Posted on 12/20/2005 7:54:38 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Fox News alert a few minutes ago says the Dover School Board lost their bid to have Intelligent Design introduced into high school biology classes. The federal judge ruled that their case was based on the premise that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was incompatible with religion, and that this premise is false.
It cuts both ways. Trust me.
It can be said that a public school teacher is a state actor be they biology, calculus or religion teachers.
You're not actually of a mind that religion is banned from the public square, are you?
How do you know?
Were you there?
Did someone who was there tell you?
Did you perhaps learn this in a dream or vision?
Plus a few megabytes worth of transitional fossil pictures, chemical pathways, trees of ERVs and other genetic markers, the occasional differential inequality, lots of links to primary and secondary sources. Just a few things like that.
Assuming that is true, how does disparging an accepted scientific theory "ESTABLISH A RELIGION?"
I've been waiting for an answer to that question all day.
While you are "Thinking Differently" about it, perhaps you should think about this:
When I was in school the Steady State Theory of the universe was being disparged by people who believed in the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang theory tends to promote the religious belief that God may just have created the heavens and the earth (GASP!). In order to avoid a possible constitutional violation, perhaps we should outlaw the teaching of the Big Bang Theory, since it "promotes a specific religious belief." We should also enjoin all the school districts from publicly disparging the Steady State Theory or even mentioning alternatives to the Steady State Theory.
That's the difference between faith and science.
Faith = I believe it because I believe it.
Science = I believe it because I see it, because I've seen proof of it, or because the preponderance of the available data supports that belief.
If you look really carefully, study very hard, and concentrate... you'll notice I never asked a question!!! I was answering one.
If you have a coherent contribution to make, go ahead with it.
Someone made some derisive comment about why people weren't completely satisfied that the entropy problem was solved by throwing the sun into the mix. I observed that the addition of raw energy to a system tending towards disorder results in more disorder, not less, in most people's experience.
Hence they could be forgiven for not finding that to be a sufficient explanation in and of itself, in my opinion.
It seeks to raise the possibility that some intelligent being designed and assembled everything.
Was it God, or was it some being from a different galaxy/dimension/time?
Oh, wait a minute, thats exactly what happened. Einstein and friends rejected Lemaitre and his own field equations because both pointed to a creation event which did not accord with Einsteins world view.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
That's unconstitutional...as unconstitutional as mandating that religion be taught by public employees.
the issue here is whether the statement by the Dover Schhol Board is an unconstitutional establishment of a religion. I am arguing the constitutional principles involved in the case and all you "evos" out there are arguing the motives of the school board. The intentions and motives of the school board are irrelevant (or at least they should be) to a determination of whether or not the first amendment has been violated.
If it was my intention to impose a few of the ten commandments on the population and I managed to get a law passed that made it illegal to steal or murder, then under the "Lemon Test Clause" of the First Amendment, those laws would have to be struck down as an unconstitutional establishment of religion.
I'm just glad the "Lemon Test Clause" was not inserted into the Constitution back when the penal codes were being developed.
Horsecrap. You're out in left field Luis, way out, I mean like in the penumbra of the stadium somewhere.
Meant to ping you on 2313 too.
ARTICLE 124. "In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious propaganda is recognized for all citizens."
The last step. When the State actually establishes a religion.
Are you aware that the same congress that passed the first amendment also passed a law mandating and funding the teaching of the bible in schools? They were promoting a speicific religious position and their statement was that the teaching of the Bible (which included the new testament) was an important secular goal?
The European states (that the founders sougnt NOT to emulate) had all established specific religions as state religions. That was what the congress intended to protect the populace from, not some innocuous statement by a school board that Evolution may not be as true as some of its proponents suggest.
When the state starts mandating which churches are the official churches of the state and when the state takes taxpayer dollars to fund the ministers and the building of church edifices and when it becomes a requirement for citizenship or a requirment to hold public office that you belong to a certain denomination, then I will agree that the state has crossed the line.
As it stands now, the state has crossed the line on the other side and has in essence made Secular Humanism the official religion of the United States. I suspect, however, that once the Lemon Test has been eliminated, the pendulum may start swinging back to a reasonable position. I think this case may wake the Supreme Court up to the monster they created in Lemon v. Kurtzman.
The last step. When the State actually establishes a religion.
What would the step just before that step be?
Constitutional.
OK, it's time to ask the question...
How is it that you think it's ok for the government, through the schools or anywhere else, to establish your religion of secular humanism?
And don't feed me this horse-pucky about a religion needing to have a belief in God. Forcing someone not to worship a God is just as much a violation of religious liberty, if not more so, than forcing someone to worship God in general.
Atheism is not the null hypothesis.
Clearly he was a creationist in the cosmological sense. But using the word creationist, especially in the context of a thread like this, implies the biological sense (fallacy/sin of equivocation)
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that LeMaitre was a creationist in the biology sense? If you don't, you should withdraw this and apologize for libeling a great scientist.
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