Posted on 05/22/2006 8:14:10 AM PDT by RightWingAtheist
A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit.
Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class.
Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes.
"I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions.
"They laugh and they call me 'ape,' but I don't mind. If I stopped, they would lose out."
April, who is leaving the town when his contract runs out at the end of the school year, said the principal first told teachers last fall not to talk about evolution.
Debate over the teaching of evolution in Salluit - a village of 1,150 located along the northern coast of Quebec, between Ungava and Hudson bays - is pitting an increasingly religious Inuit population against a Quebec education system that's becoming more and more secular.
Although April, 32, won't be punished, his reprimand has outraged Quebec's scientific community.
"What he's doing is right and it's best for the kids," said Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. "Science should not be de-emphasized for non-science."
Over the years, controversy over the teaching of evolution has erupted in Pennsylvania, along with U.S. states in the so-called Bible Belt. In November, the Kansas State Board of Education approved science standards that cast doubt on evolution.
But with heightened religious fervour among the Inuit and Cree in northern communities, some observers suggest Canada might have its own Bible North.
Molly Tayara, a member of the Salluit school's volunteer education committee, said she'd tell her four school-age children to walk out of a lesson on Darwin.
"The minister (of education) may have come from apes, but we're Inuit and we've always been human," she told The Gazette in a phone interview.
"Most of us rely on God's word. ... God made Adam and Eve and they weren't animals."
Legally, Inuit schools in Quebec's north must teach evolution, as it's part of the provincial curriculum. After April's story came out this week in the magazine Quebec Science, Education Department officials immediately called the school to ensure the curriculum was followed.
Topics like reproduction and diversity of species are part of Science and Technology, a course for Grades 7 and 8. Darwin's work, based on the premise that humans and other animals have evolved over time, is further covered in Grade 11 biology - an elective course.
"We want the curriculum to be applied. We're just saying the theory of evolution could be taught more delicately to students," said Gaston Pelletier, director of educational services for the Kativik School Board, which serves northern Quebec's 14 Inuit communities. "We have to respect their view."
Whoa, there's a zinger that almost got past me. At other times and places, it was illegal for woman to vote, legal to own slaves, and legal to beat your own children to death up to age 21. Does that make any of these things automatically moral?
That's not the question that was put to you. The question was, if civil law was consonent with the bible on the question of suffering witches to live, would it be moral for us to kill my 14 year old wikkan neighbor? Lynch mobbery is not being suggested, and not at issue. Good dodging of the question, though.
Well, than who was it, just a few posts ago, that was just going on about how the witch thing was just a local israeli issue?
But "thou shalt not kill" is not an absolute. . . . . .
Which has what, exactly, to do with the current argument? I don't recall engaging in any arguments on the relative potency of any given moral argument.
So...are you ready to publish that list of which parts of God's commandments are moral precepts and which are just annoying restrictions on the ancient israelites? So I can't kill my mother, and I have to kill witches, but it's ok to eat bats and pigs--I tell you, you really need to publish that list.
So, there are moral questions that the bible leaves untouched. Interesting. How do we determine if some action is moral if it's not covered by the bible?
Yes I take Adam and Eve literally.
I can't explain the dinosaurs dating back millions of years. Alternative explanations have been offered but I presume that the dating is wrong. I cannot prove the dating is wrong at this time. There are evidences that cast doubt on the dating such as...
There were some very prescient aspects to the biblical story
There is quite a bit of scientific information that is in the Bible that is not believed to have been science available 2500B.C.
First recognize that you have shifted the question from an adult to a child. Even Israel had Judges to deal with tough questions. I think it's entirely appropriate to be prosecute a 14 year old child in juvenile court, if he practices witchcraft in a jurisdiction where it is illegal. I think how you ajudicate children is different than how you ajudicate adults and always has been even in early Israel. Depending on the situation there are many alternatives available to the judge.
But God's moral law says we have to kill her once she turns 18?
There are principles taught in the Bible that provide guidance. The sanctity of human life for example, together with scripture that seems to indicate life begins at conception provides guidance for both abortion and stem cell research. There is the principle of love your neighbor as yourself.
You use your head. You pray. You take counsel together as a society. And if the community is not too spiritually deprived, they ought to be able to come up with a moral solution.
Another good example is your maternal uncle marrying his niece. Since scripture repeatedly emphasizes that uncles and aunts are "near kin" as the reason for not marrying, then a prohibition on maternal uncles and nieces marrying although not directly specified should be a no-brainer.
Modern genetic studies would weigh in on that as well showing that the risk of genetic defect is higher. Under the principle of love your neighbor as yourself, you don't want to risk a 5% chance of bringing a baby into the world with a genetic defect.
If this was ancient Israel, and she decided to practice witchcraft as an adult, yes.
I said the command was only given to Israel, but it provides moral guidance to the rest of us.
So...are you ready to publish that list of which parts of God's commandments are moral precepts and which are just annoying restrictions on the ancient israelites? So I can't kill my mother, and I have to kill witches, but it's ok to eat bats and pigs--I tell you, you really need to publish that list.
