for my birthday this year we spent the weekend at my parents' timeshare in escondio. we did a bunch of things but the thing i really wanted to do was visit the Creation & Earth History Museum & Bookstore
and the Unarius Academy of Science. i purposely didn't do much research before going and i deliberately planned of us to visit them back-to-back.
the Creation & Earth History Museum & Bookstore was very interesting! it has a surprising amount of science for a place that denies a lot of science, lol. and there was a lot of dinosaur stuff! basically tho, it was "this science stuff proves this stuff in the bible." and the science stuff that disproves the stuff in the bible is either wrong or not mentioned. there is also a big room full of physiology and human anatomy, basically using the watchmaker analogy to prove the existence of god.
after that, we went directly to the Unarius Academy of Science which had much much less funding but was no less interesting. we were lucky enough that the man staffing the place was very happy to explain their beliefs and to give us a tour of their space. in a few words, this is a space cult that believes in reincarnation.
we really ran into to a full spectrum of belief that day! a number of the people in the creationist museum seemed to fully believe in it. and while there were only two people at the unarius place, we only interreacted with one, but he was definitely a believer in his religion.
of the four in our party, it was t, who is some sort of christian (i don't know what sect, this is not a knock on her, just my lack of knowledge) and fairly devout; her bf i, who seems to believe some of the major tenants of christianity; j, who is agnostic and believes there may be some kind of creator; and me, an atheist who believes in neither creator nor afterlife.
i think besides learning about the religions themselves, it was really interesting to see what people accept and what they reject. t made some comments about how the museum got some things wrong in the bible, but the creationists would say the same of her, as they do say it about science! i think we all were a little more skeptical of unarians but like... why? give it 3000 years and it may become the most widely accepted religion, who knows?
what i think is most interesting is how people scoff at other beliefs when they are only very short step away from the same thing. the mental gymnastics one must go thru to believe one branch of science but not another, one random book but not another, or to look at it all and sill turn away is really something. i am also closer to creationists that I'd probably like, because religious belief isn't so much a line as it is a circle. I don't believe in the bible, but i do fairly blindly believe in science that i don't at all understand.
really, as long as you really believe in something, you will believe in it, "facts" be damned.
