Did you know that the Tyrannosaurus Rex, in those years that it roamed the Earth alongside humans and turtles and bunny rabbits and whatnot, only ate sinners? Among evangelicals, it’s apparently common knowledge that the T-Rex was like Loki’s sword, just another tool in God’s arsenal to help him smite the wicked, much like swarms of locusts or Matt Damon’s glock.

The T-Rex’s preference for the sweet, clap-ridden flesh of the wicked aside, carbon dating roundly proves that humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth millions of years apart. Want more proof? Well, nobody has ever found the bones of a hapless cave man who for all we know, may have pissed God off by coveting his neighbor’s rock collection or something, inside a fossilized Tyrannosaurus.

The folks at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ken., where the wife, some friends and I visited a couple weeks ago would tell you that they probably exist, but God is just waiting for the right time to reveal them.

We went for a laugh, and in a lot of ways got exactly what we expected. There were a lot of modestly dressed Southern Baptist families pouring out of 15 passenger vans. There were dinosaur statues, dioramas of Adam and Eve interacting with a velociraptor and of course, a whole room filled with pictures showing us doing all the things we do these days to secure our place in hell, including, apparently, playing video games.

Then again, there were a lot of things I didn’t expect. For one, there was a noticeable absence of anything to do with Jesus, Moses or any Bible story besides the creation and the great flood. The idea being that they don’t want us to think they’re just a bunch of anti-science nutjobs. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that many of these same folks were telling us that dinosaurs never existed, but instead that fossils were placed in the ground by the devil to test our faith.

So here is a quick list of the “science” we learned at the Creation Museum:

• • The Earth is only 5,000 years old.
• • The Earth was flat until the great flood, the raging waters of which created the Grand Canyon, mountains, rivers, etc.
• • Noah took two of everything on the Ark, including dinosaurs (an animatronic Noah told us so.)
• • Dinosaurs are the same thing as dragons (also according to robot Noah.)
• • Until Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, all animals were vegetarians and lived happily together.
• • After Adam and Eve discovered their love of applesauce, the animals started feasting on each other.
• • Tyrannosaurus Rex had a diet that consisted of leafy vegetation and the flesh of sinners (seriously.)
• • Cancer and other diseases didn’t exist while Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden.
• • Once the Earth dried up and all the animals left the ark, some floated across the oceans on trees that had uprooted during the flood. The “raft theory,” explains how all the wild turkeys and koalas and anacondas from Noah’s large wooden boat could make their way from the top of a mountain in Turkey to Argentina and Australia and Michigan.

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Of course this was all hidden behind a thin veil of “science.” These folks don’t dispute intra-species evolution, it’s the whole humans evolving from monkeys thing that they have a problem with. It blows their mind that something so complex as humans could come from something as simple as a single-cell organism. God put everyone and everything on this planet for a purpose, they argue, after which Adam flopped around the Garden of Eden pointing and shouting “Elephant, nectarine, duck-billed platypus!”

To take it a step further, their theology/pseudo-science jumble includes natural selection and helps them explain away the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I can only imagine that some of them are really bummed out about dinosaurs going extinct. If they were still alive, we could just turn them loose in Afghanistan and win this war once and for all. Hell, while we’re at it, why don’t we just let some eat up all those heathen, atheist, liberal elites up in New York and Boston. I wonder if we could train them to go after just Democrats. Hurry, someone call Steven Speilberg, I’ve got a great idea for a Jurassic Park sequel. I’ll bet we could get Kirk Cameron to star in it.

But I digress.

The fact of the matter is, I think this was all just a silly, ill-conceived way to explain away how many proven scientific theories conflict with stories told in the Bible. Then again, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs (unless you’re Muslim and want to build a religious building in New York.) In that spirit, on the way in to the parking lot, we even set some ground rules so as not to offend. My favorite was a ban on t he word “actually.”

Now, I knew we were on their turf, but when the displays started talking about all the hatred and violence that has come as a result of people’s belief in and teaching of evolution, I must admit that I got a little angry. The worst one was a video that strongly insinuated that World War I was not only started by the Germans, but that it was done because of the German governments decision to teach evolution to its schoolchildren.

In trying to cram their religious ideology into a modern scientific construct, the museum curators displayed a blatant disregard for historical accuracy. World War I was started by evolutionists in Germany and the Scopes-Monkey Trial set off the Great Depression were just two of the lessons they told. It seems the Texas State Board of Education aren’t the only people who don’t want history and science to get in the way of their narrative.

What makes it worse is that the people who gobble this stuff up not only believe it, but are so violently opposed to anything that falls outside of the belief system dictated to them by people like the museum founders that they will fight anyone who disagrees tooth and nail, regardless of the preponderance of evidence that contradicts it all.

In the end, we got out of it what we thought we would, and we had a good time. It was an amusing and frightening place.