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You guys kill me. You ask for evidence, you are supplied with it and your response is, "SO?!" Is it that you don't understand the text or is that just your standard response to material you cannot address?

I don't understand the text (post 322). You caught me. First, please notice your post was to a fellow creationist, not to a non-creationist, so the lack of response could be due to that... Also, please note that posting 2 paragraphs from a book does not exactly stand up to the rigors of scientific, or historical proof.

OR, perhaps it's due to an exhaustive google search on your source got me exactly nowhere. Of the several books on Amazon with that title, none are published or written by Silver and Burdett. None go past 700 pages to your cited "page 710." But I did find some interesting things. To wit:

Silver Burdett is indeed a publishing house of elementary and middle school textbooks, so it's very possible that I missed the one you cited. NOTE TO LURKERS: I am fully allowing that this book with this passage may very well exist, I just simply didn't find it. Actually, I expect that it does indeed exist.

However, making matters murkier, it appears quite clear that Silver Burdett, an arm of the Scott Forsman Publishing company, is more or less the Christian publishing wing. "Silver Burdett Ginn Religion" is one of the monikers they use. Which is perfectly fine... until they try to get their worldview into public schools. I happened to find this review of another one of their social studies books. Derive from it what you wish:

This one has various passages in which the writers obscure or erase the distinction between history and legend, between fact and folklore. For example:

On page 52 the writers conflate myth and legend with oral history, and in their glossary they do it again: They claim that oral history means "The history or traditions of a people handed down from one generation to another by word of mouth." That is just false; the writers have applied the name oral history to folklore. Oral history is, by definition, a record of a person's oral account of his own observations or experiences -- his account of things that he himself saw or did. It isn't a recitation of a creation myth, a fairy tale, a traditional belief, a traveling-salesman joke, or any other kind of hearsay. Nor is there any oral history "of a people." An item of oral history can only be ascribed (and indeed must be ascribed) to a discrete, identified individual.

On page 154, at the beginning of an effort to promote Christian religious beliefs as historical facts, the writers declare that "Practically all that is known about Jesus" comes from "four books called the Gospels, or `Good News'." Then the writers summarize several Gospel narratives, including the ones in which "Jesus rose from the dead [three days after he was crucified], appeared to his followers, and told them to preach his message to all the world" -- as if those miracle-stories present things that are "known" and factual! What an abomination! By falsely representing the Gospels as historical documents, and by concealing everything that New Testament scholars have learned about the Gospels during the past 100 years, the Silver Burdett Ginn writers have made their purposes unmistakable.

In their zeal to preach, the writers present as fact a miracle-story that was set forth by the 4th-century Christian writer Eusebius; it is the notorious story in which Eusebius claimed that the emperor Constantine had told him about a "vision" of a flaming cross in the sky. The Silver Burdett Ginn writers explicitly refer to Constantine's vision as a historical "event," and they characterize Eusebius as a "Roman historian" (without disclosing that he was one of Constantine's sycophants). Worst of all, they omit the most memorable aspect of Eusebius's narrative, which is this: Eusebius himself recognized that his cross-in-the-sky story was lame, so he tried to prop it up with a line that only a sycophant and apologist could write --

If anyone else reported [seeing a miraculous sign in the sky] it would not be easy to believe, but when the victorious emperor himself confirmed it on oath in writing to the author of this narrative many years later when I was judged worthy of his acquaintance and conversation, who would hesitate to credit the story?

I would answer: Nearly everyone, excepting the hopelessly credulous.

So much for Eusebius -- and so much for the Silver Burdett Ginn missionaries. So much for World Cultures, too. This book is a mockery, in every sense.

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William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.