Posted on 10/14/2006 11:16:50 AM PDT by lizol
Keep Darwin's 'lies' out of Polish schools: education official 2 hours.
WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's deputy education minister called for the influential evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin not to be taught in the country's schools, branding them "lies."
"The theory of evolution is a lie, an error that we have legalised as a common truth," Miroslaw Orzechowski, the deputy minister in the country's right-wing coalition government, was quoted as saying by the Gazeta Wyborcza daily Saturday.
Orzechowski said the theory was "a feeble idea of an aged non-believer," who had come up with it "perhaps because he was a vegetarian and lacked fire inside him."
The evolution theory of the 19th-century British naturalist holds that existing animals and plants are the result of natural selection which eliminated inferior species gradually over time. This conflicts with the "creationist" theory that God created all life on the planet in a finite number.
Orzechowski called for a debate on whether Darwin's theory should be taught in schools.
"We should not teach lies, just as we should not teach bad instead of good, or ugliness instead of beauty," he said. "We are not going to withdraw (Darwin's theory) from the school books, but we should start to discuss it."
The deputy minister is a member of a Catholic far-right political group, the League of Polish Families. The league's head, Roman Giertych, is education minister in the conservative coalition government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Giertych's father Maciej, who represents the league in the European Parliament, organised a discussion there last week on Darwinism. He described the theory as "not supported by proof" and called for it be removed from school books.
The far-right joined the government in May when Kaczynski's ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, after months of ineffective minority government, formed a coalition including LPR and the populist Sambroon party.
Roman Giertych has not spoken out on Darwinism, but the far-right politician's stance on other issues has stirred protest in Poland since he joined the government.
A school pupils' association was expected to demonstrate in front of the education ministry on Saturday to call for his resignation.
You're aruging with a former Pope, Fester, not me. In any case, explaining the concepts to you would be an exercise in futility.
The answer lies in:
1. Christian parents removing their kids from gummint skewels and similar brain laundries.
Then the major problem will be that Christians are forced nevertheless to pay for the gummint skewels as taxpayers and that other Christians are farmed likewise. Jefferson said that there was no worse tyranny than forcing a man to subsidize the beliefs that he despises.
The answer to this problem is to shut down the gummint skewels, expect parents to pay directly for their own kids' education either by homeschooling or creating schools (with support from sympathetic folks) that actually educate the kids which our public schools will seldom be accused of doing.
This answer is called conservatism. It also resolves the problem of he National Education Association and its leftist agendas, helps us to have our children taught the positive history of the United States and of Western Civilization, the truths of religion, grammar, spelling, languages, mathematics, actual science, writing, and what not. If you don't like the school where I send my kids or to homeschool, create a school of your own (without my tax money).
I feel no obligation whatsoever to answer to you or others as to how my kids are educated. I certainly extend to you the same courtesy as to your kids, if any.
I believe in God, the Teaching Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, Scripture, and Revealed Truth. I don't argue "Creation science" or ID and I don't have to. St. Thomas Aquinas and a lot of other folks, including the authors of Scripture, have already done that for me. America's a wonderful country. You can believe in any or all of those things or in Darwinism as you please. You can educate your kids as you see fit with no interference from me. So can I without one nickel of yours. Likewise, those who disagree with you.
Do you have a respectable conservative reason for wanting to dominate me and my family or to dictate what my kids will learn or believe? I didn't think so. Wouldn't matter if you did. I shall educate my kids as I see fit.
I trust that I have not been too frank.
You posted the words of a former Pope verbatim and drew our attention to them. I thought you read them, contemplated them, and agreed with them. That is why I asked the questions of you. If you don't care to answer that's fine, but please don't intimate that I am the dolt for your refusal to engage the subject.
Yes, some do teach evolution. In our case, the Catholic parents have created, funded and maintained our own schools at lower tuition than the diocesan schools run by Sr. Mary Pantsuited Feminist.
As I pointed out to Fester, Catholic schools teach evolution.
Are you saying that the regular Catholic schools are not adequate and that a group of you has started a new one with different teaching guidelines?
2. Read Pascendi Domenici Gregis and Lamentabile Sane (Pope St. Pius X, 1907). That demonstrates that you don't know any more about Catholic theology than you do about your imagined ancestry. Darwin was, ummmmm, NOT one of us. And, Aquinas should give you real nightmares.
Sorry again. That last was to Black Elk.
The Dark Ages are called as such because the biblical texts fell into disuse. So it happens these days that evolutionism strives to lead us into the Dark Ages once again.
Been there, done that. Ten years under the sisters and brothers. And I have the scars to prove it. My knuckles will never be the same.
And that is where I first learned science, and evolution.
You are living in your own looney-bin world. Really.
Not at all. Look up how the Dark Ages got their name, and then we'll see who's in their "loony bin world."
I have read them, and contemplated them, and I think the (former) Pope's perspective is quite interesting. Irrespective of one's religion, or lack thereof, no one can rationally say that Pope John Paul II was an atheist, unserious or uncaring about his religion, or any of the other contumelies flung at people right here on FR who understand the Theory of Evolution.
I'm sorry if I confused you. I don't intimate you are a dolt for my refusal to engage the subject, it's because of what you post on your own.
Petrarch wrote that history had had two periods: the Classic period of the Romans and Greeks, followed by a time of darkness, in which he saw himself as still living. Humanists believed one day the Roman Empire would rise again and restore Classic cultural purity. The concept of the European Dark Ages thus began as an ideological campaign by humanists to promote Classical culture, and was therefore not a neutral historical analysis. It was invented to express disapproval of one period in time, and the promotion of another.I see Petrarch, the inventor of the term, with a nostalgia for the good old enlightened pagan times when we had culture and civilization and weren't overrun with monks and other barbarians. It looks like the very opposite of your claim.
Ah, for the good old days of lice, disease, killing witches, and a life expectancy of about 40.
You throw out many interesting ideas, most of which, like the one above, are irrefutable, and, consequently, ignored by the too-clever-by-half opposition. In any event, you have the evolutionaries on the ropes, I'd say, and I'm no Johnny 'Red Shoes' Doogan.
But returning to this idea, it was the core of the Pope's arguments in his recent scholarly speech, that provoked so much noise, all of it, as we know, for the wrong reasons. Have we learnt anything from it? From all the U.S. commentators that I've read, only one seemed to get it, Bret Stephens of the WSJ (a Jew if I'm not mistaken.) His article is worth looking up and may still be posted on OpinionJournal.com. Reason and faith. The Pope (and Bret) said it better than I ever can.
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