Didya hear the one about the Dominionists’ shiney new creation museum in Kentucky? Turns out it’s both the joke and the punchline. But hey, if you’ve got $29 million to ‘contribute’ promoting your cherry-picked “intel” (if you can call this “intel”) it’s mere pennies compared to how much other conservatives have spent cherry-picking their intel for all sorts of fun stuff like wars and global warming. Johnathan Gitlin Ars Technica relates a few good jokes:

There were posters explaining just how coal could be formed in a few weeks as opposed to over millions of years, and how rapidly the biblical flood would cover the earth, drowning all but a handful of living creatures.

The curators apparently forgot that there isn’t quite enough water at the poles to melt into covering the whole planet. However. maybe they’re on to something since even a few extra feet of ocean will make a huge difference worldwide. At least the Creationists found a magic way to continue making coal for burning in coal-powered electric plants. Maybe they want to see if all that few-week-old coal will generate enough pollution to bring about a second Flood.

And beware all you parents who have the audacity to bear children with birth defects. It apparently really is all your fault according to these kooks (you sinful heathens). Mr. Gitlin again explains:

There was also an explanation as to why, with only one progenitor family, it wasn’t considered incest for Adam and Eve’s children to marry each other. Apparently there was less sin back then, and therefore fewer mutations in their DNA. Evidently sin, and not two copies of the same recessive trait, gives rise to congenital birth defects.

Now in order to prop up so many … interesting theories … the creationist curators of course need some allies out there infopimping to their hearts’ content. Enter the Schlafly family. Mom Phyllis is still the head of the anti-woman, anti-family, anti-just about everything “Eagle Forum”.

Her tweedle sons Roger and Andy were infamous for spreading perhaps the most bizarre spin known to the early Internets. Andy Schlafly is apparently still at it. This time, he finds that the truth just isn’t true enough so a newer, truer, super-truthy wiki was in order. A.S. was just the man for the job and thus from out his A.S.S. he birthed “Conservapedia” (giving rational conservatives everywhere a black eye).

The Boston Globe’s Andy Beam recently relayed an inciteful passage from the “Laughopedia” entry on kangaroos of all creatures:

Fed up with Wikipedia’s purported liberal bias, Conservapedia’s founder, Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, has created “an encyclopedia you can trust.”

And you can trust them, to give you some pretty loopy definitions. Their entry on kangaroos, for instance, says that, “like all modern animals . . . kangaroos are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah’s Ark prior to the Great Flood.”

You may not recognize the word “baramin.” It’s a 20th-century creationist neologism that refers to the species God placed on earth during Creation Week. Special for kids: I wouldn’t use that word on the biology final. Although maybe your parents could sue the local school board for failing to teach the Book of Genesis in science class.

More on Conserva-kangaroos: “After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.”

Who knew?

Who knew, indeed? I wonder why kangaroos no longer raft around the world on their mats of torn up vegetation.

Phyllis’ con compatriot Fran Eaton over at Illinois Review was previously very defensive of the so-called “Conservapedia” going so far as to significantly edit delete several comments from folks who found “Gigglepedia” to be so much hokum. Too bad for her bad case of myopic catatonia she can’t delete posts made on other blogs.

(And who is the goof ‘Jon Swift‘ who thinks Wikipedia is guided by wiccan beliefs??? Does he think fires are started by fireflies?)

But this struggle between Dominionist literalism and reality isn’t new. It’s been going on for centuries and one of the most famous flare-ups centered around this Italian guy named Galileo. As Blogs for Sam Brownback tells us everybody knows the earth can’t possibly be moving in space which is exactly why Galileo recanted his scientific research in the midst of being arrested and put through an inquisition (that arrest and inquisition had nothing to do with it, clearly).

Henry Mulder of Science and You explains why Galileo was persecuted during a church inquisition into his findings, and simultaneously ends up explaining why the conservative base preens with such a know-it-all attitude as they do:

Underlying the tenacity with which the Church of Galileo’s day clung to what to us were the utterly indefensible theories blamed on poor old Aristotle was a rather curious notion. It was this. The correct way to understand how the world functioned was to probe divine revelation. There really was only one truth and that was God’s truth. If you should have any idea that did not square with God’s truth then it obviously came from that other fellow, the Devil.

In such a climate, any theory you might dream up even if it was supported by actual observation had to be wrong if in some way it violated divine law. End of story! Galileo should have known better. He knew the rules but as I said before, he tended to march to his own drummer. … (emphasis added)

Yes, believe that which the man-made creation museum and conservapedia concoct for you because their interpretation of God’s Word is clearly (Clearly, I say!) far superior to that science crap.

And if you do not believe every word of what they think up, well then you’ve got the Devil in you and the green barf is liable to start flowing any moment. (And don’t say they didn’t warn you.)

Of course, the great thing about America is that you are free to ignore all the facts you don’t like and are free to believe any ol’ silliness you’d like to believe.

The problem is when you start trying to impose your literal view of 2000 and 3000 year old texts on the rest of us. (…At least the fundamentalists have finally given up on slavery, after a great many years of relying on the Good Word to promote and defend the peculiar institution. Just see 1 Timothy 6:1, Titus 2:9, Colossians 3:22 [among others], and of course Leviticus 25:44 in which God instructs Moses and the Israelites that they may take slaves from among those living in neighboring nations. Watch out Mexicans … a literal interpretation of Leviticus tells us it doesn’t matter how religious you are, you’re still our neighbors, and thus ripe for the picking.)

As silly as this all is for the rest of us Americans over here in reality, it doesn’t matter what party you prefer (Repub, Dem, Lib, Green, other, indy…) we actually laugh these folks off at our peril.

They have $29 million to blow on a circus promoting their literal view of something many of the rest of us recognize as allegory. They go to incredible lengths to ignore Truth because to them it smells like demon sulfur (’wikipedia is run by wiccan beliefs’) and instead they infopimp their own baramin myth-making as their version of “fact”. Heck, 30% of the Republican presidential candidates don’t believe in evolution even though scientists have literally seen it happening right before their very eyes. (And these people want us to put them in charge of the largest nuclear weapons arsenal on God’s green earth?!?!)

These people we giggle over are the people that elected Bush 43 and to whom practically the entire Republican cadre of candidates are now kowtowing. Is it any wonder that the more it allows this “base” to wield power, the more the GOP sends itself on its way to becoming a hollow shell of its once grand self?

But hey, the Republicans are now famous for cherry-picking other intelligence too, right? So why not ignore other such inconvenient truths when you can just make up your own?

With apologies to Beck, in a nation of chimps (as conservative extremists are so fond of calling the rest of us), these kooks would be the monkeys. As RichCares said over at Illinois Review’s post about “Conmanpedia”, “Why do some want to make stupid a synonym for conservative?” (emphasis added)

Good question.

(h/t DevilsTower and D)