Posted on 01/17/2006 11:24:31 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A rural school district agreed to stop teaching a religion-based alternative to evolution as part of a court settlement filed Tuesday, a legal group said.
Frazier Mountain High School will stop teaching a philosophy class discussing the theory of "intelligent design" this week and won't teach it in the future, said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Officials at the El Tejon Unified School District were not immediately available for comment.
A federal judge in Fresno had been scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday afternoon on whether to halt the class midway through the monthlong winter term.
A group of parents sued the district last week, saying it violated the constitutional separation of church and state by offering "Philosophy of Design," a course taught by a minister's wife that advanced the theory that life is so complex it must have been created by God.
"The course was designed to advance religious theories on the origins of life, including creationism and its offshoot, 'intelligent design,'" said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.
In a landmark lawsuit, Americans United for Separation of Church and State had successfully blocked Dover, Pa., schools last month from teaching intelligent design in science courses. [Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al..]
El Tejon school officials had claimed the subject was proper for a philosophy class.
The high school in the Tehachapi Mountains about 75 miles north of Los Angeles draws 500 students from a dozen small communities.
Sharon Lemburg, a social studies teacher and soccer coach who was teaching "Philosophy of Design," defended the course in a letter to the weekly Mountain Enterprise.
"I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach," she wrote.
Similar battles are being fought in Georgia and Kansas. Critics of "intelligent design" say it is biblical creationism in disguise, but defenders argue it is based on science and doesn't require adherence to any religious belief.
I think that one was Geology.
Ya know, "the Earth is really old" kinda stuff.
What if Cardinal Richelieu or Count Otto von Bismarck had prior engagements?
;->
Ah! Just so. Thanks. It's difficult keeping the details of all our nefarious evilutionist conspiracies straight!
No, actually there are NONE that do. Literally nobody takes all of the Bible literally.
For instance the Book of Amos has a passage declaring that God "creates" the wind, the word being (a form of) the same used in Genesis, which literalist creationists sometimes inform us only refers to creation ex nihilo, i.e. purely miraculous acts of creation. But no creationist ever complains about meteorology being treated as a purely naturalistic science "leaving God out". The same case, as I've often pointed out, exists for embryology and human development, where the Bible, sometimes directly quoting God Himself, repeatedly affirms that God is immediately involved in the creation of individual human bodies (not just "souls") in the womb: He "forms" their "inward parts," "knits them together" of bone and sinew, etc. And yet biblical literalists have no problem adulating purely naturalistic accounts of human development as representing the "miracle of creation".
The examples are virtually limitless. There are for instance direct and unambiguous prohibitions against women in church wearing jewelry and other adornments, and admonitions against they're leaving their hair uncovered, yet virtually no fundamentalist churches enforce (or even encourage the observation of) either Biblical mandate.
As you should.
I just about lost your post in amongst all the other stuff going on. I think I need a program to manage my posts.
Your post #445...I stand corrected, you are absolutely right...I should have said, that there are those who take the word of the Bible literally, but ONLY when it suits their own purpose...Your examples are spot on correct...Thanks for pointing that out...
Losing peoples posts is often a common happening with me...with real life going on all around, and posts on the different threads flying fast and furious, sometimes its easy to miss something...that is why, sometimes when I have time, I go back and read different threads, and often I am surprised to find I missed something really important...
C'est la vie [sigh]
So let me get this straight so I understand. If you are a creationists and not an evolutionist, you get banned and your name placed on that black list? That hardly seems fair.
A number of those guys up there are evolutionists. In death all are equal.
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