Posted on 02/28/2006 4:05:45 AM PST by PatrickHenry
House lawmakers scuttled a bill that would have required public school students to be told that evolution is not empirically proven - the latest setback for critics of evolution.
The bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars, had said it was time to rein in teachers who were teaching that man descended from apes and rattling the faith of students. The Senate earlier passed the measure 16-12.
But the bill failed in the House on a 28-46 vote Monday. The bill would have required teachers to tell students that evolution is not a fact and the state doesn't endorse the theory.
Rep. Scott Wyatt, a Republican, said he feared passing the bill would force the state to then address hundreds of other scientific theories - "from Quantum physics to Freud" - in the same manner.
"I would leave you with two questions," Wyatt said. "If we decide to weigh in on this part, are we going to begin weighing in on all the others and are we the correct body to do that?"
Buttars said he didn't believe the defeat means that most House members think Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.
"I don't believe that anybody in there really wants their kids to be taught that their great-grandfather was an ape," Buttars said.
The vote represents the latest loss for critics of evolution. In December, a federal judge barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes.
Also last year, a federal judge ordered the school system in suburban Atlanta's Cobb County to remove from biology textbooks stickers that called evolution a theory, not a fact.
Earlier this year, a rural California school district canceled an elective philosophy course on intelligent design and agreed never to promote the topic in class again.
But critics of evolution got a boost in Kansas in November when the state Board of Education adopted new science teaching standards that treat evolution as a flawed theory, defying the view of science groups.
Also watered down or the physics and math majors?
There was some kind of college math for poets, but we also had, and I sometimes taught, college bio for poets. Nice watching the kids have aha! moments.
As for your notion that only a math major or similar can effectively use math, codswallop.
A good deal of meterology, population genetics and I don't know what all eslse requires math fluency thru calc and watered down courses wouldn't have done it.
BTW, understanding evolution requires a fair amount of bio fluency...witness the laemetable failure of responses regarding viral insertion evidence.
Oddly, rather a lot of them voted for Hinduism and Islam.
The modern translation has been jimmied to fix the geography. Try the Greek or the Vulgate versions.
Here's the Vulgate:
et iterum exiens de finibus Tyri venit per Sidonem ad mare Galilaeae inter medios fines Decapoleos
...which I translate as "and again, leaving from the territory of Tyre he came through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee through the territory of the Decapolis."
There is no justification for the NIV translation. The territory of the Decapolis is accusative case, indicating motion, not arrival. The Sea of Galilee is ablative; that's where they ended up. Remember Latin is an inflected language; word order denotes stress, not meaning.
The Greek leads you to the same conclusion. Biblical scholars agree.
Spoken like a man with experience.
Long before the world was created there was an island, floating in the sky, upon which the Sky People lived. They lived quietly and happily. No one ever died or was born or experienced sadness. However one day one of the Sky Women realized she was going to give birth to twins. She told her husband, who flew into a rage. In the center of the island there was a tree which gave light to the entire island since the sun hadn't been created yet. He tore up this tree, creating a huge hole in the middle of the island. Curiously, the woman peered into the hole. Far below she could see the waters that covered the earth. At that moment her husband pushed her. She fell through the hole, tumbling towards the waters below.
Water animals already existed on the earth, so far below the floating island two birds saw the Sky Woman fall. Just before she reached the waters they caught her on their backs and brought her to the other animals. Determined to help the woman they dove into the water to get mud from the bottom of the seas. One after another the animals tried and failed. Finally, Little Toad tried and when he reappeared his mouth was full of mud. The animals took it and spread it on the back of Big Turtle. The mud began to grow and grow and grow until it became the size of North America.
Then the woman stepped onto the land. She sprinkled dust into the air and created stars. Then she created the moon and sun.
The Sky Woman gave birth to twin sons. She named one Sapling. He grew to be kind and gentle. She named the other Flint and his heart was as cold as his name. They grew quickly and began filling the earth with their creations.
Sapling created what is good. He made animals that are useful to humans. He made rivers that went two ways and into these he put fish without bones. He made plants that people could eat easily. If he was able to do all the work himself there would be no suffering.
Flint destroyed much of Sapling's work and created all that is bad. He made the rivers flow only in one direction. He put bones in fish and thorns on berry bushes. He created winter, but Sapling gave it life so that it could move to give way to Spring. He created monsters which his brother drove beneath the Earth.
