Ken Ham Slams 'Intolerant' Baptist Pastors in Ark dispute

Jim, saying “Why do we need a Creation Museum? Just look at Creation!” is akin to saying, “Why do we need preachers and teachers? Just read the Bible!”

(Obviously there is a difference—God has given pastors and teachers to the Church, and I’m not suggesting God has given Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum to the Church in the same way. But I think you understand the point of my analogy.)

How long has the Church existed without Sharper Iron? ;)

Of course I’m not saying the Church can’t exist without it, or that people can’t believe in creation ex nihilo without it. But I think it is valuable to the Christian community.

Do you live in that city/county? The answer is no… so why do you care whether the leaders/voters of that area decide to dedicate a portion of their sales tax receipts for economic development? Its “nunya bidness”.

Local governments use TIF all of the time for economic development. You make it sound like some kind of shady unethical deal. The only question is, does the creation museum, independent of its value to you personally, bring large amounts of dollars to the community. I think the answer is yes. So, it makes sense for the people there to use TIF to develop that economic engine.

[Mark_Smith]

Do you live in that city/county? The answer is no… so why do you care whether the leaders/voters of that area decide to dedicate a portion of their sales tax receipts for economic development? Its “nunya bidness”.

Local governments use TIF all of the time for economic development. You make it sound like some kind of shady unethical deal. The only question is, does the creation museum, independent of its value to you personally, bring large amounts of dollars to the community. I think the answer is yes. So, it makes sense for the people there to use TIF to develop that economic engine.

Mark, I agree that the community *can* use TIF to encourage economic development. However, I think suing to get such money or complaining about not getting it just makes Christians look petty.

And while I have visited and definitely support the idea of the Creation Museum, I’m much less enamored of the ark project. All it will prove is that someone can build something the size of the biblical dimensions. Without proving seaworthiness over a year with a load of cargo estimated at the weight of all the supposed kinds that were around at the time, we’re still left to faith to say it happened as the Bible said, which is where we already are without the ark project being built.

It’s worth noting that free money from the government, no matter what it’s called, tends to corrupt business plans. One example that we’ve heard is the debacles that accompanied Obama’s renewable energy efforts—no less than half the grants and loans made for that program were to companies that went bankrupt.

Another is this sequence:

• Build the Metrodome and tear down Met Stadium (1982)
• Build the Mall of America to replace tax base from Met Stadium for Bloomington (1989-1992)
• Watch downtown and inner ring malls collapse because of tax funded competition
• Realize there isn’t enough business to MOA, build Hiawatha Line for MOA and Block E for downtown. Both are money sinks.
• Top floor of MOA becomes playground for gang-bangers who can now come to the mall for $2 (or free if they jump the turnstyles). Most stores leave top floor, controlling gang activity is huge priority at MOA to this day.
• Block E goes over like a lead zeppelin. Mayo has bought it for a song.
• Realize that the Homer-Dome isn’t a good place for anything but monster truck derbies. Build the Target Center, Target Field, the New Crystral Cathedral, and a new stadium for the Gophers.
• Realize that it’s hard to get downtown. Build Green Line from Pig’s Eye Landing (St. Paul) to downtown Minneapolis.

See the pattern? One bad decision begets another, and what should have been a pretty straightforward decision (build a new stadium on the site of Met Stadium, where roads and parking already existed) became an opportunity to throw about five billion bucks down the toilet. TIF and other government subsidies simply weigh down one side of the balance sheet so that bad business plans look good.

Now let’s apply this to the Ark Experience. Let us assume—as the appraisals of the bonds and the application for TIF would suggest—that the project does not work without a serious amount of “involuntary loan forgiveness” and subsidies. So what we are talking about here is the very real likelihood that the Ark Experience will end up like Block E, the Homer-dome, the top floor of the MOA for years, Solyndra, and the like.

So here is the question; the Ark is supposed to be about 150 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 15 meters tall. Would it glorify God to have, say, 50,000 tons of rotting wood sitting on a Kentucky hillside? Is God glorified when we (e.g. Heritage USA) default on millions of dollars of obligations of sub-junk bonds? Let’s dream big, but let’s also work the balance sheets honestly and admit when we don’t have, to use Jesus’ picture from Luke, enough money to complete that tower and maintain it.

The Ark was designed to survive less than a year—what was it, 150 days—on the ocean. Now we would assume that it was pretty much watertight, but what in Scripture tells us that it would have survived long after it landed? So we might, or might not, have something that would last for any period of time on land—which is one of our prerequisites for the establishment of a museum.

To draw a picture, most ocean-going ships stay in duty for 20 to 40 years at most. It’s rough on a boat to actually sail, and that’s with high strength steel and the like. Apart from the Queen Mary and military ships (built extra heavy for obvious reasons), they’re mostly broken up after their time in service and recycled. So it’s not intuitive to me that God’s design for the Ark, even if we had the “blueprints”, would make a decent museum.

Again, dream big, but work the numbers, and listen to the results.

[Mark_Smith]

At my present school and the one I last attended, all recent construction has a name attached to everything. There is a name on every door, every brick. You’d expect each square of toilet paper to have a “brought to you by the Smith family” on it!

Note: I am only slightly exaggerating

On an almost totally unrelated note, I visited a children’s science museum in Casper, WY last week with my kids. In the men’s bathroom they had all sorts of related facts, including the fact that early producers of commercial toilet paper were leery of putting their own name on the paper. As a result, they branded them with the name of the customer, so the swanky NYC hotels all had their own name imprinted on the paper. Just one of the useful tidbits of info to be found at the Science Zone.

If you’re in Casper, it’s a lot of hands-on learning fun for kids and adults alike. http://thesciencezone.org

“In addition to its impressive exterior, the wooden ark will feature three stories of exhibits, a fourth-floor restaurant and several elevators. It may later be joined by other Biblical creations, like a Walled City.

On a dedicated website, Answers In Genesis says that a ‘Tower of Babel, a first-century Middle Eastern village, a walk-through aviary and an expanded large petting zoo’ could also be built.

It adds: ‘We also plan for the Ark Encounter to eventually include daily live mammal and bird shows, an extensive interactive children’s area, live entertainment, and many themed restaurants.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141100/Four-stories-tall-510-feet-long-wood-Christian-ministry-unveils-life-sized-Noah-s-Ark-built-Kentucky-field-open-public-summer.html

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Observation: I’m thinking Noah would have liked to have the colossal red crane that’s in some of the photographs.