Five Before Chaos

… is what a federal judge in Austin, Texas, had to say about the latest godidiocy not involving Sarah Palin or the Family Research Council. Some idiot “school” named the Institute of Creation Research was seeking the right to award a master’s degree in creation “science”. And the judge was having none of that:

In 2008, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board rejected the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research’s application to offer master’s degrees, which taught science from a biblical perspective.

The institute’s graduate school sued in 2009, claiming the board violated its constitutional right to free speech and religion.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks found no merit in the ICR’s claims and criticized its legal documents as “overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering and full of irrelevant information.”

Judge Sparks’ decision sums up the entire creationist movement in a nutshell.

A.A. Gill from Vanity Fair paid a visit to the notorious Creation Fred Flintstone Museum in Kentucky:

But we should cut the creationists a little slack, because every new bit of evidence, every discovery, is a nightmare for them. Take the ark. The big-boat business poses all sorts of questions. But, again, they’ve got answers. There are models and plans and layouts of the vessel. You can walk through a part of the hull. There’s biblical carpentry and weather reports. And the dinosaurs are on board. (They were probably small ones, the museum helpfully adds.) But recently scientists found a new giant rat and a fanged frog in Papua, New Guinea, so now some Noah-ists have to redesign the amphibian quarters. The rats probably sort themselves out. O.K., so you get everybody aboard, 10 million creatures, times two, without the neighbors’ noticing. Where did the water come from? You have to flood the whole world. Did they import water from the Scientologists? No: it came from underground. There is a great reservoir, presumably for flooding purposes, under our feet. I assume that’s where it went back to. Why don’t we drill for it to water Phoenix? (By the way, the flood is where we get fossils from. That’s all the dead stuff, caught in mud.) When the waters abated, the animals got off, stretched, and walked around the world eating one another’s children. I’m not making this up. Nobody’s making this up. This is what happened.

As PZ aptly observed:

It’s also ugly, cheesy, and stupid. People often try to excuse faith by claiming it inspired a lot of great art…but here is the evidence that god is dead. All his rotting corpse seems to inspire any more is cartoon kitsch. And Christian rock.

I really wish the Rapture would hurry up and get here so I can go through these peoples’ things and grab the good stuff (what that would be, other than money, who knows? – certainly not Left Behind Books and Christian rock CD’s).