Posted on 08/24/2008 2:16:12 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
...In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.
But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.
Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out.
(Click link for full article)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Was the the case where the judge said Michael Behe helped make the case for the opposition?
Good luck with that one. I asked the same question a few days ago and never got an answer. I think it must be because the answer can only be that it's okay to have Bible study because the Bible is true, but it's not okay to have Koran studies because the Koran is false. The problem is that stating it that way makes its constitutional untenability obvious, so they just don't answer the question at all.
No idea...it’s too hard for me to keep up with all the loons on all these threads...
One asserts that the nazis were on the God side because ‘Gott Mitt Uns’ is on their belt buckles!
Which takes me back years ago when at an atheist site they claimed Hitler was one of ours because he read scripture at his rallies!
In a nutshell: God anger.
Um, they’re suing over acceptance of science courses, not religious courses.
From the article in the thread on this, it appears that the UofC is not allowing those courses simply because of a statement made in the front of the textbook. I saw nowhere that UofC’s decision was based on the textbook teaching the ToE wrong.
I never saw it. Was it me you asked?
If freedom of religion is going to be allowed, then that's going to happen. Do I like it? No.
You are correct, islam is false. The objection I have to islam is not religious as much as political. It promotes jihad and IIRC, promoting insurrection against the government is illegal.
As far as teacher led anything reading and prayer, as long as its not mandatory, I don't see what anyone could do about it.
There is no possibility of teaching no religion because the *no god* position is a belief system in and of itself and qualifies as a religion by definition. If freedom of religion is going to be granted then it must be granted without across the board without respect to any religion, but that is not possible because no matter what decision they make, they're endorsing and teaching some kind of belief system.
It's the ultimate catch 22.
The only solution is the one wintertime keeps proposing; abolish the public education system altogether. Let the parents have their tax money back which would allow them to be able to afford to direct the education of their children as they see fit.
I remember.
Which still leaves you with ZERO defense of censorship.
And ZERO defense of godless liberal ideology.
And you’ve proven ZERO about your ridiculous claims, first I haven’t seen the investigation documents, for all we know there are state age laws violated concerning ADULT consent.
In conclusion, you’re a ZERO.
“You post is still there for everyone to read.”
Which remains your problem!
Well that and helpless god-anger.
How do you make the leap from ID to Bible Study? (As if we needed more proof this has nothing to do with education/science!)
Which results in the better tool?
For we are talking about science and the purpose of Science is to develop tools to make our world better. Which Flu vaccines should be made this year? How will we treat various Cancers in 5 years? etc. What may or may not of happened thousands of years ago is a Philosophical debate.
==Which results in the better tool?
Creation/ID science is a far better tool to make our world better, especially when it comes to treating disease. After all, evolutionary biology is wedded to the notion of random mutation, whereas Creation/ID, while allowing for limited random mutation, also posits directed mutation. And as the field of epigenetics is increasingly making clear, science would have been a lot better off if we had allowed these two conceptions to compete for funding (not to mention space in the mainstream science journals).
Yes, it was you I asked. Thank you for answering it now. At least your position is consistent: if a school board in a majority-Islamic area voted to start teaching Islam in the public schools (the religious part, not the jihad part), you'd just accept it as the price of freedom of religion. For me, I'd expect the Christian parents to sue (and the ACLU to support them), and I'd wish them success.
From antievolution.org:
"Christian high schools teaching antievolution as course content in biology classes are suing the California state university system."
Indeed. And he can have his atheism preserved intact just so long as he can maintain the illusion that the whole of reality (natural, historical, social, and personal) can be reduced to what amounts to an unfounded and unexamined presupposition — that "everything supervenes on the physical," on "matter in its motions," which motions are essentially perfectly "random." (As Jacques Monod put it, it's all "pure chance" in the end — and evidently also at the beginning.)
Mackey's statement is, as you note dearest sister in Christ, nothing more than "a faith statement." (A recent correspondent of mine — who evidently doesn't want to talk to me any more — seems to think that this method is perfectly legitimate....)
On this "rule," human imagination itself is to be confined to whatever limits this dubious premise demands or allows. I can't shake the feeling that some of these people have willfully committed "self-lobotomy".....
Which brings to mind Richard Lewontin's statement:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”Could the doctrine of sheer nihilism be more plainly stated?
