[medved]

The statement which the 50 scientists make is completely reasonable other than for leaving out one critical consideration: Anybody wishing to put a religion on an equal footing with evolution in American schools needs to ensure that the religioin he chooses is the RIGHT one, i.e. a religion which operates on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates are voodoo and rastifari.

Rastifari would in fact lend itself rather well to certain kinds of team-teaching situations, e.g. a bio teacher looking for a way to put 30 teenagers into the proper frame of mind to be indoctrinated into something as stupid as evolutionism could walk across the hall to the Rasta class for a box of spliffs...

[Quila]

a religion which operates on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates are voodoo and rastifari

Do you also propose to put those other origins myths into the science education too? They're just as scientifically valid as Christian creationism.

Let's see you freak when your kids come home and tell you they just learned in science class that the world is on the back of a giant turtle or something. Then you'd know how I'd feel if my kids came back with the Christian myths in their heads masquerading as science.

Note that this is for science class only. I'd love for my kids to take comparative religion and learn those things. I'd even sign up for a class on origin myths.

[dheretic]

Rastifari would in fact lend itself rather well to certain kinds of team-teaching situations, e.g. a bio teacher looking for a way to put 30 teenagers into the proper frame of mind to be indoctrinated into something as stupid as evolutionism could walk across the hall to the Rasta class for a box of spliffs...

Ask yourself why it is that creationists are so few and far between among the new intellectuals in this country. I'm not talking about lit or philosophy professors, I am talking about scientists, engineers, software developers, etc.

Most of the creationsts I've met end up in fuzzy intellectual areas like political science. They don't know how to do scientific research, write software, build complex machinery and things of that nature. They end up arguing what should the government be allowing or disallowing. They end up making a layman's ruling about a specialist's field. From banning cloning to telling software developers what we can do with our skills (when they cannot even discern between the syntaxes of different programming languages).

Here's a thought, following the scientific method if you want your bull$hit young earth theory to be accepted as a scientific theory.

1. Get evidence, not point to the lack thereof in regard to evolution and carbon14 dating to prove your case. And no, the bible does not count as an authoritative scientific volume.
2. Establish a realistic hypothesis that would explain how the world came into existance. This means you have to, (a) explain the existance of dinosaur fossiles, (b) explain how humans could actually survive with dinosaurs ruling most of the planet's landmasses and (c) explain the existance of species of human other than homo sapien.
3. For the sake of argument since humans cannot realistically observe either evolution or original creation we'll forego the experimentation stage
4. Submit your results to the public for open analysis and critique. At this stage you cannot resort to ad hominems like "you godless atheists don't believe the truth?" You must be willing to defend your theory with science, not religion if you want it to become a scientific theory and not a religious belief. Sorry, that's just the way it works