posted
Lyrhawn makes a good point here, this is like focusing millions of campaign dollars on sex-ed politics when it so often makes up a couple of weeks of health class. Biology classes in high school cover everything from bio-chemistry to zoology, the time spent on evolution or any of its counterparts should be minimal. It should be taught, yes, but it's only a small part of a vast field of study.
posted
I am a deeply religious person. I believe that God created the world (indeed, the whole universe). I am a member of a pretty conservative Church, and I am by no means on the liberal fringe of that Church.
And yet:
I do not believe that Creationism or Intelligent Design should be taught in public schools, in any form.
I also do not believe that there should be any school-sanctioned prayers during classes, assemblies, activities, or graduations.
I think abstinence-only sex education is ludicrous.
I think I am far from being alone, and I think that the existence of people like me tends to disprove the accusations of many political liberals that claim that the religious people of this country are trying to impose their belief systems on the nation.
quote:I think this whole debate only came about because some teachers/professors felt it their "mission" to "convert" some children away from their beliefs by making them feel inferior for not embracing the entire evolutionary theory.
Oh bullcrap. The need for the dominant Christian majority to force it's religion and it's epistemological unsuitability on other people is one of the major causes of this situation. I'm not going to deny that there are plenty of people who are irrationally and irresponsibly opposing religion, but, jeez, have the integrity to admit the very obvious truth that Christians (especially ones in Kansas) are not these innocent victims.
posted
Did I misunderstand the original topic that the courts were to decide this issue? The issue is before the Kansas State Board of Education, not the courts. It might end up in court, but not yet.
I hope I did not miss this point in the discussion. If so, sorry.
The issue now before the supreme court in Kansas is school finance. That is entirely different problem.
Yes, Kansas is having a good old time right now.
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posted
I didn't say anything about victims. I merely voice the opinion that, where many liberals see a vast, consolidated movement of the religiously devout working toward the remaking of the government, I see smaller, more radical religious groups working just like any number of other special interest groups, with the exception that they happen to have some religious beliefs in common with millions of others who actually OPPOSE their political mission. In my mind, the liberals are not my enemy on this front. The militant religious folks are, both because their goals are not my own, and because they invoke principles that I honor in support of their cause, which I do not.
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quote: I think this whole debate only came about because some teachers/professors felt it their "mission" to "convert" some children away from their beliefs by making them feel inferior for not embracing the entire evolutionary theory.
quote:Oh bullcrap. The need for the dominant Christian majority to force it's religion and it's epistemological unsuitability on other people is one of the major causes of this situation.
Like I said before, I think that some Christians are behaving badly as a reaction be having been treated badly for so long.
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Christians have been treated badly? That's a bold statement. Where is the proof to back this up?
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I don't think you can IGNORE the drive of the more radical religious groups. I don't think it's a vast movement, it's not everyone. But it's a lot of people. Must be noisy people too, for this issue to be so hot button, so widespread, and to be moving so fast.
On one hand, I'd almost be willing to say that, since creationist parents have to teach their ideology at home, evolution parents should have to teach theirs at home as well.
While that is quite fair to the parents, the real losers are the students.
Shouldn't young people have the right to all the information, and to make an informed decision themselves? Let parents do whatever they want teaching religion in the home, but at school they learn the progress of science. Nor forced, not influenced, just give them the information and let them digest it.
The key is force. You can't have any. The information just needs to be there.
Edit to add: woah, woah, Christians have been treated badly? Where? This is a nation that caters to Christians.
quote:Christians have been treated badly? That's a bold statement. Where is the proof to back this up?
Here's an example from earlier in this thread:
quote: I had a teacher who actually said condescendingly, "Does anyone actually believe the story in the Bible of how the earth was created?" One person raised their hand, and it was not me. This teacher really gave him a hard time about his belief.
posted
I can't speak to the rest of the country, just my own home town, my school, my family. But I honestly can't ever remember ever seeing anything that insults or oppresses Christians.
I've only ever seen them receive special treatment and concern. I think America is more concerned with making them happy than with trying to hold them back.
