Your Opinion: Is the Creationist Use of Dinosaurs in Child Education Underhanded?

Answers in Genesis has an interesting little article about the use of dinosaurs to promote their work.  They have been producing a series of billboards featuring ferocious and beautifully drawn dinosaurs, in hopes of attracting people to their creation museum.  This has sparked some outrage online - how dare Creationists use dinosaurs to lure children into religious teachings!  

Did Humans Walk With Dinosaurs? A Look at the Paluxy Tracks

Giant humans, or fakes?  These human tracks were claimed by locals to have
 been found at Paluxy and sold during the Depression.

A few months ago I stumbled on a little Creationist classic at a used bookstore - John Morris' Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them (1980).   It is about the discovery and filming of a famous set of fossilized footprints found along the Paluxy River in Texas.  Although fossilized footprints are not rare, this particular finding sparked the early years of scientific creationism in the United States.  Because here, preserved in the hardened mud along the shore of the mighty Paluxy, in a layer of ancient limestone dating back to the Cretaceous, were dinosaur footprints co-existing with those of man.

Did Jesus Have Only 24 Chromosomes?

I heard a curious story a while back by someone giving a communion thought at church, and since then I have heard the same story by a few other Christians in a few different provinces.  This is by no means a story influencing the majority of evangelicals, but it is quietly making its way into peoples’ minds.  And since we've been talking about fringe Creationist tales, I thought this would be appropriate.  The full story can be read here, but it goes as such:

In 1978 an avid archaeological enthusiast (with no academic training in archaeology) was walking in Jerusalem when he received word from God that the infamous ark of the covenant, the holy container for the 10 commandments, the symbol of the presence of God and the destruction of Nazis everywhere (Indiana Jones reference, in case you didn't get it), was hidden in a nearby hill.

Welcome to Jurassic Park

When I was a child, I was really into dinosaurs.  (Alright, let’s admit it, I’m still really into dinosaurs).  I had stacks of books about them, both fiction and non-fiction.  I spent literally hundreds of hours among the crushed-up gravel of our driveway, finding the remains of ancient sea life embedded in the limestone.  I even found two large, complete, perfectly fossilized snail shells along the shore of Lake Erie, and to this day they number among my most prized possessions (not dinosaurs, I know, but I’ll take what I can get).  There was something about dinosaurs that sparked my imagination, that opened up undreamed-of possibilities, that showed me that I was a bit player in a story far larger than anything I could conceive. 

Arguments Creationists Should Never Use, As Declared by Creationists

There was an interesting article recently promoted by Creation Ministries International (CMI), a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) organization, entitled Arguments We Think Creationists Should NOT Use.  I found many of the statements to be quite surprising, with some significant implications for the future of the YEC movement.  You can read them below; I intend to talk about their implications in my next post.