Thoughts in a Haystack

Okay ... here is some officially weird shite. It seems there is this artist in Kansas who has sculpted a 6-foot-4 anatomically correct (though the available picture doesn't reveal if it is ritually correct) Jesus with a mosasaur skeleton resting at his feet. What's more, Jesus' body is made, according to the sculptor, Alan Detrich, from Tyrannosaurus rex fossil fragments.

And just for another twist, Detrich is a creationist and supporter of teaching Intelligent Design who calls science supporters "evil-lutionists." He is thinking of running for the Kansas State Board of Education seat of Bill Wagnon, a defender of the teaching of evolution, who is not running for reelection when his term is up in 2008. But like so many supporters of ID outside Seattle, he can't quite remember the "nudge, nudge, wink, wink":

I would be interested in talking to people who are interested in talking about bringing God back into the classroom rather than having him waiting in the principal's office."

He advocates teaching about God right along with reading and writing to fix what he calls a "broken" education system.

"If we're going to teach them about sex, we should teach about how it all began," he says of schoolchildren. "Did God create all things, or did we crawl out of a primordial soup?"

As far as the use of fossils in his artwork, Detrich, who is a fossil hunter, denies there is anything wrong with it:

I've been hunting fossils over 20 years and if a fossil is valuable — because I've sold them for millions of dollars — I would recognize it as something rare and new. I've identified these as common, fragmented bone. The scientific community doesn't even recognize it as a scientific specimen if it's not over 20 percent. If you find less than that, it's not considered a scientific specimen anyhow. If I find something over 20 percent, I usually sell it or give it to the scientific community.

Except for the monasaur ...
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