“The National Center for Science Education is antichrist.”

Just about anything that is said afterwards can be discredited by this first sentence alone.  This is a debate about whether or not religion should be taught in public schools under the guise of Intelligent Design.  Intelligent Design has been proven time and again to be a slapdash repackaging of creationism in secular sounding terms in a feeble attempt to get it into science curriculum.  The National Center for Science Education isn’t antichrist, they’re simply asking that science curriculum reflects the separation of church and state that was established with the founding of this country.  To call the NCSE antichrist is to call America and most of the founding fathers antichrist while at the same time revealing your true religious motives right from the get go.

“Text taken from The Quest for Right, a 7-book series on origins based on physical science, the old science of cause and effect:”

As far as I know science is still operating under the same old system of theorize, test, modify, and test again until you get it right or get as close to right as is possible with current technology and methodology.  It’s the same system that has been in use since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and it’s the same system that has consistently validated ideas like evolution that have gotten your panties in such a twist.  Could it be that you’re hearkening back to the pure science of the dark ages that served humanity so well for so long?

“Special note on obstructionism: In 1916, one thousand scientists were polled as to their belief in a deity (i.e., God). Of the ones responding, 60 percent had no religious belief. A follow-up study 80 years later revealed that the percentage of atheists, someone who does not believe in or denies the existence of God, among scientists remains shockingly high: 78 percent of physicists, 58 percent of biologists, and 55 percent of mathematicians are atheists.”

This is one of the biggest gripes that I have with modern religions.  Why is it shocking that scientists don’t believe in God?  Why is this such a scandal?  Why do the religious have this impulse to convert everyone around them to their particular belief system?  In short, who cares if they don’t believe in God?  It doesn’t surprise me that a good deal of scientists don’t hold a religious belief one way or the other.  Their whole life revolves around coming up with a suitable cosmology that is based on observable evidence and rigorous testing, which is something that no religion in the world can stand up to.  There is no case for God other than taking it on faith, and you’ll forgive me if I prefer scientists who question the world around me rather than taking it at face value based on ancient and outdated tribal morality.

 ”Sixty percent of those polled by the University of Georgia historian Edward Larson snubbed Judaism, Islam, and Christianity by equating “belief in a deity and an afterlife with superstition based on fear and wishful thinking.” Nature, 4-09-1997″

At the risk of sounding pedantic, here is the dictionary.com definition of superstition:

1.	a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

2.	a system or collection of such beliefs.

3.	a custom or act based on such a belief.

4.	irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, esp. in connection with religion.

5.	any blindly accepted belief or notion.

Sounds like religion fits the definition of superstition perfectly!  Moving on.

“Even more disturbing, only 10 percent of those polled “expressed an intense desire for immortality” (that is, going to heaven), thus, signifying that on the average only 10 percent of physicists, biologists, and mathematicians are under covenant.”

Again you’re showing your ass by revealing your true motives.  Basing an argument against science on the fact that scientists aren’t “under covenent” is ridiculous.  Freedom of religion means they have the freedom to no religion, but that shouldn’t affect how they do their job either way.  Ethical scientists have their own system, the scientific method, that has done pretty well so far.

“The great majority (90 percent) have little or no regard for God but, rather, oppose Him, promoting the error that the earth and all that is in existence happened by chance. The mystical tenet governs every aspect of academic science”

There is a subtle but very distinct difference between actively opposing God and teaching a cosmology that has no room for God, though that’s a distinction lost on the religious.  If an experiment was carried out tomorrow that proved once and for all that God did exist then that would be put into the science textbooks, but so far the almighty creator of the universe has been strangely silent for the past five thousand years.  Science teachers aren’t actively trying to convert their classrooms to radical atheism, they are simply teaching the sum total of centuries of scientific inquiry.  It’s not the scientists’ fault that God hasn’t shown any evidence of his existence once in all that time, and it isn’t the teacher’s job to teach religion to students.  Religion and schools are separate, and that’s how it should be.  If you’re interested in theocracy then you can move to Iran where they’re more welcoming to that brand of close-minded thinking.

“To the point, obstructionists: scientists, biologists, mathematicians, and the NEA, teach the innocents within the classroom that there is no God.”

Again, God and religion shouldn’t be taught in the classroom.  We are a secular society that has the basis for that secularism written into the Constitution.  I for one am glad that I live in a society where freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought is considered a basic human right that is part of the highest law in the land.  Otherwise we might live in a world where creationist theocrats such as C. David Parsons got their way and stifled true understanding of the universe with a tragically limited cosmology written by primitive nomads six-thousand years ago.

Technorati Tags: C. David Parsons, secularism, religion, creationism, intelligent design, The Quest For Right, theocracy

The “academic freedom” tactic is just another example of Intelligent Designers taking a good idea and perverting it as a means to their own disingenuous ends. I wholly agree that academic freedom is a good thing, but that freedom doesn’t extend to allowing teachers to dress up their religion in vaguely scientific terms and poorly thought-out logical fallacies and teach it as fact in the classroom.

