Slashdot Mirror
Evolution No Longer Worth Learning, Says Government
Davemania writes "New York Times reports that the Evolution biology subject has disappeared from a list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The Education department has described this as a Clerical Mistake but others are skeptical about this. 'Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. "It's just awfully coincidental," said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.'" As someone who made use of one of those grants to study Evolutionary Biology, I find this more than a little galling.
Science has repeatedly disproven the stories found within the religious tomes in the world. Still, that doesn't mean that a god doesn't exist in some form or another; it simply means that he can't be trusted.
Meanwhile, god's existence doesn't\H\H\H\H\H\H\Hshouldn't really matter one way or another when it comes to making policy decisions.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
If non-religious people (scientists or otherwise) were forced to go to church the way religious people are forced to go to school, what's taught at church absolutely would be at least as hot a topic as what's taught in schools.
You aren't forced to send your child to a school, you are forced to make sure they get an education. Not the same thing. If you can't manage to create a home school environment for them then you are left with pawning them off on what's left over - public school.
Home schooling and Private schooling exist for this very reason.
Vocational training as in 8 1/2 weeks of basic training, then off to the wars to take the American Dream to the ends of the world at bayonette point. Who cares if your kid can't read or write as long as they can pull a trigger? It's to the government's advantage under the current way of thinking to keep kids dumb and broke and show them the military as a way out of poverty.
They tried something like this during Vietnam, called Project 100,000. They took 100,000 men that would qualify for service if only they could read and write, and promised them the world, to teach them a trade, promised them they wouldn't end up in a rice paddy, the works. What they gave these suckers was 11 1/2 weeks in what the Army called 'Special Training Company', where the Army put all its fatties, weirdos, and teenaged malcontents to either make them or break them, then off to Vietnam with a rifle in their hand. The ONLY skill taught to the Project 100,000 volunteers was basic infantryman.
Let's face it, the current stringpullers believe that unless you're rich enough to send your kids to college with THEIR kids, your kids are only worth flipping burgers for the ruling class. And the underclass is only good for supplying the ruling class with their toys, dope, sex, whatever. Doesn't matter what political party is acting like they run things, they're all the same when you get down to it. Their watchwords are stay in power and stomp the underclass. You'll never see THEIR kids in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It's the same thing as happened to the Roman Empire, according to Gibbons (who I read way the hell back in the 60's growing up). Find a copy of Gibbons in your local high school library. Hell, find a copy in your local COLLEGE library. Basically, the Empire lasted until the patrician class realised they could vote themselves privileges, using barbarian troops to push the edge of the Empire ever forward while it was party time at home.
Sound familiar?
Countering Evolution Theory is a total short circuit of scientific method. Even assuming that evolution is untrue, there needs to be a new scientific theory that can better explain the diversity of life on earth, and the extreme coincidences that point to common ancestry. The very tightly linked genome information is really hard to just explain away with some alternate scientific theory..
Evolution is a theory that is brutally hard to poke any real holes in.. Most people try to counter with statistical arguments that skip some of the in between steps.
Anyway, the point is that rational people are afraid of whats happening, and arent going to simply look away when they see neo-theocracy coming closer.
Storm
Actually the scientific method itself has not changed in over a century. Individual theories HAVE changed precisely because of the CONSISTENT application of the scientific method itself has shown that we need changes in individual theories as we have new insights into the fundamental laws of nature and new mathematical and technological tools to refine and the theoretical statement of those laws with. Mostly we are at the point of refining theories and not radically overthrowing them, for example Newtons laws of gravity are still true at the macroscopic level, it's only at extreme speeds or scales that relativistic effects show up. Those relativistic effects don't invalidate Newton's laws but extend them into realms that were not testable in Newton's time period. We may come up with further refinements in physics, but we can also be quite confident that they will not completely turn over the empirically verified theories of Newton and Einstein. Further applications of the SAME scientific method Einstein used will yield refinements and that's all to the good.
