You really can get a job working on Noah’s Ark, or to be a tad more precise the above modern recreation of it. The new theme park will be opening in a few months and so they will be taking on staff. Ah but there is a slight catch, you can only be accepted if you meet their specific belief criteria, and that is a tad more stringent than you might perhaps anticipate.
Now you might be wondering if they are permitted to discriminate like that, and the answer is yes they are. But this is in Kentucky where concepts such as secularism and church / state separation can be happily trampled over, so it is not a surprise.
What do they demand?
On their website AiG, the organisation building this new theme park, clearly state …
all persons employed by the ministry in any capacity, or who serve as volunteers, should abide by and agree to our Statement of Faith
.. and that includes gems such as the following …
- The account of origins presented in Genesis is a simple but factual presentation of actual events and therefore provides a reliable framework for scientific research into the question of the origin and history of life, mankind, the earth, and the universe.
- The great Flood of Genesis was an actual historic event, worldwide (global) in its extent and effect.
- Death (both physical and spiritual) and bloodshed entered into this world subsequent to and as a direct consequence of man’s sin
- Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ
- The days in Genesis do not correspond to geologic ages, but are six [6] consecutive twenty-four [24] hour days of creation
- By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record
… and that is truly mind blowing stuff.
OK, they are a religious group, and so Jesus and God, well I get it, because that is all part of the religious patter, and so you would expect a religious group to anticipate their staff to be religious. However, they are stepping way beyond the normal bounds here and are demanding that the employees sign up to very specific claims. For example that ..
- Not just planet earth, but the entire universe is just 6,000 years old (4th item above)
You might indeed also look at the item after that, the one that demands that you should believe that the days in Genesis are 6 literal 24 hour days, and seriously wonder about their sanity. If you embrace that idea as literal truth, then what does the concept of a literal day means, or how it is possible to get grass and trees on day 3 without the entire universe including all the stars, the moon and the sun which don’t turn up until day 4. In fact, how the frack do you have a day / night cycle for those first 3 x 24 hour days without any sun, what does it even mean?
Clearly buying into a literal acceptance is to dismiss all of our understanding of reality.
To drive that point home we also have the 6th bullet point above where employees are asked to accept that where reality conflicts with what the bible says, then they must accept that the bible trumps everything else and dismiss fact and reality as wrong. Once you go there then to be quite frank you are completely buggered because you have abandoned observation and evidence as a reliable way of working out what is and is not true.
Are they serious?
Yes, this is precisely the stance that Mr Ham (the founder of this project) took when he debated Bill Nye. The following cartoon more or less summed up that debate.
OK, so if you would like a job working on the Ark Encounter then you now know what you need to first accept before they will hire you.
One final thought. You might be tempted to dismiss this posting as criticism by a non-believer, but you do need to pause that thought and to also consider that criticism of AiG is not the exclusive preserve of non-believers, other creationists have labelled them “wilfully ignorant”, and have openly declared that Mr Ham “deliberately misleads” his audiences on matters of both science and theology. In fact another well-known young-earth creationist, Kent Hovind, has labelled the AiG stance as “fraudulent.”.
It does not often happen, but in this case I am actually agreeing with those other creationists when it comes to their thoughts on all this.
It should not be a surprise to find that other Christians dismiss them of course because not only does the AiG hiring policy discriminate against every non-christian on the planet, their demand for a very specific narrow anti-science set of literal beliefs means they are also discriminating against the vast majority of Christians as well.
Links
- A recent posting by digs into their hiring policy in detail.