Posted on 12/28/2005 3:49:52 AM PST by PatrickHenry
US. District Judge John E. Jones III's decision to bar the teaching of ''intelligent design'' in the Dover, Pa., public school district on grounds that it is a thinly veiled effort to introduce a religious view of the world's origins is welcome for at least two reasons.
First, it exposes the sham attempt to take through the back door what proponents have no chance of getting through the front door. Jones rebuked advocates of ''intelligent design,'' saying they repeatedly lied about their true intentions. He noted that many of them had said publicly that their intent was to introduce into the schools a biblical account of creation. Jones properly wondered how people who claim to have such strong religious convictions could lie, thus violating prohibitions in the book that they proclaim as their source of truth and standard for living.
Culture has long passed by advocates of intelligent design, school prayer and numerous other beliefs and practices that were once tolerated, even promoted, in public education. People who think that they can reclaim the past have been watching too many repeats of Leave it to Beaver on cable television. Those days are not coming back anytime soon, if at all.
Culture, including the culture of education, now opposes what it once promoted or at least tolerated. The secular left, which resists censorship in all its forms when it comes to sex, library books and assigned materials that teach the ''evils'' of capitalism and ''evil America,'' is happy to censor any belief that can be tagged ``religious.''
Jones' ruling will be appealed and after it is eventually and predictably upheld by a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees (Jones was named to the federal bench by President Bush, who has advocated the teaching of creation), those who have tried to make the state do its job for them will have yet another opportunity to wise up.
This leads to the second reason for welcoming Jones' ruling. It should awaken religious conservatives to the futility of trying to make a secular state reflect their beliefs. Too many people have wasted too much time and money since the 1960s, when prayer and Bible reading were outlawed in public schools, trying to get these and a lot of other things restored. The modern secular state should not be expected to teach Genesis 1, or any other book of the Bible, or any other religious text.
That the state once did such things, or at least did not undermine what parents taught their children, is irrelevant. The culture in which we now live no longer reflects the beliefs of our grandparents' generation.
For better, or for worse (and a strong case can be made that things are much worse), people who cling to the beliefs of previous generations have been given another chance to do what they should have been doing all along.
Religious parents should exercise the opportunity that has always been theirs. They should remove their children from state schools with their ''instruction manuals'' for turning them into secular liberals and place them in private schools -- or home school them -- where they will be taught the truth, according to their parents' beliefs. Too many parents who would never send their children to a church on Sunday that taught doctrines they believed to be wrong have had no problem placing them in state schools five days a week where they are taught conflicting doctrines and ideas.
Private schools or home schooling costs extra money (another reason to favor school choice) and extra time, but what is a child worth? Surely, a child is more valuable than material possessions.
Our children are our letters to the future. It's up to parents to decide whether they want to send them ''first class'' or ``postage due.''
Rulings such as this should persuade parents who've been waffling to take their kids and join the growing exodus from state schools into educational environments more conducive to their beliefs.
One point I would like to disagree with is what happens to a theory when it is repeatedly supported. It stays a theory. It does not become a law, as that is a different creature entirely. Picture a theory as an explanation for something, "It does this and this because of this and that." A law is more of a formula; laws of motion for example.
I also think theories are endpoints. However, theories can be expanded, refined or even tossed, so there is no loss of the will to test them.
On your other points, there is amazingly little fraud and lots of transitionals. See PatrickHenry's List-O-Links.
Name some.
I'll start the list off for you. Piltdown Man. Discovered as a fraud by scientists, because it didn't fit into the evolutionary picture as it should.
You continue.
Indeed. But we've had 5 years of a Republican administration, and how far has the school-choice movement progressed? Instead of school choice, Bush gave us the Teddy Kennedy monstrosity, "No Child Left Behind" (and no taxpayer unrobbed to pay for it).
MILLIONS of kids are "left behind" because their parents can't afford to send them to non-public schools. We need tax credits or tax deductions for education, but the GOP -- and Bush -- haven't delivered.
So you're just going to give up?
If religious denominations truly wanted private schools they'd find a way to fund them rather than build grand palaces for preaching that aren't used but an hour or two a week.
If the public school monopoly is ever going to be broken, it will have to be done by removing all the children from it first. Trying to break the school stranglehold is like breaking the union rules on General Motors. It will never happen. GM will have to go belly up first, and the public schools will have to be closed for lack of students.
Jones' ruling will be appealed and after it is eventually and predictably upheld by a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees...
I doubt that the ruling will be appealed because a new school board was elected.
Cordially,
There's a dark side to homeschooling that you're not taking into consideration here. There's an alarming increase from the drug and low class culture who are using homeschooling as an excuse to avoid the hassle of sending their children to school. Every year public elementary school teachers have to deal with 7 & 8 year olds being brought into their classes still not able to write their name. For that reason homeschooling has the potential to bring more government interference into the parents lives not less.
Thought it may help if your smugness about the irrefutability of evolution was tweaked.
Do you really expect to get a straight answer for a question like that?
Yes.
No, more like the shaking of heads of people who have heard the same falsehoods (like "No such transitional fossils have been found" and "the fossil record contradicts evolution") over and over and over and over again. Learn about some of the thousands of transitional fossils known to paleontologists before saying such things.
Science requires an open mind.
True. But people seem to be under the very false impression that having an open mind is the only important thing in science. Science, and pursuit of the truth thereof, more importantly, requires strict consideration of all available evidence and the logical consequences that result, irrespective of what effect it might have on one's preconceived worldview. Cold, uncompromising logic is as important to science as creativity; a fact that most of the general public can't seem to come to grips with. Pseudoscience is much warmer and friendlier and "fair"; but in the end, it fails to explain what is observed. There is such a thing as being so open-minded that one's brain falls out, ya know. Ignoring conclusions directly warranted by solidly established evidence to make science more "religiously friendly" or "politically correct" is doing just that.
Nope. One way I'm not "giving up" is by criticizing the GOP - and Bush - for not doing anything to get us school choice. If more freepers, and other GOP supporters, were willing to hold the GOP leadership's feet to the fire, we might actually get some conservative reforms, such as school choice, enacted. So far, there hasn't been much of any conservative domestic reform from this administration. A lot of spending, though. (And we'll be paying for it with higher taxes - for example, the Alternative Minimum Tax - sooner than we think). So no, I'm not "giving up." It's Bushbots - people who refuse to insist that the president promote truly conservative policies, and who refuse to criticize him if he doesn't - who have "given up."
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Note that the Dover School Board members who set this policy WERE THROWN OUT OF OFFICE. Still ... the Judge ruled on a point that by then, with the new school board, was mooted.
Why? To establish the new Judicial Supremacy Clause of the Federal Constitution. Don't look to the text of the Constitution for it, it is not there. Don't look to the Federalist Papers for it, it is not there. It is an invention of the Judges themselves.
Good read by good columnist. Thanks for grabbing this and posting. I always enjoy learning about ID - and the conversations on both sides !
I find it interesting that you can imagine a rate of change that would produce the observed human diversity in the few thousand years since Noah, but ID advocates have trouble seeing the observed diversity of living things arising over billions of years. Someone is just plain wrong about this.
Do you have any math to support your position? Rates of mutation, and so forth?
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