Posted on 08/24/2008 2:16:12 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
...In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.
But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.
Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out.
(Click link for full article)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
//They’re trying to raise a generation of kids who have no exposure to Christianity so that they think it’s normal//
It did not work in the USSR, it has not worked in Communist China, nor anywhere else they have tried to kill Christianity.
The only real limitation on religion in public schools is the ban on teachers and school officials using school time and resources to preach and proselytize. Students are free to discuss religion, try to convert their classmates (outside of class time and barring disruption, of course) and start Bible study and other religious groups (and generally use school facilities on the same level as any other club or organization).
They're trying to raise a generation of kids who have no exposure to Christianity so that they think it's normal and they keep feeding them the *separation of church and state* as if it's truth so that the little drones never question it.
Kids learn Christianity at home and at their churces. It's a bad idea, IMO, to expect the schools to teach religion. In most schools, it would be impossible to even decide what religion to teach, even if that was allowed.
And yet PLAINLY, we’re not a Theocracy!
We’d prefer to keep it that way!
Reasonable people understand that we won’t become a Theocracy and reasonable people understand the 10 commandments at a courthouse (indeed it’s already chiseled into the portico over the SCOTUS building!!!!) isn’t going to bring about the 2nd Inquisition!
Here in Georgia, the ACLU snuck in and demanded the school board remove Christmas from the school calendar on Dec. 25th. A FEDERAL holiday. The board folded like a tent.
Los Angeles was sued to remove a cross from the town logo...same for Las Cruces New Mexico, and if successful, what do you think would be next for a town NAMED “the crosses” in Spanish for hundreds of years?
Mt. Soledad out in California, sued to remove a cross in a cemetery of all places!
William and Mary was told to remove a cross FROM INSIDE A CHAPEL of all places!
Michael Newdow, hijacked his own daughter to remove ‘In God We Trust’ from our pledge and failed. (THIS time.)
Montgomery County Maryland mayor made a ridiculous rule to ban santa from lighting a Christmas tree because it might “offend someone”.
In Florida pre-school kids were forced to sing ‘O Holiday Tree’ instead of ‘O Christmas Tree’ you know, so no one would be offended.
John Gibson, O’Reilly, David Limbaugh and many others have pointed out the godless liberal agenda and the ACLU to remove Christianity, indeed anything referring to God from the public realm.
When I was a kid teachers didn’t tell the kids not to say Merry Christmas or pitch a fit if a kid had a Bible. We weren’t told in science class “there is no God” via “that’s ot science” either.
And when Christianity wasn’t under attack by the ACLU we weren’t a Theocracy then either!
If Christianity is so bad, why don’t godless liberals attack it out in the open, put things to a vote?
Nope, they sue and censor because it’s the ONLY way they can suppress it and they know it.
It’s not got as much to do with faith as it does with being anti-AMERICAN!
Sooner or later this madness MUST be addressed by the SCOTUS.
“our country would not, demonstrably, be a “theocracy” if we were to go back to the post-Scopes, where evolution was taught, but questions were also allowed to be raised”
To help out Mr.B or anyone else who is completely ignorant of U.S. history I helpfully pointed out that the Scopes trial unsuccessfully challenged a law that made it illegal to teach the Science of Evolution in Science class. So it was illegal to teach Evolution both before and after the Scopes trial and Mr.B's statement is absolutely and unambiguously incorrect.
You consider our country post-Scopes to be a theocracy?
When was that changed and by whom?
No. We are and shall remain a nation of religious liberty, so long as I have breath to defend our Republic and the U.S. Constitution in accordance with my oath.
There are Nobel prizes to be won in research, but not likely any to be won in trying to define science in state legislatures.
REALLY REALLY bad example after the algoreacle just got it for his hot air cult junk science!
Allowing religious expression is not *teaching* religion.
All your arguments fall flat in light of the religious activity that was part of the public school system in whatever form it existed in, for the centuries from the founding of this country until the recent past.
Prayer and Bible reading were part of the school day until the ACLU and its cohorts pushed it out. Show me what damage all that religious activity in schools did up until that point.
It's just an excuse to remove religion, particularly Christianity, from public and eventually, private life.
What this article says, for those who take the trouble to read it, is that kids bring a knowledge of creationism to class. The controversy is already in the air. The challenge is to teach the science side of the controversy.
But sadly, what they get is that science is at odds with everything else in their world. There’s just no room for God in science....if anyone says there is, they get censored or sued or both!