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Lyrhawn, I would tend to agree with you. I've only ever seen policies and arguments that seek to comfort the poor Christians, and never do anything that might cause them to practice the tolerance that they preach.
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Most of the time I see Christians complaining about being oppressed, it means that they are being prevented from forcing their religion on other people (just in the example of evolution, there's the Scope's monkey trial). Occasionally, they're getting their feelings hurt, like in Porter's example, but yeah, I don't know how I'd call characterize that as being treated poorly for so long. That's like saying that your generally indulgent parents forgetting to show up for one of your baseball games means that they've a long history of child abuse.
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Porter, would you object if the story went like this?
quote: I had a teacher who actually said condescendingly, "Does anyone actually believe the story in the Bible that the Earth is flat and has four corners? One person raised their hand, and it was not me. This teacher really gave him a hard time about his belief.
This is not a subject on which rational people can disagree : Evolution is as much a fact as the roundness of the Earth. Deal with it.
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While I would not wish to discount anyone's personal feelings of being ill-treated, I do think that a large portion of neo-conservative and evangelical Christian doctrine of late has drawn on a persecution complex. You can see it even now, when the country is swinging very, very heavily toward the right. Evangelical Christians seem determined to believe that everyone is out to get them, and squash their beliefs, when usually people just want the freedom to not be religious, if they so choose.
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quote: I would say 100%, but nothing is ever 100% certain, especially scientific theories [Smile]
I have to disagree. There are quite a few holes in evolution which have yet to be explained. It isn't 90% confirmed, it certainly isn't 100% confirmed, and I would hesitate to even call it 50% confirmed.
Of course, this is not an either/or proposition. My biggest problem with most creationist arguments I've seen is that they pretend that invalidating evolution proves creationism. Proving evolution false only means that we need to find another theory.
As a side note, is anyone familiar enough with creationism to describe it in detail. Pretty much all I know is that they believe that evolution is false and that god created all living beings. What do they propose was the actual process of the creation.
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posted
I honestly bothered by the lack of understanding, on both sides, of what science actually means. To me, that's a grave educational deficiency that we should be focusing on.
edit: And KOM, yes, I'd object to the story the way you presented it as well. It's never okay for a teacher to single out and ridicule a student, at least not until they get to college.
I see your point, but I don't know if I really see that a lot. The problem I think many Christians have is differentiating between lack of respect for their religion and lack of respect for the person. I don't respect Bush, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanon, most of the leadership of the radical evangelical agenda, it isn't because of their religious beliefs.
It's because of who they are as people, and the things they do.
If they act abrasive and desconstructive, they aren't going to enjoy much respect. And that has little to nothing to do with their religion, and everything to do with who they are as people.
I'm not saying that is you, Farmgirl, or that you have that particular blind spot. But many do. It goes towards their siege mentality.
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quote: I merely voice the opinion that, where many liberals see a vast, consolidated movement of the religiously devout working toward the remaking of the government, I see smaller, more radical religious groups working just like any number of other special interest groups, with the exception that they happen to have some religious beliefs in common with millions of others who actually OPPOSE their political mission. In my mind, the liberals are not my enemy on this front. The militant religious folks are, both because their goals are not my own, and because they invoke principles that I honor in support of their cause, which I do not.
UofUlawguy, this is an interesting way to look at things. It's all to easy to lump every non-liberal Christian into a monolithic blob and call them the Religious Right. When in reality, many conservative Christians disagree with the goals and tactics of these small groups of politically active conservative Christians.
On the other hand, those activists are extremely influential in Republican politics, setting the agenda for the party in many cases.
On a talk show recently, the host wondered why there is never any mention in the media of the Religious Left? There are certainly liberal Christians active in politics.
quote:I have to disagree. There are quite a few holes in evolution which have yet to be explained. It isn't 90% confirmed, it certainly isn't 100% confirmed, and I would hesitate to even call it 50% confirmed.
