Coming Soon To A Natural History Museum Near You

I'm waiting for this to start happening here -- if it hasn't already:

[Bishop Boniface] Adoyo, the Chairman of Evangelical Alliance of Kenya that represents 35 churches with a membership of six million faithful, says the theory confuses children who frequent the museum on educational tours. "I'm worried that children will believe we evolved from monkeys. Yet this is not the truth that's killing our faith," he says.

Saturday Standard has learnt that the alliance has enlisted a number of Western institutions to raise funds for anti-hominid campaigns in the media and through religious sermons.

The church plans to hold major demonstrations to the museum to press for the removal of the bones.

There is a strong element of denial of reality here:

But Adoyo dismisses the theory as "mere speculations".

He argues that the theory presents assumptions as facts. He says it takes more faith to believe in the theories than that God created man. "These are just speculations yet we believe in them. ...Man is uniquely created; there is nothing concrete about the evolution theory and that is why we as Christians are uncomfortable with the museum's plans to display the hominids and narrate the story of evolution as if it is the truth," he explains.

Reminds me of our home-grown creationists (who are probably the ones funding this campaign).

And of course, he has to play the race card:

But the NPC cleric insists that evolution is an archaic theory meant to perpetuate racism. "Even Darwin on his death bed expressed surprise that people believed his theory," Adoyo says. "Pure science has overtaken palaeontology.

This one got me:

The advent of DNA testing has helped us to trace the origin of man to Adam and Eve," he says. "Palaeontologists do not want to admit this because it will crumble their scientific edifice," he says.

This is sort of staggering, aside from simply not being true. RNA has been traced back to a group of women in Africa about 200,000 years ago, as I recall, who are lumped together metaphorically as "Eve" (but I forget -- fundamentalists don't admit to metaphor -- if they did, they wouldn't be fundamentalists). DNA mapping has led to the inescapable conclusion that we are closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas.

This goes back to Jack Balkin's comments on Ted Haggard, which I mentioned in my last post on that subject. The mindset seems to be that the universe is ordered the way you've been told by highest authority that it's ordered, and nothing that contradicts that exists. They just don't see it, even though they're staring it in the face. I have to admit, it's a way of looking at the world that I don't understand at all.

(Sidebar: I'm cynical enough that I have a hard time swallowing that anyone acts this way from pure religious belief and not from some political agenda. I admit it. I don't understand this attitude that "everyone must believe as I believe and my beliefs must be the law of the land" (nice little dose of proto-fascism there), probably because my own religion recognizes that there are many paths to Truth. I simply feel that those who insist on the unalterable rightness of their beliefs are up to something. It doesn't help that they usually are.)