Letters to the Editor
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@ Mingming/Crazy for Reason
Here's another suggestion that others may already have made: encourage your friend to read Judge Jones' decision in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case. In this case -- a Federal courtroom where both sides had plenty of chances to put forth their best case -- ID/creationism got smacked down and exposed as a total thoroughgoing fraud, in no uncertain terms.
And Jones wasn't a liberal either, or a secularist, or an atheist. He's a conservative, Republican, Lutheran, Bush-Jr.-appointee, whom many creationists expected to be biased in their favor.
And the creationists, who lost that case, never filed an appeal on any grounds.
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Re: Hatred of creationism
"What's underneath this hatred of creationism? Fear? of what?"
Besides the inherent anti-science stance of creationists?
(Which is enough...)
It's a specific dislike of the underlying attitudes which arise from literal belief in the Creation story. In the second creation narrative, God gives Man dominion over the animals and over Woman, who is created from Man to be his "helper." It's an inherently patriarchal mythology that is destructive to the environment and to women. Tons of Christians in the US don't care if we destroy the environment because they believe God gave it to us to do with as we wish.
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Religious Myth
"Privileging science over belief is good practical behavior, but does it allow for the largest and most tolerant view of humanity as a whole? Does it not place those in possession of technical and scientific power above other cultures, and is that superiority not the starting point for imperialism?"
It's not only "good practical behavior," it's spiritually sound. Those societies, such as the Spanish of the 16th and 17th centuries who conquered most of Central and South America had superior technologies, such as steel weapons, but the real power behind their conquest was religion and greed, a deadly combination, which has its contemporary counterpart in America's attempted conquest of Iraq.
Religious myth doesn't have to be disastrous, but much too often it has proven itself to be a horribly negative force in the world. As it is now.
It's obviously dangerous to teach utter nonsense such as creationism to children. Would I advocate its censorship? No. Let the these ideas compete in the intellectual and spiritual marketplace.
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ID not science
The problem is not that teaching ID or creationism or the flying spaghetti monster myths is abuse, the problem is the lie that this is somehow science. Science involves making educated guesses and testing them.
Is the school wishing to set up this course willing to test the hypothesis "God created the world in six days"? If the hypothesis is not testable, it is not science, and if it is testable, what will the reaction be when it shown to be false? Are they willing to give up the idea (that's science) or cling to it in the face of contrary evidence (that's faith)?
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Hey, I have an idea...
Let's get rid of Gary Tennis and simply post about a dozen letters each day, and allow us, the readers, to contribute our own advice to whichever problems we feel competent to address. Salon could spend the money saved on its real strength -- political news and commentary -- and without the bottleneck of one guy choosing which letter to answer, more LWs would get the same quality of advice that Tennis' readers (regular and occasional) are offering now.
It would be the best of both worlds: the wisdom of crowds plus the savings of outsourcing.
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Which High School Science Teachers Are Failing Their Duty: not flunking out Creationists?
I know it is late in this thread but I have had trouble accesing Salon articles lately.
I need to ask something I think about often in this type of discussion.
"Why the heck do we continue to pay for high school teachers in science who refuse to flunk out creationist students in their classes?"
A whole canon of science is Satan's Work for a lot of these unfortunates in highchool. So many creationist students continue to excell in their grades beyond high school- are they living a lie just to get their diplomas? And if the teacher knows this why doesn't she grade them accordingly?
Plate Tectonics- continental shift;Red Shift; Doppler; Darwin (Huxley et al) Mengel; Crick/Watson; Zillion year old Galaxies; Nano ands quantum time and Archaeology and basic history and suggested prehistory and any discrepency with biblical or Koranic dogma- all that and most of strong high school and college curriculae is just nonesense to these kids, yet studies still show about 30% of the US population holds to the creationist mindset.
Why are we not flunking out 30% of these otherwise well-performing highschoolers and college students based upon their scientific unreason?
Please, all you high school and college science teachers out there: TELL ME WHY YOU ARE FAILING IN YOUR DUTY AS A TEACHER BY PROMOTING THESE FAKES?
Soyy about screaming at you there, but sssscheeeeescschh!
You know you are doing wrong! You know who thses kids are and you value your jobs more than getting the thing right, huh?
Are you no better than these duplicitous politicians you so often decry?
Flunk those creationist phoney students out of your scince programs! Just as you would likely flunk and other kid in class who couldn't grasp the material.
Let them learn their science in church- WITHOUT a diploma to fall fake back upon!
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Because they can't, Minnesinger
"TELL ME WHY YOU ARE FAILING IN YOUR DUTY AS A TEACHER BY PROMOTING THESE FAKES?"
I'm not a science teacher. Are you?
I didn't think so.
But from what I have seen of public-school science curricula, evolution isn't a big enough part of the subject to cause a complete failure. Nor to stop a promotion. The school boards don't want court cases where they have to defend against folks with an ideological agenda.
Teachers have to stick to the approved curricula, test and mark according to the published standards, and be as impartial as possible. They don't get to apply their own personal standards all the time. If evolution is 10% of the grade, you can't flunk a kid who gets the rest of the course.
I suspect that most creationists deal with the problem in three ways:
1) They don't send their kids to public school.
2) They insist that evolution is against their religious beliefs, and manage to opt out of it, same as some folks opt out of sex ed.
3) They give the right answers on the test, and then tell themselves rationalizations such as "it's only a theory, not a proven fact" and/or "flunking out is a greater evil than going along with a *theory*".
Don't blame the teachers - they're the soldiers on the front lines, not the generals back at headquarters.