Posted on 08/18/2008 9:35:10 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
With five seats on the State Board of Education up for grabs this year, education advocates say how children learn about evolution hangs in the balance -- and who voters choose could affect Kansas' national reputation.
A frequent flip-flop between moderate and conservative majorities on the 10-member board has resulted in the state changing its science standards four times in the past eight years.
Conservatives have pushed for standards casting doubt on evolution, and moderates have said intelligent design does not belong in the science classroom.
In 2007, a new 6-4 moderate majority removed standards that called evolution into question.
This year, none of the three moderates whose seats are up for election are running again. Only one of the two conservative incumbents is running for re-election...
(Excerpt) Read more at kansas.com ...
And your point is?
What’s happening is that the evos are trying to push the unsubstantiated idea that if those scientists in you list were alive today, they’d be evos.
*roll eyes*
So I’ll raise them a *Darwin recanted*.
Yeah, I was kind of curious about that myself. Having said that, I kind of like it better that way. It shows that Creation Scientists stuck to their guns after the advent of Darwin’s fairytale.
Doesn’t seem there was much to deal with here.
I read the whole thing. The point is that while his faith provided a motivation and a context for his research, he didn't let it get in the way of analyzing his results. When his results didn't conform to what his faith told him they should be, he nevertheless reported them accurately.
This is in sharp contrast to the practices of today's "Creation Scientists" (which is not the same thing as a scientist who believes in Creation, as you know, so you should stop pretending it is). The Statement of Faith of Answers in Genesis, home of Creation Science, says "No apparent, perceived, or claimed interpretation of evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record." Confronted with Faraday's results, today's Creation Scientistists would have insisted that "certain phenomena are best explained by a gravelectric force," come up with a bunch of excuses for why their experiments hadn't found any sign of such a force, and tried to get the gravelectric force mentioned in science class anyway.
That Faraday didn't do that--that he didn't decide his results weren't valid because they contradicted his faith--is why we still know his name today.
I specifically recall that the ACLU...made sure that everyone involved on the plaintiffs’ side understood that we were not trying to ban Pandas from the library, because the ACLU doesn’t do that sort of thing....
LOL even the most deluded apologist for the anti christian litigation unit understands they do EXACTLY this kind of thing.
I’ve experienced it for myself in my own school district when they badgered the school board to remove ‘Christmas’ from the school calendar here.
Your dog won’t hunt either and needs a desperate visit to the vet!
You are correct. None of the linked articles document any removal of books from libraries, or keeping anyone from reading any books on their own time.
There are (and always will be) frauds on both sides of the debate. Faraday is one of ours. Get used to it.
his results contradicted his faith?
Where’d you get that from?
Geology was developed as a sciene to confirm the Genesis flood. Research and argument from evidence was quite popular until the direction of the evidence turned. If you want to see where the rift between science and religion began, you need look no further than the history of geology. That is where you begin to separate those willing to follow evidence from those willing to make excuses.
Perhaps you should work on your anger and you will obtain a better understanding.
I support keeping Christmas (and Easter) on the school calendar but still support keeping ID out of the science class.
If you demand to remain delusional about the censorship, as you wish.
Here’s yet another instance:
Censoring intelligent design
One man’s personal experience of state school anti-Christian intolerance in the USA
As a music teacher, the author, Roger Paull, received glowing commendation from parents, teachers and even the State Governor. But he’s now been summarily barred, and despite repeated requests for an explanation from the District Area Superintendent as to why, Mr Paull has yet to receive any response.
by Roger Paull
The year was 1996. I had just moved to Arizona with my family, and though as a musician I had some income, it was not enough. So I worked as a substitute elementary school teacher.
At the beginning of the day the students would recite the American Pledge of Allegiance. In many schools, students would then recite this well-known excerpt from America’s Declaration of Independence:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, … ’
I love my country, and I thought that was great—when I was in school we just said the pledge. One day I asked the kids I was teaching if they understood what they were reciting from the Declaration of Independence. I was not too surprised when no one put their hand up to affirm that they did.