Eventually Sapling and Flint decided to fight till one conquered the other. Neither was able to win at first, but finally Flint was beaten. Because he was a god Flint could not die, so he was forced to live on Big Turtle's back. Occasionally his anger is felt in the form of a volcano.
The Iroquois people hold a great respect for all animals. This is mirrored in their creation myth by the role the animals play. Without the animals' help the Sky Woman may have sunk to the bottom of the sea and earth may not have been created.
Way back in time all men emerged from a single hole in the earth. There was a mockingbird there at the entrance to the hole. He gave each a name and a language. To one he would say, "You shall be a Hopi and speak that tongue." To another, "You shall be an Apache and speak that language." And so it went for all who came from the hole, including the White People. The earth was still covered in darkness in those days so the peoples came together and decided to change things. They made the sun and the moon and placed them in the sky. With light and warmth things got easier for the people so the chiefs of all the races and tribes got together and decided to break up and go to different places. They decided to go eastward to where the sun rises and that whoever got there first was to cause a shower of stars to fall from the sky, and then everyone would see this and stop where they were. The Whites, always impatient, soon grew tired. Their women rubbed flakes of skin from their bodies and molded them into horses. Thus, mounted on these speedy animals, the Whites were first to arrive in the east. Thereupon a shower of stars fell to the ground and all remained where they were at the time.
You have such issues with biologists. Did your wife run off with one, or what?
The fact of the matter is that the testimony of the evangelists is some of the best eyewitness and secondary historical evidence of events in recorded history. It has stood the test of time. I would conclude that those who deign to question it, should be viewed as having their ownsecondary agenda.
Really? Because you say so?
Feel free to dispute my translation of the Vulgate in post number 463. What's the matter? Your Latin and Greek a little rusty?
Finnish and Hungarian share a common ancestor (and maybe Estonian or Latvian, I don't remember.)
Bantu is a group of languages sharing a common ancestor.
I haven't read much about the Chinese.
Comrie's book, "The World's Major Languages" is an older reference that's pretty good.
Need caffeine break.
watered down FOR, not or
laementable = lamentable
eslse=else
Well, like the Toe, the Bible makes predictions, too!
Matthew 7
13. "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
14. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
)Remember: this stuff is GOOD advice!)
Uh, no. Humans aren't "apes". Not by standard convention. The argument is that humans should be classified as apes if both chimps and gorillas are, because chimps are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas.
The premise here is that a taxon should always include ALL descendant species on a given limb (and ALL its branches) beyond a given branching node. This is the contention especially of "cladistic" taxonomy.
IOW if gorillas branch off first, THEN chimps and humans split, you have to call all three species by the same group name, and whatever you call gorillas you must also call both humans and chimps. You can only distinguish humans and chimps from gorillas by putting them together in some subgroup.
However this type of cladistic taxonomy is NOT the conventional form, and is probably neither practical or workable if implemented exclusively, completely and consistently. We're always going to have to sometimes and somehow recognize that particular lineages are sometimes sufficiently "divergent" with respect to others within their "clade" that they warrant a different name.
For example, by the exact same logic that humans are "apes," humans (and chimps and gorillas) are also "reptiles". It turns out that cladistically there are no such things as "mammals". I.e. there's no way to separate mammals from ALL reptiles (or rather the reverse) by a single branching event. The reason is that mammals branched off from reptiles very early, then there are lots of other reptiles (that we insist on calling reptiles) and then birds branch off from reptiles.
You can't (by the cladistic logic) then call reptiles, mammals and birds by different names that all have the same "rank". And yet we do. Further you can't call mammals anything different from (all of what we call) reptiles, since mammals (and birds) are simply a lineage within reptiles.
Where'd THAT line come from????
Linnaeus (pre Darwin) also classified humans as a type of ape.
The best way is to stop taking a bath in it
Some other female fell through a hole in the sky as in the Iriquois tale. Was it Finnish?
OUCH!
DOUBLE Terrible Twos!!!!
Which is it...Mark doesn't know his geography or Jesus went off mission?
Despite your inconsistency...How is either of your contentions supported by what Mark reported (Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre, and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of Decapolis. - Mark 7:31)?
They are not supported. You have no evidence of your claims...Thus, you are veracity-challenged.
In answer to your second claim that Jesus went off mission to the lost sheep of Israel by taking the route that Mark reported, have you read Matthew 15?
It demonstrates that Jesus was on mission in that route...besides what intimate knowledge do you have of the Father's will for Jesus that the rest of us don't have concerning his route from Tyre to the region of Decapolis?
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