Then I'm sorry, but I would hesitate to call you 50% informed on the subject. We have observed evolution and speciation both in the lab and in the wild. Evidence of common descent with apes is scattered all through our genome. Evolution-as-fact is as certain as scientific facts get. Evolution-as-theory, that is, how it occurs, is a subject for some small disagreement within the scientific community, but that's not really an area where either of us is qualified to comment.
quote:How appropriate would it be for a Christian teacher to single out his one athiest student and ridicule his lack of belief? Not at all.
Here we speak not of religious beliefs, but of verifiable facts. To ridicule someone for believing the Earth is flat is not out of line, at least after the evidence has been explained a few times.
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posted
I'm also worried by the apparent need for a relatively pampered group to nurse a feeling of ubiquitous persecution. Historically, this has been used for justification for attacking minority groups, kind of like how a lot of the "Defending Marriage" crowd is primarily interested in attacking gays.
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posted
While we're bringing up anecdotes about religion in the classroom: my brother and I had a shop/drafting teacher in HS that would ask for Bible verses on tests, for extra credit. We both thought it ironic that we both usually knew the verses (the verses were easy, like John 3:16) despite being agnostics, while some Christians forgot them.
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ricree -- this is part of the problem. There is no mostly agreed to "theory of intelligent design", much less of other forms of creationism. Here's an overview of the basic beliefs of the various camps:
YEC (Young Earth Creationism): the world is young, typically circa 6000 years old, and pretty much everything was placed here by God, or something close to it. Some YECs accept "microevolution", while others think that all the basic species have been around from the get go. This is despite that the only difference between micro and macroevolution is the degree of change, not the sort, which I find rather amusing.
OEC (Old Earth Creationism): currently the least common variant. OECs accept the old age of the earth, but reject "macroevolution" (and very rarely "microevolution" as well). They believe that either things have just been around a really long time, or more commonly that whatever supernatural force they subscribe to has placed more and more things on the planet over time, or rarely that the earth is old but the presence of creatures on the earth is young.
ID (Intelligent Design): very popular right now. Most proponents of ID accept at least a bit of "macroevolution", and all accept "microevolution". In ID, not only is evolution "guided" (by unstated mechanisms, of course) by some outside intelligence, which is completely compatible with normal evolutionary theory, but this guidance is necessary for the physical explanation of evolution, which is not. I have yet to see any testable predictions ID theory makes that evolutionary theory does not (and evolutionary theory has resulted in numerous testable predictions, many of which have been tested), which prevents me from considering it a scientific theory. Of course, the lack of any coherent formulation of it is also a significant impediment.
There are also some esoteric schools of thought such as the "there is a God, and since this God is omnipotent and could have created the universe 5 seconds ago, screw origin theories" school. But the above pretty much covers Judeo-Christo-Islamic creationism categories.
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quote: Then I'm sorry, but I would hesitate to call you 50% informed on the subject. We have observed evolution and speciation both in the lab and in the wild. Evidence of common descent with apes is scattered all through our genome. Evolution-as-fact is as certain as scientific facts get. Evolution-as-theory, that is, how it occurs, is a subject for some small disagreement within the scientific community, but that's not really an area where either of us is qualified to comment.
First off, I have to admit that the 50% statement was more rhetoric than anything else.
That said, I have to disagree with some of your statements. First off, evolution is in no way "as certain as scientific facts get." Whether or not the arguments against it prove true, they are numerous and must be carefully examined before calling evolution true. A nearly certain scientific fact would be, for example, saying that newton's laws of motion hold true for all but extreme values. That is a fact that is pretty much undisputed.
I don't have time to do much searching, but later on I will try to dig up links regarding some of the problems that evolution has. I can't promise that it will be posted soon, since I'm going to be offline most of the rest of today. I'll have it as soon as I can.
Before I leave, I have one question for you and anyone else who is familiar with evolution. I don't lay this out as a challenge to evolution, but as a question that I have honestly wondered about. Different species often have different numbers of chromosomes. Humans, for example, have 46, mice have 40, and fruit flies only have 8. As far as I have seen, the number of chromosomes in an individual differing from species norms is very rare. Furthermore, in most cases where this does occur there is either retardation or undeveloped sexual characteristics. How does evolution account for this?