Note again I'm not really a rocket scientist or physicist would some hard core scientist please jump in here and confirm what I've said? Thanks.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
That's a simpler version of the theory that I've long liked: When God created this world, he went to a lot of effort faking the geological and fossil records. He obviously wanted us to believe that our world was billions of years old, and life had evolved here from simple precursors. If we don't believe this, we are going against God's will. So we should believe what God's evidence tells us.
Those who believe some old book written by ignorant desert shepherds will be punished by God for their refusal to follow his story line that He wrote in the very rocks of our world.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Not the ones in this day and age. They all dump WIS in favor of CHA so they can get more money and followers. That's why they can't cast spells like they used to thousands of years ago =\
Hail oh powerful and wise Slashdot mono-culture.
Mono-culture? Is that International Whine Language for "anyone who doesn't agree with me?" Guess what? Freedom of speech does not guarantee you the right to be respected for what you say. Or even believed. And insulting your target audience is not likely to get them to agree with you.
Saying that everybody who posts on slashdot thinks the same is just a thinly veiled insult. It's basically implying that (unlike the 'free thinking' poster) no one here can think for themselves. It is implying that only easily-led sheeple would hold that particular opinion, that no one could have arrived at that opinion through logic or introspection, only through surrendering to the hive mind.
It's a very hypocritical stand to take. It's trying to get everyone to agree with you by saying that if they don't, they are somehow not individuals, but mere pawns. Face it, you aren't upset that "slashbots" are pawns. You are upset that they're not your pawns. You don't want free thinking individuals, because you aren't one yourself. You project your own inadequecies onto others. You've bought a certain line of thought hook, line and sinker, and when anyone questions that line of thought, it can only be because they aren't a "free thinker" like you.
How droll. It's like the counter culture kids who rebel by all dressing alike.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You are free to home school your kids if you like and that costs you nothing.
Nothing? It costs you one parent's income. That's more expensive than private school.
In any case you're reading a lot into my posts that isn't there. I'm not arguing that I need to be able to send my kids to a private school, I'm arguing that:
IMO, both of those are good things.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Summary: People who do not study evolution are not suitable for "high caliber" education.
I agree and disagree. I agree that the study of evolution is important. So are many other aspects of science.
On the flip side. . . Rejecting students because of a single issue / single theory / single area reflects exactly what is wrong with our education system and our nation as a whole.
Complete disgregard of a student on a single criterion is short sighted. There are great scientists who have had little background with evolution. That is no indicator that they are flawed or have some broken logic that segregates them from the rest of society and higher education. To reject a student based on this one criteria indicates your logic is flawed and you are as limited in understanding education as you claim others may be regarding science.
How can we foster an educated public that innovates and invents if we slap them with a mandate that they must study and accept everything that we accept now? Innovation is discovery and challenging what we think we know now. If we had not challenged hard science at one point the world would still be flat.
Again the flip side. . . How can we innovate and challenge something if we turn our back on it and refuse to discuss it? This is the same logic that prompted religous institutions to execute people because of their notions on whether the Earth was the center of the universe or not.
We must study evolution as much as we need to study Psychology and Sociology BUT we need to stop being so polarized about it. Denying someone education because they lack a background in a single area is the complete opposite of the other side and both are equally wrong.
Repeat after me, "would you like fries with that?"
Being able to say that in a foreign language may prove to be helpful in two or three generations...
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Nothing gaurentees that the voucher by itself will be sufficient to cover the tuition at a good private school. In fact, it probably won't-- And that's before considering it would be in any good private school's best interest to raise their tuition considerably if a widespread voucher program went into effect.
If you can cough up the extra on top of the voucher to send your kids to the good public school, it works well for you. If you can't, then you are forced to send your kid to the (now horribly underfunded) public school. Thus, those who had the least oppertunities to start with have even fewer oppertunities than they do in the current system. It gets even harder to pull yourself out of poverty. The and the distribution of wealth grows even more uneven.
For those of you who don't care about the spread of poverty (as long as you're not poor) and maldistribution of wealth that increases over time (as long as you're OK), you should-- crime and quality of life issues are the primary reason. But at the extreme end, history shows that the greater the maldistribution of wealth is in a civilization the more likely it is to collapse, and the more violent that collapse is likely to be. I don't think that's an immediate danger, but education is an area that requires multi-generational thinking.
