"The entire tenor of this thing just reeks of religious bigotry."
Struck a nerve, he did. What hypocrisy. It's okay to try to push teaching of ID and a supernatural cause in high school biology classes and it's okay to mock the ToE and call it a religion, but it's not okay to explore ID and Creationism as religious beliefs in a college level comparative religion course.
I'll assure you that my ancestors were Divinely created.
It shows that the academics of the non-science arts are much to blame for the original start of the controversy and the continued bitter actions.
I think there are Christians that believe the book of Genesis as a literal text in matters of planetary and chronological history that go much beyond my understanding. But overall, most conservative Christians have supported some of the State Board's actions due to the actions of the social science academic community over the the years in secondary and other levels of education. Most of us understand that Science teachers with science degrees aren't schooled in any versions of theory that are outside the scientific mainstream and we don't see science classes being used by the science teacher's as anti-religous propaganda forums. We do, however, note that for three decades that sort of action is much more prevelant in the other wings of education as a means of tearing down Judeaic/Chirstian religous belief and promoting a Dewey style Secular Humanist religion in its place.
Seeing that, we feel the pedulumn had swung too far and see the State Board as applying a corrective in the only manner possible: self-government.
This exchange of e-mails shows how even University departments of Religion are used by the social science wing of academia to accomplish those ends.
The social science teacher is able to marginalize traditional religion by treating it as being supplanted by scientific knowledge and classifying all religion as mythology. Its a game of saying, "Didn't you learn about evolution in science class?" and "Didn't you learn about the history of mythology in History and the age of the planet in Geology?"
Its not the science teachers that push this conflict. It is those teachers of the liberal arts that wish to marginalize religion, western tradition and our heritage in general to promote a quasi-religious secular humanism and the leftist view of the world in general.