If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
Partially inspired by Ben’s post the other day, I had a discussion with my parents about the push for “intelligent design” and other semi-religious issues being discussed for inclusion in public schools. My mom had the best comment, I think:
“What boggles me about the way these people—the ones who want to push religious ideas into schools—is their lack of foresight. California’s going to be largely hispanic, and so is Texas, sometime in the future. And that’s generally Catholic, not Protestant. I can’t imagine they want their kids going to school to learn the principles of a religion that’s not theirs.”
Which, frankly, is why we have things like “the separation of church and state.” I think anyone who disagrees with that concept should spend some time in a country where those rules don’t apply.
{ 2 comments }
Kyle 08.24.05 at 4:14 pm
First of all, there is no such thing as a mandated separatation between church and state. All the government can’t do is establish a national religion. Things like referencing god are completely fair game.
Second, this push for intelligent design, also, led to some book about Pandas making the case for intelligent design being put in the library, and a 30 second announcement the availability of said book being made in a Biology class. Seriously, that’s what all this fuss was over. Unbelievable.
3rd, I don’t get what you mean by referencing catholics and protestants. The only difference between them is the centrality of their governing.
Liberals arrogantly assume that intelligent design is about Jesus or passing out bibles in science class some shit. It’s about the hole in the science community’s own theory about matter- it can’t be created or destroyed, so where did it come from? Intelligent design is just another way of explaining things that can’t be any more disproven than any other explanations they have, it’s just not as popular with a science community that hates anything that they think even leaves room for the existance of a god, and if communities want that included in the education that they pay for and the government mandates that their children have, some whiny jackasses in DC can kind of suck it.
As far as the whole ‘but our children are so far behind!!’ bullshit, eurasia can keep their heady twerps, we’ll just go ahead outproducing them in just about every sector.
It’s funny too that people use Darwin as some sort of champion against Judeo-Christian idiocy, given that he himself was a christian and thought his theory of evolution was evidence for the existance of god rather than denied it, which was the whole point of his expedition in the first place.
-Kyle
Jason 09.05.05 at 4:20 pm
Sorry about the slow response! Traveling has kind of put me behind on things:
Re-reading this, I didn’t mean to suggest as much as I did about intelligent design–something that I dont’ really know much about. My basic point was that –regardless of what intelligent design is–the inclusion of fairly religious ideas in science courses is a mistake.
If ID is a complete theory that can be looked at via whatever method we’re supposedly examining scientific theories with, that’s fine. I just want to be wary of teaching things that are, to a certain extent, immune to critical questioning. If someone can, in a socially acceptable way, get offended by you poking holes in their argument, it’s not really for use in a classroom. As far as I can tell, the best reason to teach theories is to get millions of arrogant kids trying to poke holes in them ;)
Comments on this entry are closed.