WE predicted last month that a planned visit to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, by P Z Myers – along with members of the Secular Students’ Alliance – would turn out to be a barrel of laughs.
Mark Looy gives Derek a telling off. In the foreground is a Creation Museum security officer
We were wrong. The visit yesterday turned out to be a muted affair. The visitors strongly resisted the temptation to guffaw or slap their thighs in derision – but one student, Derek, was thought not to be taking the tour seriously enough, and was evicted by the museum co-founder, Mark Looy, whose surname is appropriately close to the word “loony”.
P Z Myers, who describes the museum as a “Palace of Lies” explains what happened:
I was with him [Derek] when he was pulled aside, and can verify that he was doing nothing but engaging in quiet conversation with a small group of us godless atheists when Mark Looy arbitrarily singled him out and took him aside to tell him stories about how unruly he had been. It was genuinely bizarre … there was no shouting, no disruption, no rudeness at all going on — they simply plucked Derek out of the group and told him he was a bad boy.
While Looy had Derek off to the side, their head of security hovered about and tried to interpose himself between Looy and all the cameras aimed at him … an impossibility, since there was a whole arc of watchful atheists around them. At one point he gestured to one of the uniformed guards and sent him to escort one attendee with a large, high-quality video camera off the premises – this happened to be a fellow who was there making a documentary about atheists, who had been careful to not directly participate and who was certainly not wearing any godless apparel. The creationists are certainly brilliant at PR, aren’t they?
Derek, expelled from the Creation Museum
I can say that all of the atheists were well behaved and civil, that the only behavior the museum staff could possibly have complained about is that we engaged in quiet criticism, and that the only bad behavior was by people like Looy and the noticeably edgy security guards, who we could tell were looking for an excuse to throw all the people laughing at their joke of a “museum” out. I think Derek was simply their chosen sacrificial lamb, used as an excuse to vent their failed expectations for a ferocious confrontation.
Myers adds:
One last irony: … Looy came up to me with their photographer to ask to take my picture, presumably to put on Ken Ham’s blog. I let him, of course, but I expect they’ll also use it to let their security know who I am, in case I should make future invasions. (Which is not likely, by the way. I think I got enough.)
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
August 8th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Ah, but did they return his entrance money when they decided he was not worthy?
August 8th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Barry, they were making fun of it the whole time. Some, including PZ, were very quiet with their criticisms, and some were not. I stood by several that were openly mocking everything they saw. Mark Looy gave them a lot of space on the rules, and I assure this guy wasn't pulled aside unless he was out of line.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:36 am
I suspected as much, PZ's blog attracts those cultish types. He went there gagging to be oppressed by a borderline retarded disneyland staff just so he could whine about it and pretend to have a Tianamen Square moment with security (presumably brainwashed teens dressed like christian dinosaurs with wakie talkies). Low hanging fruit. We all knew it would happen. I still enjoy his blog though, its like poking at a sore tooth!
August 9th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Aw. I thought I'd done well since I stuck out enough for them to bother asking if I go to college and, upon my confirming that I did, them telling me to keep an open mind.
Wrote up the whole terrible experience here. It's not funny or silly–many of the sentiments displayed in there break my humanist heart. And it's awful to see the kids taking it in–you see brainwashing as it's happening. As I said, terrible.
August 9th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Tom – I read your blog and Ken's too – all this stress over "Mocking" – apart from being hilarious – The whole venture is staggeringly stupid – intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible – and after reading your hardtruth blog, it seems that you are a just an ignorant bonehead.
Here's The HardTruth
You are insecure about being so intellectually inferior, and are simply afraid to face up to rationality – leading to a dishonest and frankly appalling stance of believing infantile stories over verifiable evidence. I assume all this sick rubbish floating around behind your cold dead eyes, is left over from a childhood upbringing where you were systematically lied to.
Get this though – It is OK to fear death.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
I don't get the staff's problem with folk laughing at the exhibits. If someone pays to come in, it's their business how they react to the 'exhibits'.
First lesson of marketing, the customer is always right. For a religious tradition built on snakeoil merchants, insurance agents and others who persuade the gullible public to buy rubbish that nobody needs and doesn't work, they're incredibly poorly informed about their own history – never mind the plastic dinosaurs.
After all, this is only a museum in the 18th century sense of the word – ie. a freakshow. If they want to pretend it's a place of education and enlightenment, not a fairground sideshow, they should prove it by offering free entrance to all on the basis that they have something valuable to teach. They can easily beg the money from the deluded herds who attend their megachurches (and their tax-avoiding pastors). Considering they seem to regard anything the US government did which doesn't line their pockets as the work of Satan I'd have thought they would be only too glad to get along without public subsidy or turning their temple into a shopping mall.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
An adult who still has an imaginary friend should hurry back to Bellvue before they give his bed away. He should also give serious consideration to a brain exchange with a cabbage — if he can find a cabbage willing to make the sacrifice.
What kind of masochist keeps posting proof of his ignorance to a site populated by people who recognize that he is dangerously, criminally, certifiably braindead?
August 10th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
I'd be interested to see an example of a creationist being thrown out of a proper museum for spouting religious trash and mocking real science. Gimme just one example, Mr Estes?
The real problem with creationists is that they hate freedom of thought. That's what made them so nervous and aggressive – a group of intelligent adults who weren't there to have their unthinking prejudices reinforced. It's good to see Americans like PZ Myers standing up for freedom and truth.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:48 am
So why is it that when you guys are preaching hateful things towards LGBT people at their events and spewing obnoxious things toward atheists everywhere you're "preaching the Bible" and "expressing you're deeply held religious beliefs"? If anybody objects they're "persecuting" you. Yet if atheists or others speak their minds and point out, say, scientific facts or the way that displays in a museum are blatantly inaccurate it is "mocking" and they have to be silenced or kicked out? Do you not see the double standard? Why is it Christians insist on saying and doing whatever they want yet refuse others the same privilege/right?