So say the godless liberals who have consistently proven that they are unobjective:
journalism (drive-by media)
politics (hyopocrat party where Pelosi says abortion is just cool with the Catholic church!)
law (activist judges off their rockers in places like SF)
eudcation in general (FAILED public school systems across the board)
science specifically (homosexuality/transexuality/pedophilia is normal & ramming the godless agenda down normal people’s throats...hot air cult junk science, etc. etc. etc.)
Godless liberalism is destructive and need not be coddled and should be defeated by a moral nation/society.
it’s teaching them to be good little drones.
godless little drones.
I’m actually in agreement with the creationists on teaching the controversy. I think, however, that the kids have already had buckets of creationism. This article, and the statistics on opinions of evolution demonstrate that. They need to be taught the alternative.
I honestly don’t get your view. From reality, we know that they get pregnant at ever earlier ages, often come from broken homes where they not only don’t “get creation by the bucket loads”, but don’t even understand it AT ALL or that they can get AIDS via sex!
Sheesh, even the leader of the hypocrat party doesn’t want them to believe oral sex IS sex!
And look at the statistics on creationism....how many Christians don’t even know what creationism even means as explained in Genesis let alone scientifically!
Uh-huh....we can all play that game....Hitler, Stalin...just to name a couple.
Maybe we're not on the same page here- whose religious expression are we talking about, and in what context. Teacher or student? Inside of class or outside?
All your arguments fall flat in light of the religious activity that was part of the public school system in whatever form it existed in, for the centuries from the founding of this country until the recent past.
I have a tough time squaring the use of taxpayer money for religious activity in schools with the 1st Amendment. How do you propose allowing an even playing field for all faiths in the schools?
Prayer and Bible reading were part of the school day until the ACLU and its cohorts pushed it out. Show me what damage all that religious activity in schools did up until that point.
For Agnostics, Atheists, Hundus, Wiccans, Muslims, Zoroastrians and various other faiths, being forced to pray and read the religious book of a different faith is a violation of their 1st Amendment rights, especially when done with taxpayer money. We didn't really consider that issue a couple of generations ago, but we do now.
it’s not just science class or education, godless liberals have been ruining everything they touch!
From law to the media...to politics...now they have their number one hypocrat who is so far to the left, he’s for killing the BORN, forget abortion, it’s full blown infanticide now they preach!
The Bible doesn't say pi is 3.0; the Bible is not a scientific or mathematics textbook.
We'd probably all agree that it is best for students to master the subject matter of the courses they take. But what is troubling about the manner in which Darwinist evolution theory is often taught these days is its presentation as tantamount to a sort of "proof" of the non-existence of God (See???? You don't need a Creator after all; you just have to understand everything that exists is random, yet chemistry, physical laws, mutation, and natural selection are the sufficient causes of its "order" such as we observe in the biosphere today. We are told the theory taught in this fashion allows one to be "an intellectually fulfilled atheist," as Richard Dawkins put it. For some professors, this is most definitely a big part of evo theory's "charm" — especially among "Lefty" professors.
If the teaching of evolution theory were confined to the subject matter of actual science per se, then there would be few objections to it, I imagine. The problem is many promulgators of evolution theory leave the scientific reservation and proceed to smuggle philosophical doctrine (e.g., materialism. positivism) and religious doctrine (e.g., atheism) in through the back door. Now I'm all for the First Amendment. But clearly, that is cheating....
Creationism is neither irrational nor indefensible on the basis of empirical observation and experience. Here's something interesting I came across recently, Justification of Theism, by Richard G. Swinburne, in reply to the late J. L. Mackie, an evolutionary biologist (and inveterate proselytizer of atheism).
Now Swinburne is a creationist and accepts evolution theory as propounded by Darwin. I can only give the briefest sketch of his ideas here (see the above link for details); but in a nutshell, he thinks a "personal explanation" of the origin of life and the universe is perfectly reasonable. By "personal," he means a purposeful creative agent is at work, which is why the universe has the "order" it has — i.e., "is the way it is, and not some other way." The supposition of a creative agent also answers the question, "why is there something at all, why not nothing?" [Answer: because it is the will and purpose of a free creative agent that such should be so.]
Swinburne points out that "the personal explanation" would actually be the simplest logical explanation of all (cf., Occam's Razor), and has the added virtue of being consistent with the way intelligent human agents experience their own existence. Which is to say, for instance, that when we see a complex object such as a machine, we don't expect to discover that it created itself. We sense intuitively that it had to have been built by a conscious agent who wanted to build a device capable of enabling him to execute his purposes, his goals.