I think most people know the difference. You can't kill your mother. You can't kill witches before they are outlawed, and if you want to eat bats and pigs you can. And based on modern medicine, I'd stay away from bats until I knew for certain whether cooking killed rabies or you find a reliable test to see if they are infected or not.
yea, but, I don't need god's help at all to figure this out. In fact, God's been misleadingly unhelpful about this. This isn't much of an argument for God's unquestionable moral precepts from the bible at all. In fact, this is an argument an intrasigent athiest would mount.
so it was a moral precept in 1800bc, but it's not now? Is there a time limit on God's moral laws?
Well, that's pretty much your argument, isn't it? If, by some strange chance they are perplexed about whether to stone witches or eat bats, they can always ask a priest, right? Thank God for priests.
Bats are a common delicacy in some parts of the world, where I doubt they do much laboratory testing. So...getting back to our story, by what means might I know which parts of Genesis are God's moral laws, and which are just sly jokes on the israelites? These are God's absolute moral laws we're talking about, after all. Surely we have some better guidance available than that we "just know"?
How many times do I have to tell you this?
I believe it's a moral lapse to allow witchcraft to be openly practiced. However, dominion over the earth was given to man, and we are a nation of laws and elected officials.
God never told all the gentile nations to kill witches. He did tell Israel to. The reasons that God gave Israel for killing spiritists, "that they would be defiled by them", is something that logically the rest of us should pay heed to. But God hasn't ordered gentiles to kill witches, and therefore we aren't bound to. It's not a good idea to allow witchcraft, but it is up to us corporally as a nation to decide whether to.
You have to distinquish between the law of conscience which we are all under, the Adamic and Noahic Gen 9(1-17) law which applied to the whole earth, and the Mosaic Covenant that only Israel was under (Deut. 4:7-8; Ps. 147:19-20; Mal. 4:4).
The Mosaic covenant includes several parts. It includes moral law, which is instructive to us all about what it means to love others and things you shouldn't do. In other words, nothing in the mosaic law binds us, but to the extent that it illuminates the Noahic law, then it's instructive.
The Mosaic law includes civil law which only applied to Israel. It included ceremonial and Kosher laws which only applied to Israel. The kosher laws were to separate Israel from other nations. (Lev. 11:44-45; Deut. 7:6; 14:1-2)
Gentiles had no dietary restrictions except not to eat an animal with the blood still in it.
The Mosaic Law vs the Law of Christ
You can apply your the law of conscience to your witch problem. You are required to love the witch as she/he is a special creation of God as are we all. But practicing and consulting witchcraft is a sin against God. Whether it's a criminal violation is up to the society of man, who God gave dominion over the earth. In Israel it was a criminal violation and the death penalty was specifically authorized and commanded by God to Israel.
That is one of the funniest links I have ever read.
It takes the poetry of the already-known-to-be-mistranslated King James Bible and says it is "science?"
Case in point (just an example or perhaps an exemplar):
The bible includes reasonably complete descriptions of the hydrologic cycle.[3]
That is no more a description of th hydrological cycle than Ook Grunt would have seen from his Cro Magnon cave.
Id doesn't descrbe (or enen mention) evaporation and how they form into clouds. No mention of Hydrogen/Oxygen, Heat Exchange. It doesn't describe any PROCESS at all. It merely notes clouds happen and rain happens.
The rest of the site is equally hilarious.
But thanks for the laugh. I hope you didn't use these so-called "Biblical science" references for any actual science classes.
It mentions vapors ascending, that is evaporation. It doesn't have to be an all encompassing thorough explanation to be valid.
We can't offer a complete description now as evidenced by our inability to predict the weather.
But I'll grant you that in this case, "vapors ascending", that level of science, could have been observed.
How many times do I have to tell you this?
Until it makes a modicum of consistent sense, probably. You just recently told me the witch thing was, indeed, one of God's moral laws. Now you say:
"God never told all the gentile nations to kill witches. He did tell Israel to."
When you have a consistent story, I'll take your whining instead of coming up with a sensible answer more seriously.
I believe it's a moral lapse to allow witchcraft to be openly practiced. However, dominion over the earth was given to man, and we are a nation of laws and elected officials.
yea, well what God said was "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". That's the moral law. If we, in our "dominion over the earth" by "elected officials", don't kill witches, that's a moral lapse. Being a witch is not the moral lapse in question here--our failure to kill witches is the moral lapse.
So let's just be clear about the original question, which I'll answer for you, since you are so persistently shy. You think killing witches is a god given moral imperative, which means you think if our government was behaving morally, it would be killing my 18 year old next door neighbor who casts spells and worships the devil.
Of course, you won't say that--because you know that makes you look suspiciously like a moral idiot.
But God hasn't ordered gentiles to kill witches
Than I presume he also didn't lay the 10 commandments--which is right there in the same place in Genesis, all issued to Moses in one God's breath--on the gentiles either, and killing my mother is, in fact, not a sin prohibited to gentiles by the 10 commandments.
Once again cleverly avoiding trying to address the moral status of the laws of Genesis. I just re-read Gen 9(1-17) to find out what what God doesn't forbid to us gentiles, and am happy to report that we can covet our mothers, commit adultery, and worship false idols, all without sin.
You are required to love the witch as she/he is a special creation of God as are we all.
Just as was the case with Torquemada.
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