To change the subject (slightly): I couldn't help but notice the correspondence between Swinburne's h1 and h2 probability domains; and your enlightening discussion of pi as it relates to the problem of randomness.
It is common in the scientific debate today to toss the word "random" around a lot. But I've never got a decent definition of "random" from any of the folks who routinely use such language. (But I continue to hope I may, some day.... )
Notwithstanding, it seems to me pi illuminates this problem pretty well. The fact that pi is an irrational number means that its digit series will appear to human observers as a random distribution. The proof of this is that any selection of consecutive digits you might care to make to the right of the decimal point, at any place in the series, and/or in any selection size, will show you that digits selected on the basis of these criteria are not apparently correlated at all, and so they could never display any pattern whatever.
Trial "Q.E.D.": All the selection sizes and locations report that, whatever selection size or spatiotemporal location, the observed rule has been validated: Since "patterns" don't appear, randomness "rules."
But then you remind us that it's silly to speak of randomness if we do not know "What the System Is" against which this so-called random behavior is supposed to occur. Unless we mean to totally deconstruct reality as human beings typically experience it, we need to ask questions like this. JMHO FWIW
And you also remind us that, as "random" as pi "looks" to us, it is the universal demonstration of a rule, a law of nature (or at the very least a law of mathematics...).
Pi always and everywhere is "inerrant" in stipulating the numerical value of the circumference of a circle divided by its radius. Evidently pi holds universally and everywhere that human beings have ever been around to notice such things.
And yet for all the "random noise" expectorated by the Kultursmog lately, I think most human beings understand what a circle is, and find it useful in their daily lives.
Dearest sister in Christ, thank you so very much for your splendid essay/posts!
The question I asked was:
Do you believe the government should have the power to take children from their homes without an actual charge of abuse? It's really that simple.
Or, to put the issue in your terms, should the state have the power to investigate parents for child abuse when no allegation has been made?
Perhaps you could now show us an atheistic regime that wasn't tyrannical.
Allowing isn't mandating. But that's not good enough for the God haters. They consider allowing to be equivalent to mandating, which it's not, and will sue anyone who wants to exercise their Constitutional right to the free exercise of their religion into silence. Free exercise for me but not for thee.
It's promotion of one faith over another through the use of taxpayer dollars, which is unconstitutional. You are compelling non-Christian taxpayers to pay for Christian proselytizing.
What's actually happening is that you are compelling Christian taxpayers to pay for non-Christian proselytizing. It's promotion of one faith over another through the use of taxpayer dollars, which is unconstitutional.
The problems are that:
1) Atheists think and preach that atheism is neutral as far as religion is concerned and it's not. There can be no neutral position when there's only two sides to an issue. There's either God, or there's not. Either one is a belief system. Suppressing one is only giving the other a monopoly.
2)Atheists who suppress theists because they don't want someone forcing their views on them, sure don't seem to have any problem forcing their atheism on others just because they think they're right. Well, I think that I'm right so why I shouldn't I have it my way instead? Why should they have preference? Are they better than me or equal? What makes them think they should have favored status?
So we have the removal of Christmas break from the school calendar and have the atheist holiday of Winter Recess. Same with Easter and Spring break.
All in a nation based on the Judeo-Christian heritage; the same heritage that gives the atheists their rights in the first place. And then they spit in the face of those very people who gave them the right to follow their non-belief freely by using that very freedom those Christians gave them to take away the rights of other Christians.
Talk about ingratitude.
Try again. The question was about if I objected to teacher led prayer and Koran reading in schools, not about teaching Islam in public schools. That's misrepresenting what I said, IOW, you lied about what I said.
BTW, for the record, Islam contains both the OT and NT as part of their religion. The Koran is added to it.
So, Bible reading and prayer, especially if the Bible reading is restricted to the Old Testament, should offend no one out of the three largest religious groups represented in the United States; that is Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Is the textbook teaching the ToE wrong?
Is it’s teaching of it in error?
If it’s not, there’s simply no reason to not accept the credits. If they are not accepting the credits because they don’t like the stand the book takes as opposed to the book being in error, then it’s a matter or religious persecution.
I don’t blame them for suing then.
It depends on what you mean by atheistic. The United States was one of the first "atheistic" regimes in history, in that the separation of government and religion was strongly guarded in the Constitution.
If by atheistic you mean regimes that stamp out religious practices, then the answer, of course, would be that there are none.
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