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posted
When my eight grade science teacher had to teach evolution and creationism, six students were excused by their parents from the lecture on evolution. I therefore excused myself from the lecture on creationism. My dad was called and he laughed in their faces.
I insisted that since we were teaching Christian Myth we needed to cover the creation myths of all the major faiths to be fair.
I think this tactic would work to squeeze the creationists out of the science class. Insist on equal time for Shiva and Brahma and the turtle theory and pretty soon they would all end up in a seperat class where they belong. This method also enshrines the highest ideals of religious tolerance! Pretty slick Huh!
posted
Actually, there are several quite common chromosomal abnormalities in humans which don't inhibit normal functioning.
Furthermore, there are numerous species which can have diploid or haploid offspring, including startlingly complex species, which function mostly normally, and even some where the diploidy or haploidy breeds true with like. In fact, its long been noticed that closely related species of certain sorts tend to be within a couple of chromosomes of double or half the chromosomes of each other.
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posted
I wrote a paper for an American history class on this topic this year. I covered the scientific/ideological/religious roots of both sides, and how the issue has played out in the courts since the Scopes trial.
This issue has been in the courts many times before, and it's always the same.
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quote:Most of the time I see Christians complaining about being oppressed, it means that they are being prevented from forcing their religion on other people (just in the example of evolution, there's the Scope's monkey trial).
quote:I'm also worried by the apparent need for a relatively pampered group to nurse a feeling of ubiquitous persecution.
Squicky, you seem to be very good at blatantly ignoring a lot of what goes on in this country. Get this through your head: Christians are being attacked often, and not as you mischaracterized it here.
At one point I listed dozens of cases of Christian groups being discriminated against in schools, many of which got to the appellate level, some to SCOTUS, before they were vindicated. And those were only some of the federal cases.
At UVA, my student activities fees were going to a group that worked actively to promote abortion, another to support gay rights, and a magazine that published anti-Christian articles almost every issue. The first two made anti-Christian comments a regular part of their propoganda. A speech code was promulgated that would have made statements such as "I believe pre-marital sex is immoral" actionable if anyone felt "oppressed" by it. (Yes, that was an actual example in the official comments). It wasn't implemented, because after it got through several official committees we rallied against it.
Why are Christians sensitive to attacks in educational settings? Because we see them constantly.
posted
And, to bring it up again, Farmgirl has made accusations that we (and, while I may be wrong, I feel as if I were a primary target) were behaving disrespectfully towards her and ridiculing her beliefs. I'm hoping that either she or someone else could show me where this happened, because I really don't see it.
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Ricree, I am quite familiar with the basic strawmen arguments of creationists. They come in three main categories :
Irrelevancies, such as "If evolution is true we cannot behave morally".
Bunk, such as "Radiocarbon dating does not work".
Outright lies, such as "Dinosaur and human footprints were found side by side".
If you have something outside those three, I shall be delighted to hear it. As for your question, I don't see how it is in any way a problem for evolutionary theory (or, to be fair, for ID "theory"), so I don't understand what you mean by accounting for it. You get chromosomal abnormalities when something goes wrong in the copying process, and then you get too much of several kinds of protein. Obviously that causes trouble. The reason it's pretty rare is that creatures with better error-checking mechanisms had more offspring, and passed on their good error checking. Basic differential fitness. Where is the problem?
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Dag, Could you substantiate your claims that Christians are getting attacked constantly? Because, as I said, I don't see it. There are some instances of this, but taken against the backdrop of priviledged status that Christians enjoy in this country, I don't feel that the attitude of ubiquitous oppression is justified.
And, man, you accusing someone else of ignoring a lot of what goes on? That's terribly ironic.
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There are a large absolute number of "attacks" on christianity, but I'm not so certain its that large in comparison to, say, the inverse occurence.
