Fundamentalism's Tombstone?

I'm absolutely reeling from a recent post by Echidne, who discusses this article about the "Museum of Creation" that will open in Kentucky this spring.

It sounds as though it'll be the ne plus ultra of hallucinatory, high-camp Christofascist freak shows, and it will undoubtedly give America's ever-dwindling population of sane people yet another reason to hang their heads in shame:

[C]ontroversial exhibits deal with diseases and famine, which are portrayed not as random disasters, but as the result of mankind's sin. Mr Ham's Answers in Genesis movement blames the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on evolutionist teaching, claiming that the perpetrators believed in Darwin's survival of the fittest.

If this is true, all I can say is that they apparently took a rather dim view of their own fitness to survive, since they shot themselves dead.

This next tidbit is so predictable that it's barely worth mentioning:

Other exhibits in the museum will blame homosexuals for Aids.

I must say, the wheels of God's wrath grind very slowly indeed if it took Him centuries to invent a fatal disease with which to punish homosexuals. But maybe He was exhausted after conjuring up dinosaurs with which to terrorize Adam and Eve:

[V]isitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned.

One always wishes to be tolerant of other people's beliefs. But I have to draw the line at people who think that Adam and Eve were not only real, but were chased from Eden by the Giant Lizards of the Lord. To put it bluntly, it strains my credulity.

This museum is further evidence that for all its sound and fury, conservative American Christianity is in utter psychic disarray, having broken not only with reality itself, but with anything remotely resembling its supposed beliefs. Garish monuments to dogma are exactly what you'd expect from a sickly faith that has replaced agape with triumphalist pomp and circumstance. One can only hope that the Museum of Creation ends up being Christian fundamentalism's tombstone.