TSDRT, Episode Sixteen: Going Down (Pt 1)

I am currently in Kansas City, MO. Before you ask, yes, it infuriates me that Kansas City is in Missouri. There should be a law against that type of thing.

The last few days in Detroit were uneventful, with me mainly dodging assassination attempts from Amy Jane. Here’s a transcript of an event:

Me and Amy Jane: *eating corned beef hash*
Graham: *eating shrimp and grits*
Graham: “Hey baby, you want a shrimp?”
Amy Jane: “Oh thanks baby, yes.”
Graham: *places a shrimp in Amy Jane’s bowl*
Amy Jane: *eats shrimp*
Amy Jane (immediately afterward, holding out forkful of poison): “Man there’s a lot of corned beef in this hash, Joe do you want some?”
Me: “WHAT THE FUCK THAT WAS LITERALLY JUST TOUCHING THE SHRIMP YOU KNOW I AM ALLERGIC TO SHELLFISH THIS IS A WELL-KNOWN PART OF OUR FRIENDSHIP.”
Amy Jane: “Sorry, I forgot that that would kill you.”
Graham: “I just really want to stab you with an EpiPen.”

This happened more than once on this trip.

On Friday we took a day trip north up to Port Huron. Along the way Graham tried repeatedly to sell us on visiting the “Ice Museum of North America“, a museum about ice. This sounded so terrible that by the time we reached Port Huron Amy Jane and I were convinced, but sadly, it was closed. Instead, we visited an enormous antique store, where I found a painting I quite liked, but with TARS full of three human beings and a lot of my shit, was too big to fit in the car.

“Take a picture and if you still want it tomorrow, we’ll just come back here tomorrow,” Amy Jane said practically, with the air of someone who really doesn’t mind an extra two hour round trip in the car.

On the mole at Lake Huron. Even with the sun, it felt like 12 degrees out.

On the way back from Lake Huron (we would be passing by the antique shop again) Amy Jane started strategizing. “I don’t mind having a five foot painting on my lap for the drive back to Detroit. Let’s just stop and get it.”

So now, in addition to all the general travel crap, I have an enormous painting, wrapped in cardboard, in the back seat of TARS, despite being 2,300 miles away from home. I love travel decisions.

Saturday we got take-out from Chili Mustard Onions:

and then hit up the Motown museum, which was pretty dope:

Graham pictured on the left. There are few things I enjoy more than selfies where there is nothing distinguishable about the participants;

We visited the Fisher building.

The Fisher building, photographed from an area that we probably should not have been in.

Graham and Amy Jane are very fond of playing the “let’s see if we can get into an area where we definitely should not be, then act dumb when security kicks us out” game, which I am also a very big fan. This plan *does* misfire occasionally (I was once locked into an stairwell without a key to get back into the building in Seattle, and had to walk down thirty-seven flights of stairs to the ground floor to get out, my legs ached for a week afterward) but worked spectacularly here.

Along the way I also heard a lot of very funny and very embarrassing stories about when Amy Jane and Graham first started dating, but I’ve been forbidden from repeating them here.

Sunday we were SUPPOSED to visit Eastern Market, but it was closed, so instead we tooled around Detroit a bit and looked at architecture and murals.

The nice thing about hanging out with Amy Jane and Graham in a city that they love is that they know a lot of things about a lot of things. Example verbatim below:

Me: *points at random building* “What’s that?”
Graham / Amy Jane: “Well, that’s the Smith building, named for owner Jebediah Smith, it was a last stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves fleeing to Canada and has a lot of hidden chambers in the basement for that purpose. Then during Prohibition they used it to store rum that was smuggled in from Canada over the frozen Detroit river. Mostly office space now, but there’s a cute karaoke bar called Taste of Detroit that we used to hang out at before we quit drinking.”

They can do this for basically any building in Detroit, and I’m not exaggerating even a little.

Monday morning I headed south toward Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. In a rare stroke of luck, there were a few tickets left at 9:30 AM the following day (the only ones available for the entire week) so I would need to make it all the way to Mammoth Cave in a day. Detroit to Mammoth Cave is only 7 hours, but I’d already spent the morning getting TARS regular maintenance and oil change completed. I bought a ticket, noting the YOU MUST BE PRESENT AT THE TIME ON YOUR TICKET OR YOU WILL BE REFUSED ENTRY and NO REFUNDS FOR ANY REASON and IF YOU ARE LATE WE WILL TELL YOU TO GET FUCKED warning signs.

The drive south was pleasant enough, and then – suddenly – I saw the sign.

The goddamned Ark Encounter.

You are gazing into the pixels of human stupidity.

I had no idea.

The Ark Encounter, for those lucky enough to have never heard of it, is a creationist “theme” “park”, and is a monument to man’s arrogance, and is basically a theme park that purports to have a life-sized Noah’s Ark, and teaches young-earth Creationism (the idea that God created the world in six days and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and also all the events in the Bible, including Noah’s Flood, actually happened). Needless to say, they’ve been mired in controversy, including discriminatory hiring practices (despite being heavily funded by taxpayers), fudging their attendance numbers, because attendance has been well under their predictions, and, most of all, being an entire theme park based around pushing pseudoscience and lying to their attendees.

I knew I had to go.

It made me physically ill giving these assholes any of my money, but I knew I had to do it. Upon arriving, I was informed that the cost for a single adult entry ticket was FIFTY DOLLARS. I balanced it out with a donation to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but even so it left a bad taste in my mouth.

