The Grand Canyon Blog

Long-time readers of my blog will remember it was about this time last year that I travelled to America, temporarily handing the reigns of TommyIsCoolDotCom over to Matt. You know, the time I went North, and my hits went South.

But the highlight of my America trip, indeed one of the highlights of my entire life, was a visit to the Grand Canyon. I flew over it in a chopper, walked down the rim (hehe rim), saw the sun set over it, and late one night, I made love to it. It was a Grand Canyon, after all.

hot

Seeing this feat of nature, the beautiful rivers of rock, the cavalcade of colours and shades, the... how you say.... giant fucking hole in the desert, it almost made me tear up. It was the only time in my life I've ever been 'moved' by something like that.

And so, today, I blog about this.

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

We'll skip the 'Bush is evil' undertones there for another blog, but... zuh?

Let me break it down for you. The Grand Canyon falls under the juridstiction of the National Park Service, or NPS. Or NAPS, if you like acronyms that sound like words. They control everything there, including what the tourist shops sell. Which is why in 2003 there was a bit of a kerfuffle when, out of 22 books that submitted that year to be sold at Grand Canyon bookstores, the NPS chose just one. 'Grand Canyon - A Different View', by Tom Vail.

To cut a long story short, Vail is a creationist. He used to be a tour guide at the Canyon, but then his brain fell off the edge and now he thinks the old GC was made by Noah's Flood.

You can see the marks from the flood, just under the bit where the Colorado River and its tributaries cut a channel through the rock over millions of years

I gotta say, I feel sorry for Noah. All he did was build an ark complete with sanitation, food storage and necessary supports to contain two of every single species of animal on the planet, and he gets an earth-destroying flood named after him.

Talk about the short straw.

Straw, of course, being one of the thousands of products he would have had to gather in order to sustain the life of the thousands of animals on his ark, while at the same time ensuring each animal had sufficient room to move and were kept seperate from predators and had sufficient sunlight, air and food and could not punch a hole in the flimsy wood structure he made and launched by himself.

Sorry, got lost a bit there.

Anyway, I think you know where I'm going with this. I don't really have a problem with a bookstore at the Grand Canyon selling a creationist text. After all, every good bookstore should have a Humour section.

But when a certain theological viewpoint is given so much credence that it's the only alternative available in a state-run national park bookstore, when it's put next to books that use the scientific method rather than looking up the index of fucking Genesis, it stops being a freedom of religion issue. It becomes an issue exactly like Intelligent Design, where an un-scientific theory is forced upon the debate and placed on the same level as those with centuries of evidence and consensus.

NO

People opposed to Creationism aren't opposed to religion, and they're definitely not opposed to expressions of religion. They just want you to come up with a better explanation than committing intellectual suicide and saying 'A WIZARD DID ITT!@#' before you sell your fucking books next to the real ones.

If you want to read more about this, because, let's face it, I just mainly just bitched about Christians, - clicky and clicky.

If you don't want to look at more hot Grand Canyon photos, tough shit cause here they come.

HOT

(props to richie for taking the photos)