My three-plus years spent ‘subbing’ with the district was somewhat notable. One of my music classes singing the Lee Greenwood song, ‘God Bless the USA’ caught the attention of the principal, then a US senator, then the governor’s office, and so on. In due course, there I was, a substitute teacher, putting on probably the biggest elementary school patriotic concert in Arizona state history; and it was going to be broadcast around the world as well as on several Phoenix TV stations. It was quite an honor for any teacher, especially a sub. I was given a great deal of praise by parents, teachers and even Governor Napolitano herself. In fact the principal of the school wrote a glowing evaluation of my performance as a teacher and asked me to take the position permanently. She even offered to help me get state certification.
… anti-religious propaganda; the kids sat there like little sponges soaking it up
But these ‘glory days’ were not to last. The next school year I took a two-day assignment in a middle school science class. The teacher left me a four-part video called something like ‘Science of the Soul’ (I have had no access to it since). Curious about the strange title, I started showing one part. It was a mix of science and anti-religious propaganda; the kids sat there like little sponges soaking it up. To summarize, it portrayed early religious people—specifically Christians and Jews as it used biblical terminology—as primitive and superstitious. For example, when talking about comets it stated that religious people once thought they were signs from God or the devil. It then explained how science came to the rescue and explained what comets really were. A similar statement was made about lightning being a sign that God was angry. Once again science rescued man from religious superstition.
Of course, the narrator failed to mention that it was Bible-believers that founded these very branches of science, and that even some skeptics have acknowledged that the biblical belief is the best antidote to superstition.
Through this video the Washington school district was actively disrespecting the Christian families in the school. I wondered what the enlightened narrator would have believed had he lived in ancient times. I also wondered why the narrator didn’t tell them that scientists once believed in spontaneous generation—that frogs spontaneously generated from mud, mice from wheat, and flies from decaying meat. In fact, it was still the scientific consensus when Darwin wrote Origin of the Species in 1859 that microbes arose by spontaneous generation.
Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, wrote a lovely poem dedicated to evolution, and wrote in support of spontaneous generation. However, in 1864 Louis Pasteur very neatly debunked the idea that microscopic organisms generated spontaneously from lifeless matter. By the way, modern evolutionary scientists still believe life spontaneously generated from dead matter (anything but God), despite the enormous chemical problems with this—see Origin of Life Q&A.
I also wondered why the narrator didn’t tell the students about ‘scientific’ racism. This was a movement in response to the Enlightenment (better termed ‘Endarkenment’) of the eighteenth century by scientists (not religionists) to prove that Africans (the primary race focused upon) were of very low intelligence, biologically inferior to whites, and were racially suited for slavery. It has been said that ‘science is what scientists do.’ Therefore science was the primary and preeminent propagator of racism and slavery from the time of the Enlightenment onwards. But the science in this case is not really science at all, but an anti-God philosophy of naturalism.
Scientific racism actually preceded Darwinism. However, when Darwinian evolution became the accepted worldview by the scientific community as it is today, it joined with scientific racism like two love-sick rabbits. Soon Darwinism became the basis for the vilest racism imaginable. (See, e.g. Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust, and the case of David Duke.) Naturally public education would be humiliated if it became known that Darwinism is the most racist scientific theory that has ever existed (see also See Q & A on Racism). Indeed, Hunter’s Civic Biology, which the ACLU avidly defended during the Scopes Trial (1925), explicitly promoted white supremacy (and eugenics).
The narrator of Science of the Soul, however, never mentioned anything that might give Darwinism a bad name. Instead, he continued to glorify science and attack religion. I personally believe that God created and controls the universe and everything in it. It’s all His and He can do what He wants at any time He chooses and that includes controlling lightning and comets. But I also understand, like most people who have a moderate exposure to astronomy, that comets are chunks of space ice and rock, sometimes referred to as dirty snowballs, which travel in large elliptical orbits around the sun. I also believe that our Creator is a God of order, so normally runs the universe in an orderly way—which inspired the pioneers of science to discover the laws of nature, which as Kepler said, was ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him’.2 Trust me when I say that in the midst of a close and tumultuous thunderstorm I have been known to pray for the Almighty’s protection. In class, of course, I did not say what I believed to the kids. I kept my mouth shut and ‘steamed’ inside.