The purpose of public education is the public good. It's in the public's best interest that there be as easy a road for people to better themselves as possible, and a decent education is a key part of that. It is also in the publics best interest that the general populace be educated.
There are substantial problems with our current educational system, most definitely. And they need to be addressed. My thoughts on the best way to address them are beyond the scope of this post. But I think that "moving them to the private sector" (as many suggest) is not an effective strategy, because while the market is excellent at determining some things (and more things than people might expect) it's not a magic wand that can fix everything. Long-term, public-good, infastructure issues often fly contrary to, rather than in alignment with, the private profit of those providing the services. So trying to use the market to inject accountability is using the wrong tool for the job.
Most of this post has been general, not all of it a direct response to Parent. But from Parent's post:
I'm pretty libertarian, but I think taxes to fund education are a fundamentally Good Thing. There's not much I think government should do in the way of social programs, but that's one of them. However, I also think it would do both public and private schools, not to mention students, a world of good, to introduce some real competition between them.
I would agree, if this could be done in such a matter that those with the fewest oppertunities to begin with didn't end up in the schools too lousy to compete.
What are people's thoughts on a modification of the voucher program, where in order to participate, a private school would be required to charge a tuition no higher than (regional?) voucher amount?
Not after the next election there won't be. Illegal immigration is the number two annoyed topic that people will be voting on come november(the first is the stupid interventionist war). Globalists seeking to second world the US will be voted out, and those illegals will be *going home* as their employment dries up.
Wishful thinking. There is a reason your sort called themselves the "Know nothing" party seven or so iterations back.
Face it. Every attempt to eradicate or exile a given group within a population of humans has failed since the dawn of history*. And thank God because diversity is the greatest strength a population can have. It is one of the main reasons the United States has prospered. It gave us victory over our enemies (The Axis poorly utilized their resources when they refused to let women work and relegated swaths of their population to extermination or forced labour. We on the other hand allowed people of all stripes to work freely and were victorious).
The furor over immigration is just as useless as the other smokescreens thrown by our government to distract us from the fact they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing about the things they can actually work on. It's a canard that gets us all riled up, allows inflammatory discussions involving racism and such to take up time that should be spent discussing what we can do to make our nation better and win / end the war we seem to be fighting. Gay Marriage, Abortion, Obscenity, and Mexican immigrants are all wedge issues that they know will divide us, and which for the most part the government has no business dealing with (and really cannot).
When it comes to the specific issue of immigrants from mexico (because let's face it, for all their talk the Minutemen sure don't seem to care about patrolling the Canadian border which is the only border crossing Al Qaeda has been known to use), there have been migrant workers for centuries and the presence of "undocumented" workers is a simple reality. There's no sense in trying to send 7-25 million (depending on who you believe) people back who are currently working and contributing to our economy. The fact they are outside the system is simply further proof our system does not reflect reality in terms of our economic needs.
The whole system of registering immigrants and control based on quotas originated from provably racist legislation which has since been tweaked but retains its roots. Originally anyone who could come here was allowed to come here and could apply for citizenship after proving they'd lived here a couple of years. If you want control I say you may as well go to the simpler model that anyone who has a job in this country can come here and stay and apply for citizenship after a time; if we're going to keep quotas we're going to need to make them large enough to match the true rate of immigration into this country and speed up the process to match the digital age we live in and again the needs of society.
We need immigrants. They are our only hope of paying off the national debt and social security, and they are the only way we will currently retain the level of population we have. They inject new blood, new ideas, and enrich our cultural experience. The fact that the best people from every country and every field can choose to become Americans, and the fact they often do, makes us all that much stronger. Confucius said that if you treat your population properly people will flock to your country with their children on their backs. That's part of what he described as the ideal state and that is essentially what the United States, for all its faults, became. That's the America we should be protecting.
But again, getting people like me to argue with people like you about immigration is a distraction that keeps you and I from spending time focusing on the things we might agree on, like the fact we are involved in potentially endless conflicts
If anyone hasn't noticed, there is no law, custom or anything else forcing, literally or in practice, anyone to send their children to church to be taught whatever they're taught there. There is, however, a law forcing people to send their kids to school to be taught whatever they're taught there. Therefore whatever is taught in church and whatever is taught in school are not equivalent matters, and your argument is, while technically not a lie, quite misleading.
