Creationist Science Projects

The line between parody and reality has been blurred. From one of the funniest web pages ever:

Elementary School Level
1st Place: "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
"Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey."

Middle School Level
1st Place: "Life Doesn't Come From Non-Life"
"Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes."

2nd Place: "Women Were Designed For Homemaking"

High School Level
Honorable Mention:
"Thermodynamics Of Hell Fire" - Tom Williamson (grade 12)

Every page on this site has a gem. I'll post a few highlights in the next day or so. You might want to check out the site before reading the rest of my comments.

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This site got me thinking about the difference between reality and satire. The two can be easily blurred. "Governor's wife calls for popping a cap in Britney Spears at gun control rally"--this could have easily been from The Onion. And many articles from The Onion have been mistaken for real news by some people before.

In response to this, most satire makes the fact that it is satire obvious in some way, so people can get the joke. The site is a different kind of satire, one that takes great pains to hide the fact that it is satirical. And it has a different motive than typical satire. Instead of poking fun at something, it tries to trick people into believing that it's true (and, I think, poke fun at the people who don't get it.) I'm not even sure if it qualifies as satire. It's closer to a practical joke than anything else. A very successful joke that, while I'm not sure it was the site's intent, makes more fun of people ready to rush to judgment rather than the creationists themselves.