The narrator went on to tell of a writer during the industrial revolution that referred to factories as ‘dens of Satan’. He sure liked to use biblical terminology to make believers in God look like superstitious fools. He neglected to point out of course that the horrible conditions of the industrial revolution were in large part a direct result of ‘survival of the fittest’ applied to society. Proponents of this particular form of ‘social Darwinism’, such as Herbert Spencer, taught that the powerful and wealthy were this way because they were biologically and evolutionally superior to the struggling masses. They believed that we should therefore do nothing to help improve the working and living conditions of the lesser evolved masses. Charities were clearly evil in helping sustain the lives of those who otherwise would and should die in the natural selection process. In other words, the weak were to do their duty and die while the fittest survived, which would one day lead to an evolutionarily super society and race. Note that Darwin himself was a social Darwinist!
The historical evidence for this, and for the fact that social Darwinism was the foundation for Nazi Germany, is irrefutable. Yet this truth, dangerous and damaging to the Darwinist’s cause, is never taught in US public schools. Instead, people of religion (by which they primarily mean the Christians) are disparaged and blamed for the brutality of the Social Darwinists!
The narrator further went on to subtly attack the Catholic Church when he told of a French chemist who was guillotined ‘ … in the shadow of Nôtre Dame Cathedral ….’ The implication was clear—guilt by association. Give me a break! During the French Revolution, Christianity was considered a social evil by the revolutionaries. For all I know, the chemist may have been beheaded precisely because he was a believer. By the way, Nôtre Dame Cathedral was looted during the French Revolution and the name was changed to the Temple of Reason. No church had anything to do with the mass executions of the French revolution. The narrator might have been referring to the great Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered the role of oxygen in combustion, who was indeed beheaded. But the irony is that the christophobic revolutionaries proclaimed, ‘The Republic has no need of scientists’ — so much for atheism’s friendliness towards science!
Do you get the feeling that there is some kind of agenda in this video? I did. The kids, however, just sat there like little sponges soaking it all in.
Part three of the video was on evolution. It gave the history of Charles Darwin and his adventure on the good ship Beagle. The narrator, a very scholarly-looking bearded professor type, stood before a table full of fossils and bones. He concluded by passionately saying that Darwin had ‘proof’ that his theory was true, thus implying that fossils were part of that proof. (The truth is that Darwin actually said that the fossil record was a serious objection to his theory.)
The narrator then corrected himself and said something like, ‘Not exactly proof, but there is no absolute fact in any science.’ The implication being that the law of gravity, for example, and the theory of evolution were equally true. In other words hard experimental science was the same as speculation about the unobservable past. This wasn’t education—it was indoctrination. This video disparaged religious thought, was seriously misleading (to put it mildly), and elevated microbe-to-man evolution from a hypothesis to the level of a fact of hard, experimental science. The kids did not know that there are a growing number of scientists who simply don’t believe in evolution. However, they just sat there like little sponges … .
This was the beginning of the end for me as a sub at that school, despite my sterling record. I asked the kids if they had ever heard of a different theory called ‘intelligent design.’ Out of classes of about 30 kids, only one or two would raise their hands. I told them that Darwin didn’t have ...
MORE here:
http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/5788
Nope, I don't have any specific statements.
Then case closed.
It’s not me that promotes censorship to silence my foes.
Being angry and delusional makes you angry and delusional and well... now you’re projecting it.
I have a keen understanding...godless liberals are literally incapable of allowing their argument to stand alone without hijacking the govt to ensure their worldview succeeds.
well, that’s a start!
It seems to me that Christmas, a federal holiday, extreme or offensive to some like the ACLU, but to be so angry to want it removed...????
Seems they have bigger fish to fry!
But they did it by doing real science, not creation "science."
It would be a lie. Here is the real story.
==Other than the church he belonged to, do you have any personal statements of Faraday’s that would support him specifically thinking that the earth was only a few thousand years old or rejecting the evidence of biological evolution?
Nope, I don’t have any specific statements.
Then case closed.
Riiiight let’s just ignore that the reality is during his time godless liberals weren’t demanding God be removed from schools and censoring and shutting down any dissent.
If he was around today I’m certain he’d say nothing to clarify. Riiiiiight.
Good grief I’ve never seen a wet paper bag be so impenetrable to libs in all my years! :)
But they did it by doing real science, not creation “science.”
REAL science=pre-darwinism...agreed!
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