Letters to the Editor
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Hard call
The problem is that if your friend punts on the assignment, the school will replace him with someone who's more theologically pure -- someone who, unlike your friend, will eagerly jump at the chance to indoctrinate a bunch of kids. Perhaps it's better in the long run that the students are taught by someone who has serious reservations about young earth creationism.
Maybe you could suggest that he go over a variety of creation theories (including evolution) with his students and let them decide for themselves. Or that he could teach young earth creationism and mention all of the scientific problems with the theory. Or that he could teach it as theology, not science.
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cjackb
You said -
Fundamentalists have a word for your philosophy: moral relativism.
#### Which brings us to an important point. We are being urged by Cary and others to be tolerant of people's crazy ideas. But they do not reciprocate. If we just shrug and say, oh, okay, creationism, whatever, they will just walk all over us. When someone says, d'ya think this is okay, the thing to do is say
NO
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Ah, kuhnigget...(5/14/08 11.24pm)
You quote me thus "Poetry, art, design, literature, games, music, and, some say, even mathematics and, yes, science, are constructed so as to support the project of human life, which is for every person to live a life in which it makes sense to try to preserve, honor, and promote other life as well as one's own." And reply: "Uh...right. Nice thought, but the science of, say, aircraft engineering, is to keep the damn plane in the air, not to make one honor the joy of flying." I say true, but ask: why keep the "damn (?) plane in the air"?
You go on: "Maybe your philosophy of inclusion would be okay if our society, our very lives, were not so dependent upon real science performed by real scientists who know what they are doing, and not by non-scientists who "believe" in some alternative universe in which faith keeps a satellite in orbit, or a power plant running, or vegetables growing in their backyard garden." True again. Good science is not only true but helps us live. Bad science is not only untrue but hurts life. The trouble comes in--and one wishes these were not possibilities--when good science (i.e. true about the world) undoes sense and/or destroys life, and bad science (untrue about the world) makes good sense and/or supports life. (Many agricultural practices, for example, were once supported by moon phase timing, spirit stories, and a bevy of unscientific beliefs.)
More broadly: If Nature includes human nature, then science, to be complete, must include seeming facts about human nature in its matrix of falsifiable propositions. Among those falsifiable propositions is the proposition that people believe unfalsifiable things. The evidence so far shows that people do, including people who get exercised about other people's unfalsifiable beliefs. Can science be made of that? Or only sense?
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Turn off the heat
Turn off the heat and turn on the light. I suggest that the atheist send his friend a book on how to teach science as vividly as possible rather than just throwing up his hands. Assure the person of his ongoing personal regard and that the disdain is for a religiously-based scientific theory and not for the friend. The friend is not considering putting his hands in children's underpants. Yes, it may have an element of withholding something valuable (the truth) and yes, it is thus immoral. Maybe the atheist might suggest consulting the local laws on the separation of church and state so that there is a more powerful controlling legal authority that the friend can use to counteract the frankly-illegal attempts by the man's pastor.
I consider it profoundly wrong to teach young earth creationism or Intelligent Design, the child with a three-digit IQ, in science class. I am a theologian, by the way, trained as a neuroscientist before I started to study religious history -- my field. As a theologian, I am appalled at the over-reach by some of the more fundamentalist representatives of religion. Christian dominionist views have no place in the American social and legal fabric. They're fine in church but keep them out of the body politic.
As long as the theist is convinced that the atheist cares about him, the tutorial on ethics and science teaching could work. Above all, the man wants to be a good teacher. Help him find a way to do that.
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Nancy Ott--from somebody who's been there
I doubt seriously that he will be given any of those options. Fundie school, remember? And if they want to teach young earth creationism they must be fairly extreme fundie.
One of the things fundies are alert for, to the extent of hypervigilance, is dissent within the ranks. We were roundly and consistently punished for "passive resistance", a wonderful category of crime because all you had to do was THINK the wrong way, and if your body betrayed you, you were caught.
My sister was punished for rolling her eyes during a lecture about how the Devil uses songs like "Stairway to Heaven" to lead people into Hell. I was punished for twisting hands and leg trembling. All passive resistance.
That teacher will NOT be allowed to express a dissenting view in the classroom. I am pretty sure he unburdens his doubts to this friends because he has learned to keep his mouth good and shut around his community.
Not all fundies are alike but many in rural/survivalist communities are absolutely cults of the worst order. I think the only way to combat them is to make sure the children being raised in them are exposed to a normal environment at least a few hours a day, so that they can function when they leave. That's why I think that in America, mandatory public school education is a must to prevent somebody like Mike Huckabee from becoming President in the future.
To make this possible, complete overhaul and massive funding of public schools should be a priority, to turn them into world class institutions instead of the ghetto warehouses for the minority kids who couldn't flee to suburbs--which they often are now. Their well-being should not be tied to property taxes. Lots of things. But those damn schools are our only hope.
I can think of another country where public education became ghettoized and largely failed--Pakistan. Soon there was a significant rich, privately schooled and poor, barely literate divide. The poor parents turned to religious schools to close the gap--mosque schools known to the West as madrassahs. The rest, the Taliban and political instability and Pakistan on the verge of failing as a state, is history. The beautiful and formerly Buddhist mountain area of Swat and Chitral is now under the Taliban's sway. Children are dying of polio there because Allah doesn't like the polio vaccine. All of this relates pretty directly to the failure of good universal education in Pakistan.
For God's sake wake up people. This could happen in America. Pastor Hagee has thousands of followers and homeschoolers are building their own colleges to keep the bubble around their young robots. Fundies have come a long way since the 1970s, when they couldn't even dream of fielding a candidate like Huckabee who could actually win any state.
Wake up. These fuckers are out to get us, and they have got a pretty good plan. But if they can't brainwash the next generation, they won't win. If they can't keep people in ignorance, they won't win.
Mandatory public schooling. No one has a right to abuse their children to advance a pernicious political ideology disguised as a religion. Nobody, whether they call themselves the Taliban or the Baptists.