A church is a private organization, while elementary school is a branch of the government. They cannot be considered equal in what is appropriate to be taught in them. A bunch of scientists (or anyone else) trying to make a court tell a priest (or anyone else) what he can or cannot say to a bunch of people who voluntarily came to the church (or his own home - remember, sermons don't need to be held in custom built churches, it's just practical to do so) would be an outrageous violation of the most basic right to free speech; a bunch of people trying to get the court to tell a teacher who's paid from public (tax) funds what he can or can't tell their kids who were forced by law to come to a public (built or bought with taxpayer money) school is simply business as usual.
This is not an argument for or against teaching evolution or anything else in schools; just that your argument is deeply but subtly flawed.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Should parents who are offended by the idea that people of different skin colors are legally and ethically equal, be allowed to send their kids at taxpayer expense to a school that teaches racism?
Adults can believe whatever crap they want, but children have an ethical right to be presented with good information. There is a certain educational baseline, things that you are obligated to see that your children have the opportunity to learn. These things include basic safety (fire burns you, drinking bleach is a bad idea), basic ethics (skin color is irrelevant, bullying and cruelty are wrong), basic health (regular bathing promotes health, masturbation will not make you go blind, proper condom use reduces but does not eliminate the risk of pregnancy and STDs).
This basic orientation to life also includes the fundamentals of the best human knowledge about our place in the universe: that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, that the stars are distant suns, and that all life on Earth is related through a common chain of descent and diversified through natural selection.
The fact that some ignorant or superstitious parents may find some of these ideas uncomfortable does not relive them of their obligation to see that their children's right to good information is respected. Teaching children only creationism is no more acceptable than teaching them racism or the geocentric model of the universe.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Evolution can't explain where matter comes from, or how it just happened to become oriented in just the right way to allow life
I honestly wish there were a way to mod you up. More people need to realize that those people who "oppose evolution" do so because, at a fundamental level, they just don't understand it. You statments say more than you realize, and they say you don't know what you're talking about.
As a hint, evolution concerns itself with neither of those things... other theories and fields of science do, but not evolution per say.
You might as well say evolution is wrong because it can't explain magnetism.
But religion doesn't reciprocate, and the whole "debate" about evolution isn't the first time various churches have tried to force their religion to substitute for science in the classroom.
That's because many religious ideas are so weak that they do not survive well in the "free marketplace of ideas." Consequently, they require special isolationist protections (an identifying characteristic of cults and brainwashing, BTW). You must isolate your flock else they find out how nuts your ideas really are. Movement to institutionalize religious protectionism I think effectively demonstrates just how bankrupt some of these religious ideas are. As Benjamin Franklin said:
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not do so, and God chooses not to do so, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
When someone finds something "offensive" to their religion, it simply underscores where that religion has no logical counterargument for that thing-- it cannot rationally justify it's problem with the offence, so it must attempt cover up the idea by crying religious "foul," as if we are all playing with a set of rules that claim that no idea can be too baldly irrational as long as it's source is someone's religion
If a truly free country does not include freedom from religion, then the reverse must also be true-- religion is also not free from criticism, contradiction, ridicule or any other forms of irreligious proclamation.
It is this very sort of religious protectionism that is at odds, less with evolution than it is with the concept of a public or common education. Such forms of education are fundamentally incompatible with the arbitrary constraints of foolish superstitions.
Ok wait...if religion is rock and science is paper what's scissors?
politics.
Actually, no. It's reality.
I consider that to be a form of child abuse.
Wanna bet?
You're assuming creationists are only concerned with what's taught to their children. Ask one how he feels about what's taught to your children sometime.
rj
The best way to put frame creationist theories are that its conclusions are true BY DEFINITION, that is, it possesses a circularity that has no real explanatory power.