Let’s be clear, what the ID crowd is advocating isn’t academic freedom, it’s institutionalized ignorance. Intelligent Design can’t be proven. Religion is taken on faith, and as such there is no test that man could ever devise to prove or disprove the existence of God. Any student who has taken biology and genetics courses in college can easily poke thousands of holes in the “scientific” rationale for Intelligent Design with evidence to back up their claims while the Intelligent Design groups are forced to rely on facile appeals to the ignorance and incredulity of the masses. As the courts and the overwhelming evidence has proven time and again, Intelligent Design is nothing more than an attempt to sneak religious teaching into the school system, and teaching religion is most definitely verboten.

Of course that didn’t stop the Alabama legislature from trying to use a false appeal to “academic freedom” in the language for the bill:

“[teachers have the right to] present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views in any curricula or course of learning “

The last time I checked, no reputable scientist opened up their copy of the Bible and took every cosmological statement found therein at face value. Even people who study the Bible for a living admit that there’s a lot in there that’s contradictory and just plain wrong when seen through the lens of a modern world view. Intelligent Design and creationism are not part of the scientific debate anywhere but amongst the creationist academic pariahs at the Discover Institute. The ID crowd is attempting to create the illusion of scientific controversy where none exists, because the hard evidence consistently disproves just about every idea they espouse.

“no student in any public school or institution of higher education … shall be penalized in any way because he or she may subscribe to a particular position on any views.”

I don’t know about you, but I certainly hope that the future doctors and scientists of America are flunked if they fail basic 100 level science courses because they insist that religion trumps reason and evidence. The country will be in a sad state in a few decades if the people who wrote this bill eventually have their way. Of course I do have to admit that it would have made the biology and genetics classes I took in college much easier if we were simply allowed to say “God made it happen” on exams instead of drawing detailed cladograms and blending nasty smelling chunks of beef to isolate and analyze the genetic material over the course of several weeks.

On the plus side, the language in that bill would have provided legal protection for the teaching of Pastafarianism in the schools, but it’s probably a better idea to just keep all religion out of the classroom no matter how noodly and delicious it may be.

via Bad Astronomy

Technorati Tags: alabama, creationism, intelligent design, HB923

Now I’ll be the first to admit that there are circumstances under which it would be acceptable to fire a teacher for wizardry.  Maybe if he was trying to entice one of his students to enlist as a thief with a group of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their lost treasure from an ancient and fearsome dragon.  That’s the sort of dangerous thing that middle school students probably aren’t ready to handle.  Firing would be justified if if he was trying to kill one of the students to create a seventh horcrux that would make him an all-powerful immortal evil overlord.  I’d even say firing was justified if he was using his magical powers to banish students to the magical land of Oz.

But for making a toothpick disappear?  That’s just plain stupid.  I’d be willing to bet that there is a fundamentalist Christian child at the bottom of this who complained about the magic trick in the first place because everyone knows sleight of hand is an abomination before the Lord their God, but for a school system to actually fire someone over a magic trick is just further proof of the downfall of reasonable civilization.

Finn Laursen, of the Christian Educators Association International has taken up the fight for religious moral absolutes that brought civilization wonderful things like the Inquisition:

This type of behavior should not shock anyone in this postmodern culture that promotes a philosophy of no absolute truth and therefore no absolute right and wrong.

Actually, Finn, I’d say that society in general frowns upon premeditated murder.  The relativistic viewpoint could possibly justify these kids attacking their teacher if she was horribly abusive or if they were sent back in time to prevent her from giving birth to the next Hitler, but that’s getting into a realm of fiction a bit far-fetched even for someone who takes the Bible at face value.  In this case everyone can agree that the kids are a rotten bunch who should be thrown in the juvenile equivalent of the clink, whether or not your moral compass happens to come from an ancient legal code that is morally dubious by today’s standards.

When parents don’t train their children to have a clear moral compass, the young can be expected to make unethical decisions. The next line of defense is in the schools where we are in a culture war, and our schools are the battlefield.

Should I even bother to mention that this little plot would become perfectly ethical according to the Christian scripture if their teacher was a homosexual, wasn’t Christian herself, or was menstruating without voluntarily exiling herself to a tent in the desert where she would be forced to make burnt offerings of sweet meats to the Lord her God?

Children today are continually confronted with ideas contrary to the principles of Scripture, and  contemporary public schools are often void of such truths. The fruit of these dynamics are apparent. If children are not nurtured with God’s perspective, they can and will be easily deceived.

And here we come to the crux of the problem.  The Bible is not an ethical guidebook.  The Bible doesn’t provide a moral compass for people.  The Bible is a mishmash of poorly matched stories told by unreliable narrators usually hundreds of years after the events they are covering supposedly took place.  Most of the rules that the Bible lays out are horrible and completely ridiculous by today’s standards.  Christians need to stop harping about Biblical principles and leading their lives according to Scripture, because living according to Biblical principles and the scripture just leads to hatred and intolerance.

The Bible is a handy guidebook if your idea of moral behavior includes incest, murder, sexual repression, and deity-sanctioned genocide, but you’ll have to forgive me if I prefer my society to lean towards moral relativism.

Technorati Tags: moral relativism, christian living, scripture, christian ethics