I had this link sent in to me by Jennifer, Fe reader and commenter. A big thanks goes out to her, because that article was a fucking riot. A veritable goldmine of lines and quotes; so much so that I almost don't even know where to begin. Other than, say, the beginning.

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

That has got to be the coolest name ever. Okay; on with mocking the X-tians.

Mr. Hovind, a former public school science teacher with his own ministry, Creation Science Evangelism...

Creation... Science. I don't even have to say anything to point out how funny that oxymoron is.

Among the products the park gift shop peddles are T-shirts with a small fish labeled "Darwin" getting gobbled by a bigger fish labeled "Truth."

First off, bonus for the the belittling use of "peddles." This reminds me of a bumper sticker that I see every now and then. As we all know, I hate bumper stickers, especially ones that have someone spouting their religious affiliation or their stupid personal opinions. The one I'm talking about, though, is always a treat. You may have seen it. It's the picture on this t-shirt, in fact. In addition to the picture there's a caption that reads "Survival of the fittest." Every time I see this sticker, I break out into a big ol' smile and yell "Thanks for reiterating one of our main points, fuckers!!!!"

"There are a lot of creationists that are really smart and debate the intellectuals, but the kids are bored after five minutes," said Mr. Hovind, who looks boyish at 51 and talks fast. "You're missing 98 percent of the population if you only go the intellectual route."

It's like the guy is trying to write my jokes for me.

Creationist groups are also promoting creationist vacations...

Holy shit what a good idea. "Hey honey, it's time for us to take a vacation." "Great, where to? Hawaii? Europe? A cruise?" "Oh, heck no. Nothing that dull and uninteresting." "What?! What do you have in mind?" "A creationist vacation! Isn't that swell?"

Ken Ham, the group's chief executive, said marketing surveys suggested that the complex would draw not just home-schooling families...

A core audience of this nonsense is home-schooling families. There's a shocker.

The complex will open in 2006 at the earliest, Mr. Ham said.

I want to go. Dead fucking serious. Who's in?

"This is clearly not possible. The top of the Grand Canyon is 4,000 feet higher than where the river enters the canyon! Rivers do not flow up hill!"

That's riiight...

The spiritual lesson, according to Mr. Johnson: "You need to learn to be coordinated for Jesus Christ so you can get more things done for him."

Yeah, Jesus is fucking PISSED that you aren't pulling your weight around here. He's turning fucking water into wine and healing the sick while you're sitting there on your knees looking like you're waiting for someone to put a dick in your mouth.

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which tracks creationist programs, said traditional creationists like Mr. Hovind had in fact given up on building intellectual credibility years ago.

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Just last week Internal Revenue Service agents used a search warrant to remove financial documents from Mr. Hovind's home and offices, saying he was not paying taxes and had neither a business license nor tax-exempt status for his enterprises.

A story like this just wouldn't be complete without some good ol' fashioned corruption...

Mr. Hovind said he gave 700 lectures a year and that 38,000 people had visited his park, at $7 a head.

... Or some exploitation of religion for profit.

According to a map that invites visitors to pinpoint their hometown, most come from the Florida Panhandle and from Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Raise your hand if this surprises you. Hmmm... I see no hands.

But they and the Passmores, who traveled from Alabama with eight minivans of like-minded families...

I always thought there were only four horsemen.

Okay, on a more serious note, this article brings to light all sorts of reasons why religion scares me. Now, I'll preface this by saying that I do fully realize that there are a lot of people out there who don't take the Bible seriously literally. Those people have at least that much going for them. However, there are plenty of people who take the Bible at near or total face value, buying into all those goofy ghost and animal stories. It all reminds me of other mythologies, which were all clearly borne out of a need and a desire to explain the unexplainable. We don't know why volcanoes erupt, so there must be some big angry being up in the sky. We don't know why we have lightning so it must be a god up above hurling it down upon humanity. We can't explain why this canyon is here, so we'll just say it was a great Biblical flood. Oh, except that we can explain it; you know, that whole "water runs up hill" thing. It's all so stupid and childish. We don't need a lot of things explained anymore because we have science - real science - to give us some answers.

That brings me to a second point. The mindless acceptance of shit that flies in the face of things that even some of the more rational and logical religious folk believe. Now, look. I'm not saying that science is flawless, because it isn't. I'm not saying that science hasn't been manipulated, because it has. I'm not saying that scientific findings haven't been abused, because they have. But science is at least a process, one that (in theory) involves research and thought as opposed to just listening to something someone told you that came out of a book whose origins we have no real clue about.

Thoreau once said something along the lines of "It's okay to build your castles in the air; now put foundations under them." Religion is all about those castles in the air, but unlike science and rational thought, there is no desire to build those foundations.