Needless to say, Mackie isn't "buying" any of this. Again, I won't go into the details of his counter-argument. Maybe you can infer something about it from Swinburne's response (below); in any case, the article at the link is a fascinating read.
I argued that the totally regular and simple ways of behavior of physical objects; or, as we should say in order to avoid hypostatizing laws of nature, the vast coincidence that there are objects of a very few kinds (electrons, photons, and so forth) all of each kind having identical powers and liabilities, is a very striking coincidence, which is a priori very unlikely. And I went on from there to argue that the hypothesis of a common creator explains the coincidence, since He has the power to bring it about and reason to do so.Mackey's alleged expectation that "order in packs of cards is a normal thing to be expected, not in need of further explanation," is the sort of thing I really detest because, of course, it explains nothing — except for the "unexamined" presupposition that anything science can't get at, ain't "there" to be got at in the first place! He stops at the water's edge, so to speak. And because science cannot explain, say, the origin of life or design in nature, therefore, such things ought not to be asked.Mackie objected:
Inductive extrapolation would not be reasonable if there were a strong presumption that the universe is really completely random, that such order as we seem to find in it is just the sort of local apparent regularity that we should expect to occur occasionally by pure chance, as in a series of random tosses of a coin we will sometimes get a long run of heads, or a simple alternation of heads and tails over a considerable number of throws. Swinburne holds, and his argument requires, that inductive extrapolation is reasonable, prior to and independently of any belief in a god. But, I would argue, this would not be reasonable if there were a strong presumption that the universe is completely random. So he cannot consistently say that, without the theistic hypothesis, it is highly improbable a priori that there are any regularities; for the latter assertion of improbability is equivalent to saying that there is a strong presumption of randomness.Mackie's argument seems to be that in holding that the regularities which we observe are typical of wider regularities in regions of space and time outside the region immediately observed (as I do in rebutting the suggestion that we are observing an untypical segment of space and time) I am already committed to denying the strong presumption of randomness.
Before showing what is wrong with Mackie's argument, it is worthwhile to show it in action in another case. Suppose that there are before us, ready for use, many packs of cards. On examining some of them at random we find that they are all arranged in order of suits and seniority. That allows us to infer that the other packs which we have not examined will also be so arranged. Any normal observer would then immediately suspect that these coincidences are to be explained in terms of something beyond themselves — for example, an agent or a machine constructed by an agent which arranged the packs in order. Mackie, however, if we are to take his argument seriously, would not so react. The mere fact that we can reasonably predict that the unobserved packs will be arranged in order shows that order in packs of cards is a normal thing to be expected, not in need of further explanation.
What has gone wrong? Mackie has misconstrued the argument for design. There is indeed a strong presumption of randomness. But then we observe the regular and simple behavior of all of the many objects which we observe. We argue that if all objects behave in regular and simple ways (h1) our observation will be made; but if only a few objects behave in regular and simple ways (h2) our observation is very unlikely to be made. Although a priori h1 has a much smaller probability than h2, the observations are so much more likely to be observed if h1 than if h2 that the posterior probability of h1 (that is, the probability of h1, given our observations) significantly exceeds that of h2. We then inquire how such an unlikely hypothesis as h1 comes to be true; we seek a higher hypothesis which explains it. Faced with the choice between saying that there are simply brute coincidences in the behavior of objects, and saying that their behavior is brought about by a common cause, a person — we choose the latter on the grounds that its simplicity is high and it gives some probability to what we observe. That after all is how we argue with regard to the packs of cards. Analogy demands that we argue in the same way with respect to the regularities in nature. [Bolds added for emphasis]
No wonder so many parents of publicly-educated schoolchildren are hopping mad about this travesty that passes for "education"....
It didn’t work in Rome.
EXACTLY...and by the next generation and the one after that, they’ll get exactly what they’ve been whining about...an ANTI-theocracy in their image to go along with their re-written history that America was the evil in the world.
goofy journalism (THIS should give us pause TODAY...godless liberals STILL want the fairness doctrine when 90% of the media already is godless!!!)
law (we see the results in SF)
//The Bible doesn’t say pi is 3.0//
The whole issue about PI is another evo red herring.
No matter to what degree of accuracy you calculate PI out too (10 to 1000 places), you still round it out at the end based on what your engineering technology can accurately replicate.
And then there are the variables of margins of error in the measuring tools/application, the margins of error in cutting of the materials etc.
Their ‘cleverness’ is very tedious for me.
I see you are against profiling and like to waste lots of time
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