accomplish. The initial idea came from Ken Ham’s presentation to the Planning Board of Williamstown. He said that hundreds of thousands of school children would come on education trips from school. He was basically pumping up the attendance figures to get approval and linking it to the Stokes Monkey Trial and the removal of prayer in the schools. He got all the Christians riled up. One of our members was at that public meeting and relayed to FFRF “Over my dead body that is going to happen”. We debated how to stop this from happening. A proposal to release a press release on the unconstitutionality of education trips to the Ark. We had experience from Dover and had a lot to draw on. I think it was a staff attorney who proposed legal “warning” letters to principals in Kentucky. Other members extended it to more and more states. I wanted to include NJ and NY but that was just getting prohibitively expensive. We settled on 1500 mile radius from Ark Encounter. It was a lot of work. Individual legal letters to each school districts. Expensive and time consuming but it worked. We heard that Ham went ballistic when he heard about it. He tried to get a school district to bite by offering $1 admission fees, and then free school groups on Saturdays. Nothing worked. The line has held. Was it fear, intimidation of a lawsuit from the group that won Dover - yes it was.
“When Noah’s ark finally rested atop Mount Ararat…”
But the Bible makes no such claim, Patrick. There is no “Mt. Ararat” mentioned in the Bible. I’m very familiar with the Hebrew text of of the Noah pericope and, trust me, there is no “Mt. Ararat” mentioned there.
Moreover, Ken Ham gets lots of Bible facts wrong on a frequent basis but I’ve never heard him claim that there is a “Mt. Ararat” in the Bible. (Perhaps he has. I simply don’t know that he has.)
Of course, the Bible makes no statements which would support a claim that Noah’s ark landed in Turkey, let alone anywhere near the mountain which became known as “Mt. Ararat” just a few centuries ago.
Just to play along with the silly hop-to-Australia hypothesis, if kangaroos made steady progress with each generation, the number of kangaroos born-lived-and-died along the way would surely not be a large enough number to make fossilization of any of their bones likely. You realize that the chances of any given individual mammal fossilizing is quite low, right?
Bottom line: That .jpeg meme is just about as lame as some of Ham’s claims. The author of it has a poor grasp of the topic. (Do you know who first created and published it?)
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Agree, the slide is lame. FFRF tried to place billboards like this along the highway to Ark Encounter but billboard owner CBS refused it as “divisive”. Federal Lawsuit under way. Stay tuned, it should be an interesting free speech question.
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The churches nearby were strong driver in it as well as national Christian organizations. It was seen as a way to put God back into public view and children’s education as attempts to get back into the public school system had failed miserably (Dover).
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Interesting for sure! After all, while the government is restricted in the Constitution in how it can limit speech, individuals and companies routinely limit speech. (Example: a newspaper editor can decide to ignore and not publish a Letter-to-the-Editor if he/she doesn’t find the letter worthwhile.)
I assume that a federal court case would explore whether the billboard company is engaging in religious discrimination by refusing to accept advertising that expresses a controversial areligious position (in criticizing a particular religious position like Ham’s/AIG.)
As far as “divisive” messages on a billboard, one could certainly argue that the Ark Encounter promotes a “divisive” message(s). Someone could (and many certainly do) argue that the “evangelism wing” of the Ark Encounter----where visitors are told that they are headed to hell if they don’t accept the Gospel message—is divisive and even “outrageously dismissive” of other religions. Seeing how that involves billions of people, is an Ark Encounter advertisement on a billboard ultimately “divisive”?
As an evangelical Christian, I prefer that atheists be allowed to advertise their messages. After all, if someone can suppress the advertising messages of an atheist organization, can’t someone also suppress the advertising messages of an evangelical Christian organization? I favor protecting minorities because over time, the balance of power in terms of who is in the majority and has power can change greatly.
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That is why this case will be interesting. CBS is a news organization. It fights Government censorship all the time. Now we have a news organization (CBS) doing the deciding of what is “divisive” or not. Note that the billboards are not on public land. They are far enough from the highway on private land. It is going to be an interesting (and expensive) fight that will go all the way to the Supreme Court.
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I think that anti-Ark signs on the way to Ark Encounter in rural Kentucky are not a good strategy as the people going to the Ark (the family in the family station wagon) are not going to turn around because they see an anti-Ark billboard from FFRF. Anti-Ark digital billboards in Times Square are a much better (through more expensive) tactic. And not controversial as CBS and other sign owners gladly take the money for a 30 second spot in Times Square NYC.
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