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If you do not want your beliefs to be scorned apply just a bit of... I guess sense to what you believe.
I mean if we postulate that all the fossil, DNA, RNA and biochemical evidence for evolution is a false creation to mislead us from God, then we have an impotent God or a deliberatly deceptive one. It is then a short step to wonder if the Hell of such a God can be less tolerable then his Heaven!
If you dismiss the evidence, without accounting for it, you are not postulating a valid theory, you are not following the scientific method and you do not belong in a science class! (period)
So go away and shame on you for bringing this sillyness before real grown ups!
posted
And I'd argue that it's relatively small compared to the number of times Christians have tried, without much justification, to cast things (like for example the judicial philibusters) as an attack on their religion. Or people protesting changing the law in PA to allow liquor stores to sell alcohol on Sunday as being religious oppression because they can't tell other people to follow their religious laws.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Could you substantiate your claims that Christians are getting attacked constantly?
*points to his previous post* Evidence for one four-year period at one institution in America. At that point in time, I was very involved in this issue and heard about it from people at dozens of schools around the country.
quote:Because, as I said, I don't see it. There are some instances of this, but taken against the backdrop of priviledged status that Christians enjoy in this country, I don't feel that the attitude of ubiquitous oppression is justified.
I didn't say an attitude of ubiquitous oppression is justified. I said attacks can be seen constantly.
quote:And, man, you accusing someone else of ignoring a lot of what goes on? That's terribly ironic.
Only because you insist on taking my statements about somethings as proof that I don't know about other things. For example, my stating that many Christians do not oppose gay marriage out of bigotry seems to provoke you into claiming I'm denying that such bigotry exists. It's comforting that you do it to other people, to: for example, Catholics who saw The Passion and were moved by it were somehow ignoring the rest of Christianity by focusing on one element for a brief period of time. Every post I make does not have to be a complete exegesis of every possible subject which you think is related to the one I'm commenting on.
In this instance, you seem to be trying to raise the privileged status of Christians to counter my proposition that "Christians are being attacked often."
Both can be true. Focusing on one does not mean I deny the other.
It's really quite a simple concept.
quote:There are a large absolute number of "attacks" on christianity, but I'm not so certain its that large in comparison to, say, the inverse occurence.
I've made no statement about the frequency of the inverse occurence, have I?
quote:And I'd argue that it's relatively small compared to the number of times Christians have tried, without much justification, to cast things (like for example the judicial philibusters) as an attack on their religion. Or people protesting changing the law in PA to allow liquor stores to sell alcohol on Sunday as being religious oppression because they can't tell other people to follow their religious laws.
Which, of course, has nothing to do with my point above.
It seems to me that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction--if not in physical reality, then certainly in politics.
The secular people push for the absence of religion in their government. The religious see this as an attack on them, and push for prayer in the schools. This goes on and on, and today, more than ever, we see this played out on the national stage.
Most of the problem is a fear of being attacked, and a reaction to that fear in the form of a counter-attack. It doesn't end.
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posted
I know you didn't, Dag, but there's a difference between being persecuted and being attacked, and a large part of that difference is how disproportionate the attacks are.
Many Christians have a sense of persecution that I feel is inaccurate.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Dag, You've displayed a pretty consistent tendency to twist things to make Christianity look good in most of our conversations about it, such as Galileo or the Crusades. I expect extreme, fact-warping bias from you.
I don't deny that Christians get attacked, never have. However, as I've said, they are a relatively priviledged group and, from what I've seen, the majority of times they've played the attack card were not really justified.
edit: And seriously, those are not accurate descriptions of our interplay on those issues. I realize that we both tend to miscontrue the other and I think you've done it to me there.
posted
I have seen that science is taught backwards. I am so excited about the discovery of the Black Holes already pointing to proff of String Theory, (Well M-Theory) it may be that we can start teaching science 'ab inito' rather then jumping around and leaving people with such huge gaps in their understanding. Science may soon be taught starting with space time and going up to theories of consiousness and cosmology. We do ourselves no favors by sarting in the middle.
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