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Posted on 03/01/2006 8:33:30 AM PST by x5452
St. Petersburg schoolgirl sues authorities over Darwinism 18:42 | 01/ 03/ 2006
ST. PETERSBURG, March 1 (RIA Novosti, Maksim Leonov) - A St. Petersburg schoolgirl intends to go to court over the compulsory teaching of the theory of evolution at Russian schools.
Maria Shraiber's father, Kirill Shraiber, who is also her lawyer, told a news conference in St. Petersburg that the suit did not seek to abolish the teaching of Darwinism in schools but to give schoolchildren the right to study other theories about the origins of life.
"Darwin only presented a hypothesis that has not yet been proved by him or anyone else," Shraiber said. "Hence, we think that school education imposes this theory on children as the only scientific option, which violates the human right to free choice."
Shraiber said the lawsuit against the Education and Science Ministry would be filed soon at a district court in Moscow.
"We will be represented in court by several lawyers ... who are now drafting the suit," he said.
The Russian lawsuit echoes a string of similar disputes in the United States over teaching creationism alongside Darwinism in the school curriculum.
Do you agree or disagree with that definition?
I think the definitions are beside the point, the problem is not the raw basic pincibles darwin put forth, the problem is that in the classroom athiests put forth their faith, and use darwinism to describe creation and say that God is an impossibility. Further Darwinism is hardly integral to getting a good job, I think it should be saved to the college level where specialists and those less impressionable can be exposed to it at their will not because it is impossible for children to make up their own mind but because it is too easy for them to be impressionable and for the iressponible to use the classroom as a forum to preach athiesm.
Similarly I do not think open homosexuals should teach children. Children are impressionable and adults with power over them can coerce instead of educate.
Lived through it actually. (I'm sure you'll now try the 'your lying' or 'isolated case'
argument)
Incidentally my college experience was quite the opposite, an explicit to the facts explanation. Prof was a Christian.
Further I was a comp sci major in college. The most I've ever gotten out evolution lectures is a primer for arguing with evolutionist on threads.
For perspective btw, i had my 'global studies' teacher do the same with the UN; force us to write essays about how great the UN was, have multiple choice questions that had only positive responses about the UN, no option to call it what it was.
Barely pulled a C in the class after writing an essay about what a joke the agency was and how aweful it was to force students to laud it.
I was responding to this statement:
Next we'll be seeing a list of the definitions that we're supposed to accept. Because they say so.
So the definition of terms is exactly on point. That poster seems to be rejecting the contention that theory is a well defined term.
Do you accept the definition of theory in the American Heritage Dictionary?
You asked me what I thought of the situation, I told you.
Go play dictionary games with the poster who mentioned definitions.
The article is not about whether evolution is or isn't a theory, or even whether it's true or not, it's about whether its fair and proper to force children to learn it.
A huge portion of teachers in St Petersburg and Moscow are old line athiests. It's wrong to subject students to aithest all too eager to use to power of the state to preach their view of the world.
If you want to debate semantics which are irrelevant to the article I posted, go for it, if you want to know why I find it abominable that students in such a climate be forced under the tutolage of athiest propagandists who will twist evolution's tenats to suit their needs I'll be happy to explain.
Not so. The only thing I asked you was whether you accepted the American Heritage Dictionary definition of theory; and you did not tell me one way or the other.
Because it's off topic.
Do you accept that black is the best color?
Doesn't bear any relevance to the conversation but it does make a great platform for repeating inane questions.
No. With the exception of funerals and Johnny Cash look alike contests.
(was meant to be a trick question really, since black (speaking of light) is the absense of color, or (speaking of paint) the combination of all colors)
Like I said, teach what is observed, then offer hypotheses. Just lik when we teach gravity or magentism, we teach what we observe, then offer explanations.
If you think that retrovirus phenomena are ready for high school textbooks, go ahead. Till then -- and they are manifestly not ready -- call hypotheses hypotheses.
You second paragraph makes no sense. We observe bodies of any size conforming to the laws of gravity. We do not observe any species, excepting perhaps some primitive organisms, evolving.
Then scientists need to stop teaching something that cannot be proven as *fact*, which is what's happening.
On these threads, I've seen many bemoan the fact that people don't trust science or are skeptical about it and then they turn around and say that nothing can be proven. You can't have it both ways. If nothing in science can be proven, then scientists have no basis for criticising people for not accepting lock step their latest pronouncements on how the world is.
We're told that scientists are always willing to change their theories when new data comes up yet anyone who expresses skepticism before that moment is branded as anti-science and anti-intellectual or worse. Today's latest scientific discoveries will be in the trach heap in a few months or years. Today's scientific *fact* will be tomorrow's *creatinist lie*.
The problem is this...
...if you pick up a first year Physics or Chemistry textbook, you find such texts to be full of facts. There is very little science fiction in such works, and where it does appear, it is invariably a result of editors getting ecumenical and trying to defend darwinian evolution from a distance.
A first year Biology textbook, however, proclaims fact and science fiction side by side with equal force. It isn't until you undertake extensive study of the field in question (and that too only if you have a mind sensitive to the vagaries of logic and philosophy) do you realize which is which.
Are you able to demonstrate this assertion?
Probably the best evidence is that when someone wants to teach ANYTHING besides evolution, someone runs screaming to the courts about *seperation of church and state* and *promoting a religion* and tries to get the courts to rule that only evolution be taught. Once those evolutionists bring the charge of religion into it, they show that they are not fighting it for the sake of *pure* science, but because it's a religious belief. Their not fighting *non-science*; they're fighting religion.
The simple fact is that not all things fall down.
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