Michael Ruse at the Creation Museum

Andrew Brown's Blog has a story about the trip that Michael Ruse made with some of graduate students to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Ruse remarks that the museum is not quite as high-tech as he imagined it would be but also, that, there is a great deal of sincerity poking through:

This is, I think one of the key differences between the new, or militant, atheists and Darwinians like Ruse, just as atheist as they but a lot less anti-religious. The new atheists recoil instinctively from the idea that they should get a feeling for the ideas and psychology of creationists. To them the essential point about believers is that they are stupid and crazy and wrong. So why waste your one life trying to inhabit a mind smaller and more twisted than your own?

But this constant identification of religion with irrationality, stupidity, cruelty, and ignorance is doubly self-defeating. It doesn't of course work to persuade anyone out of religious belief. But it also promotes some quite grotesque self-deception. For if all the bad traits in human nature are religious, and I am not religious, then I am surely free from all the believers' faults. Sometimes I think this explains the attractions of that style of atheism.

I still have not been to the museum. I should go but cannot scare up the money for the price tag. It is also not a place that I want to take my children—it would simply fill their heads with things I don't want there.