Private education versus forced payment for education IS the issue that OP raised that you considered bizarre. That's the "blood-sucking parasite" part.
Evolution stands ONLY because it's forced on people in government schools. That's the thesis.
In a free market of school selection, it would not stand.
And Catholics do not believe anything that detracts from the fact of God's being the Creator of "heaven and earth." (The Apostle's Creed.)
They are forced by intrusive government requirements to include things in their curriculum that I'm sure they'd handle quite differently if they were fully free.
Just one Catholic high school in our large metropolitan area had more National Merit Scholars than all of the public high schools combined.
Apostle's Creed dittos. At least we agree on that! :o)
Best, OP
And that thesis is complete horse crap.
In a free market of school selection, it would not stand.
Utter nonsense. Evolution "stands" not because it happens to be taught in public schools (and you're "forgetting" to mention that it's taught in a great many private schools as well). Evolution is taught in schools (of all types) because it "stands" on its own, and it "stands" because every time people check the real-world evidence, it overwhelmingly supports evolution. In short, evolution "stands" because it's true, and keeps getting reconfirmed and revalidated over and over again.
I'd like to know where you got the bizarre notion that it's only some empty shell of a fashionable notion, kept alive only because people are told about it only in public schools... Come on, be honest -- you've been reading too many creationist pamphlets again, haven't you?
Just one Catholic high school in our large metropolitan area had more National Merit Scholars than all of the public high schools combined.
I'd like to see some documentation for this claim (it sounds like the kind of factoid that gets passed around avidly without being verified by its promulgators), but even if it's true, it's hardly a good indicator of academic excellence. The National Merit Scholar program is not automatically awarded based on merit -- a necessary step is that the student send in an *application*. Your statistic may simply be a result of that school aggressively ensuring that every student who meets the initial requirements gets off their butts and sends in an NMS application, whereas other schools left it up to the students themselves (resulting in far lower application rates).
A much better indicator would be raw SAT rates or some other indicator which is not as "self-selecting" as the NMS program.