"YOUR (and the rest of your type) closed mindedness is the precisely reason why so many people think Creationism is so wrong. Most of us who believe in Divine Intervention also accept Evolution (to some minor degree or major depending on your brand of Divine Intervention) as part of the chain of events, just believe we started some other way."
And that isn't any different than the fools who say "God did it 6000 years ago". You've just given a little ground, retreated further into the "nobody knows" of it. And that's what God is, the answer people give instead of "nobody knows", when "nobody knows" is too scary, or they don't want to undermine their own position as a knowledgeable authority figure (religious leaders, or parent-child relationships)
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Some of his examples were straight value judgements.
His assertion that "skin color is irrelevant", while an opinion that I share, is an opinion, not a scientific theory.
It's an opinion that the religious right, however, has already lost the fight on, and is, ironically, now more generally accepted than the idea that life evolves.
That life evolves is a scientific theory. That a supernatural critter made everything exactly the way it is today 6000 years ago is a religious assertion. Which, despite politicking to the contrary, has no place in a science class. Now, if creationists ever come up with some kind of scientific theory, or any kind of actual evidence, to explain their beliefs, it would be different, but so far, all they can do is try to pick on holes in various evolution theories, and usually dishonestly at that.
You say that current scientific theory is not considered "good" information by the parents. The problem is, that parents aren't usually the best judge of what "good" infomation is, which is why we have panels of experts set school curricula, not parents. If the parents don't have enough education to understand what is and isn't a scientific theory, that only proves that education has been inadequate for more than one generation. I heartily disagree that the answer to inadequate education is to make it even more inadequate to avoid offending the ignorant.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention, but this happens all the time. It's called mutation. You can get point mutations (affects just one base pair), deletions (a chunk of DNA is accidentally removed, and the remaining ends are stitched up), insertions (a new chunk of DNA added where it doesn't belong, sometimes smack in the middle of an existing gene), transpositions (a deletion at one site, and an insertion somewhere else), repeat errors (a segment of DNA trips up the cellular machinery and gets duplicated multiple times, like a skipping record), and many others. Combine these, and the result is new DNA.
Most mutations are generally caused by errors in the cellular machinery, although there can be other causes (radiation, dormant retroviruses, etc.). Machinery errors are caused by entropy, so raising the temperature increases the number of errors. This means it's quite easy to induce mutations in the lab by controlling the temperature of a cell culture. (Incidentally, the temperature-error connection is the reason men have a scrotum. If the testicles are too warm, too many of the resulting sperm cells have lethal mutations, leading to reduced fertility and a higher rate of birth defects. Just ask any fertility doctor. Mutations are an everyday fact of life, even within our own bodies.)
Most mutations do nothing at all. Those that do something are usually harmful. However, as one example, our ability to see the difference between red and green probably came from an insertion mutation (in this case, one gene accidentally turned into two genes for the same protein) followed by a small number of point mutations (leading to two genes for two separate proteins, namely Photopsin I and Photopsin II). The intermediate point mutations would have been harmful if they'd happened to the only copy of the photopsin gene, but they were beneficial when they happened to a spare. Many times, if a gene is duplicated by an insertion, one copy can go on to mutate dramatically while the other copy remains unmolested, sometimes resulting in two very similar genes with nearly unrelated roles. (This is because just a handful of changes in the amino acid chain can radically alter the tertiary and quaternary shape of the protein, and the shape of a protein determines what it does. Unfortunately, computing the folded shape of a protein is fiendishly difficult, which is why massively distributed projects like Folding@Home exist.)
Really, mutations are quite heavily studied and, in contrast with your claims, there's some very direct evidence for them. Even the Creationism/ID folks generally don't argue with microevolution (changes within a species), and mutation is required for microevolution to happen. Your position is really out on a limb. What's more, if you don't accept duplication plus point mutations as DNA "being generated/created", then you're essentially faulting God for not magically snapping His fingers for you and instead doing it the boring, step-by-step way. God has more important things to do than please your sense of aesthetics.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
The Constitution may put it in writing, but the freedom of speech, religion, travel, press, assembly, petition, and, yes, PRIVACY are not given to us by the government.
I said, "guaranteed" by the constitution.. not granted or given. Please read more carefully before you rant. Of course a right cannot be given. Otherwise it is just a privilige.