In news that should surprise no one: there is not a single location, anywhere on this entire road trip, that has had worse COVID practices than the Ark Encounter. I was arriving fairly late in the day (the bus from the parking lot to the Ark was empty, except for me) and despite that, 90%+ of the people at the indoor Ark were not wearing their masks.

It really shouldn’t surprise me at this point, but it still blows my mind how arrogant, spiteful, and selfish Christians are.

It also really didn’t surprise me, but I was still blown away and how spectacularly and monumentally terrible the Ark Encounter was. It is possibly the worst theme park that has ever been created, and I’m not saying that just because I’m an atheist. It is monumentally awful. Like, if you came to me, put a gun to my head, and made me design a theme park based around Noah’s Ark, I’d probably start with the fact that there are supposedly two of every type of animal, and make that the selling point. Tag line: “You cannot possibly see every animal that the Ark contains!”

The awful message aside, a theme park that tries to have two specimens of every single living creature on Earth does actually seem kinda interesting, right?

This is the part of the Ark Encounter with closed boxes that have different animal sounds so when you walk past you hear the animals that must be inside these boxes.

This is the part of the Ark Encounter with closed pots and animal sounds so you can pretend in your head that there are animals inside the pots.

The best part of this was the bitchy dad mansplaining to his family about how he couldn’t believe the Ark Encounter would have something so inaccurate because “everyone knows” that God didn’t let dinosaurs onto the Ark!

Then, when you actually get to see a creature, it’s behind these giant wooden beams of a cage so you can’t really see it….and it’s a plastic animal. And then you realize you are inside a theme park looking at fake animals inside fake cages inside a fake theme park.

Still, you might think, maybe there are some animatronic elephants, or tyrannosaurs, or stuff like that, right?

Nope! In an effort to try and pretend that 7,800 ‘kinds’ of animals could fit on the Ark (which purports to be the size of the actual Ark described in the Bible, and has maybe 150 different plastic animals on it) they got rid of everything interesting. Even the tyrannosaur exhibit has baby tyrannosaurs the size of ponies. No elephants at all.

Then there’s the rest of it.

Yepperooni.

I think you have to give them some credit, because in a theme park designed around the concept that a supposedly loving God murders every single human being except for a family of eight, including all the young children and babies who obviously were way too young to deserve a horrible drowny death – as I spell out in my new book – they were smart enough to include an exhibit to have terrible, terrible answers to why God should murder everyone, including kids.

That’s probably my favorite part of the Bible. It’s when God murders kids, or tells people to murder kids. Also, listening to Bible literalists try to invent reasons why this was actually okay and God definitely loves us, and it was a good and morally righteous thing to murder those kids.

Finally, the Ark Encounter ends, the way only the Ark Encounter could possibly end: with a walk-through Chick Tract exhibit.

This blows me away. Imagine paying $50 a person for you and your family to visit the fabled Ark Encounter, and the final exhibit, the end-all be-all, is literally a blown-up reproduction of a shitty fucking comic strip???

I think that’s all I can fit into this update. What a shitshow.

2 responses to “TSDRT, Episode Sixteen: Going Down (Pt 1)”

angconley

April 8, 2021

Theists have to try to explain why there is evil and suffering if God is good. Atheists have to explain why products of evolution have a sense of evil and suffering or get upset at the universe for being the way it is. They should simply not care.

As Lewis says, people universally having a sense of the numinous is pretty good proof that the numinous actually exists. Gary Habermas says if you had millions of testimonies of people who had been to Narnia, you would at least need to consider the possibility that Narnia was real. Also the many people I and everyone in my family have seen miraculously healed or other answers to prayer are more than enough proof for me. Some of them could be explained away by an enterprising materialist, but not all, and the weight of evidence is incredible. I have a friend with before and after medical records of all her organs shutting down due to bulimia when she was 18, who had brand new looking organs after prayer at Woman’s Aglow–the same organization my mom devoted years of her life to. I was instantly healed of asthma at age 9 and never had it again. My mom prayed for a couple who had been trying to have kids for 10 years –9 months later they popped out a baby. That couple was Ron Galbreath’s brother and his wife. This was not the only childless couple she successfully prayed for; I just don’t remember who the others were. Keith has prayed for many and seen healing – including a lady in a wheelchair with horribly twisted legs and feet.

Atheists in the 20th century mass murdered so many people that it may be more than the total of people in all of recorded history before. I would never lump you in with those atheists. Both you and I would be outraged at lumping all Muslims together with Islamic terrorists. So keep that in mind when you speak of “Christians” as if they were an homogenous group. 😁 Quakers, for example, are almost single-handedly responsible for every social advance of the last 400 years, including equality and votes for women, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, political freedom and separation of powers, equality of commoners with the aristocracy, prison reform, mental health reform, underground railroad and abolishing slavery in both England and America. Virtually all the non-Quakers who helped with these things were devoted Christ followers too.😇

Foust

April 10, 2021

Just need two other guys in there own cars driving in an odd caravan with you and this is almost a faithful recreation of one of the Top Gear specials where Clarkson, May, and Hammond have gone and bought ridiculous gifts for each other.

I think you need to figure out how much of your time was worth spending at the Ark Encounter and then give that much more to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, because that kind of looks awful. Point of interest, pretty much all the old churches in Paris are free to go into during weekdays (Notre Dame might not be, also has ridiculous lines) and they don’t spout nonsense. Most of them just talk about the saints they’re named for. In case you ever find yourself there at some point.

Also I got a kick out of that “not-dinosaur” that is “presumed extinct” like the producers of this park expect one to be spotted in the wild any day now.

joe writes