Excellent New Yorker journalist George Packer writes an insightful post about his visit to the new Creation Museum in Kentucky:

The simulation serves a primitive ideology known as “young-earth creationism,” which promote the idea that the earth is just over six thousand years old and that the fossil record appeared after the Flood, around 4300 B.C. The first rooms ease you into this mental scenery with a soft sell: the Grand Canyon is discussed in pseudo-scientific terms as possible evidence of the Flood. But as you get into the farther chambers of the museum—which, like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, forces you along a single channel, so that one overwhelming narrative is imposed on every visitor—the message is didactic and clear: Voltaire was “an infidel philosopher.” The Scopes trial was the beginning of the end. “Scripture abandoned in the culture” has led to porn addiction, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, divorce, religious relativism, child neglect, and genocide. “Human reason” has replaced “God’s Word,” with horrific consequences. Just when the displays are depicting total despair in the modern world, you come out into the Garden of Eden and a soothing diorama of an attractive and prelapsarian Adam and Eve lounging in a waterfall pool surrounded by lilies.

. . .

Many of the quarter of a million people expected to visit the Creation Museum by the end of the year will be children. They will be indoctrinated into an ideology that systematically warps their understanding of the physical world and fills them with hostility toward the facts and concepts of modernity. As we have learned over the past few years, this doesn’t mean that they’ll be outcasts and failures. A great political party has largely abased itself before their world view and offered them unprecedented access to government power. The Creation Museum, a combination of a natural-history museum and a Communist Party propaganda center, will help to arm and arouse the next generation of Christianists in the ongoing war against secular and scientific America.

It’s tempting to treat the museum as an interesting cultural diversion, rather like a guided tour through Colonial Williamsburg, which is how Rothstein, at the the Times, took it. But the museum’s creators are more serious than that, and in a sense they have it right: the family from Columbus came looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Either you accept the claims of science, or you might as well believe that dinosaurs made it onto Noah’s Ark. This disagreement is the size of the Grand Canyon. The mass of ordinary visitors were every bit as alien to me as the few Mennonite families in their nineteenth-century bonnets and long beards. We might speak the same contemporary American dialect, wear the same T-shirts, and eat the same fatty foods, but our basic beliefs are so incompatible that it’s hard to know what political arrangement could ever satisfy us both. Rothstein ended one of his reviews by saying that a visitor “leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.” My experience was different: I had the sense of being a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state, and I kept my reactions to myself. As I was driving away, I realized what the barrage of falsehoods written on slick signboards reminded me of. It was the telescreens in “1984.”

Check out the whole piece, if only for the pictures.