And ultimately, you either believe that a woman's right to PRIVACY exceeds an unborn child's right to LIFE, or you do not.
Privacy??? You think that forcing a woman to give birth against her will, risking her own life and health, is a matter of PRIVACY? Please.
If medical evidence suggests the child is, in fact, not a human,
Too subjective. There can be no such medical evidence.
then they have no rights. If the evidence suggests it is human, then the original question remains. THAT is where the fight lies; not in whether or not the Constitution allows it. The Constitution allows nothing; it only AFFIRMS the inalienable truth of being a human.
The truth is that it is wrong to force a woman to give birth... even if by some subjective view a fetus is human. That fetus is under the private care of the mother. It is similar to how we treat born children under parental care... but much more extreme. Parents are generally allowed to restrict the rights of children... but children are citizens so we still protect their basic right to life and some other things. Inside a woman's body, however, all bets are off. In the case of pregnancy, all control is given to the mother. A fetus is no citizen or even resident of the US. We make no death certificate if/when it dies (either miscarriage or abortion). We generally don't hold funerals, etc. Think of a person's body as a sort of "international waters" within which US law doesn't really apply.. even if a fetus is human.
There are 4 stages of a human in the eyes of the law:
1) Unborn and under the private care of the mother. Fetus lives or dies by the mother. Mother calls all the shots.
2) Born, under parental care, but now a citizen. Parents have a lot of authority over teh child, but the child now has the basic protections of the law.
3) At 18 years old, human is an adult and parents have no real authority. All contitutional rights are protected to their fullest (ideally).... except:
4) At 21, drink!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Actually, we're having a rather heated immigration debate in the UK too, at the moment. Actually, there's a stronger argument against it in the UK because this island is incredibly overpopulated already, whereas the US isn't. However, my main problem is the language barrier. I'm of the strong belief that it's a good thing for everyone in a country to speak one language; ideally, i'd have everyone in the world speaking one language. Immigrants coming in and speaking Spanish in the US sounds like a bad idea. The language barrier is, IMHO, the biggest barrier to human interaction and telling most Americans to learn Spanish is a really stupid way to solve the problem rather than vice versa.
I've spent the better part of my life in places with a heavy influx of hispanic immigrants, legal and otherwise. And I have never ever found a hispanic person who did not agree, as every other immigrant to the US agrees, that learning English and getting a good education is the key to success in the US. The immigrants themselves may not speak English and might have difficulty learning it, but they make damn sure their kids learn it because they don't want them to have to be labourers like they are.
No one is making Americans learn Spanish. There's no way they could; it seems that even with High Schools often requireing one or two foreign languages practically no one manages to learn and hold onto anything other than English. The official language of the United States is English and always will be. All of our laws and signs are written in English and it remains the primary medium of instruction in our schools. Yet politicians want to get people riled up over the issue and try to pass laws declaring this and make speeches as though we might have to speak another language than English. It's the same as the French politicians who try to scare their constituents into thinking that they might be made to speak Arabic as a new primary language just because there are so many (French-speaking, mind!) immigrants from places like Algeria.
And like another favorite topic of these same politicians, prayer in schools,* politicians are using this canard to try to outlaw speaking any other language. You see currently we have programs in public schools ostensibly designed to teach children English so that they can understand the rest of what is being taught. It's somewhat less than optimal and effective because they are taught everything else in English while attending classes on how to understand English, but it is what we have. There are people who want to do away with these programs, supposedly on the basis that only English should ever be spoken and tax dollars spent on teaching the subject are wasted, but the whole idea makes no logical sense unless your goal is to close what little door is open for the children of migrant workers to learn our language and become skilled workers.
It is annoying to me that people whose entire basis for law is supposed to be religion and morality are such damned liars and clearly hate their fellow man. And they claim Jesus is their leader and favorite philosopher. Clearly they were sleeping in class.. or else it was conducted in Aramaic. :P
*(where they claim praying is currently not allowed in school -- a lie because it is curently illegal to prevent people from praying -- in order to pass laws that force everyone to pray to their God in their way)