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First Russian Anti-Evolution Suit Enters Court Room
sdriver writes "If you thought it was only the US giving Darwin a hard time, Russia has its own problems starting with evolution. A student has 'sued the St. Petersburg city education committee, claiming the 10th-grade biology textbook used at the Cervantes Gymnasium was offensive to believers and that teachers should offer an alternative to Darwin's famous theory.' The suit, the first of its kind in Russia, is being dismissed out of hand by the principal and teachers. The teacher of the science class had apparently even taken the step of stating at the start of the school year that there were other theories on the origin of life."
Correction: the other proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures, not theories (scientific or otherwise). Further, Darwin proposed natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. That hypotheses has well withstood credible scrutiny and attempts to disprove it, and so is considered a theory (mind you, the modern understanding of the theory is quite more involved than Darwin would have imagined). Darwin never created a theory for the origin of life.
Let me make a few things clear:
1. The textbook does NOT refer to religion in negative way. Being a Biology textbook, it ignores religion completely.
2. The Russian law says nothing about not dissing religious groups. It does say that inciting inter-racial or inter-religious violence is punishable, but dissing is completely ok.
3. The girl who has "sued" the school is not religious in any special way. In fact, she dresses and looks like a goth. The lawsuit itself has been initiated by her father, working for some small PR outfit and in bad need for publicity. Now, thanks to the lawsuit, he has got onto national TV, if only for a few moments.
The whole thing is a publicity stunt and everybody including most journalists acknowledges that.
(from Jesus Camp)
MOM: (reading from "Exploring Creationism with Physical Science") One popular thing to do in American Politics is to note that the summers in the United States over the past few years have been very warm. As a result, global warming must be real. What's wrong with this reasoning?
KID: It's only gone up 0.6 degrees.
MOM: Yeah, it's not really a big problem, is it?
KID: No. I don't think that... it's going to hurt us.
MOM: It's a huge political issue, global warming is, and that's why it's really important for you to understand...
KID: Is evolution too?
MOM: Um, not really. On a much...
KID: Creationism?
MOM: Um, it's becoming one now. What if you had to go to school where the teacher said, "Creationism is stupid, and you're stupid if you believe in it?"
KID: I think they should...
MOM: Well, or what if you had to go to a school where the teacher said "Evolution is stupid, and you're stupid if you believe it?"
KID: I wouldn't mind that.
MOM: You wouldn't mind it. If you look at Creationism, it's the only possible answer to all the questions. It's the only possible answer.
KID: That's exactly what dad said!
MOM: Mmm hmmm, it's the only possible answer to all the questions.
KID: Oh, yeah...
MOM: Oh, yeah.
MOM: Did you get to the part on here where it says that science doesn't prove anything? And it's really interesting when you look at it that way.
KID: It is?
MOM: It is.
KID: (reading further) I think, personally, that Galileo made the right choice by giving up science for Christ.
(later)
MOM: We know when things started changing, you know, prayer got taken out of school, and um... the schools started falling apart. And now the rest of us are going, wait a minute, where is my country? Our firm belief is, there are two types of people: those who love Jesus and those who don't.
Saying that Evolution is not proven shows a very basic lack of understanding of the scientific process. But hey, don't let me, or anyone else, stop you from continually making a fool of yourself everytime you say a theory isn't proven.
Which would explain the the parent post is asking that evolution is not presented as fact, but as a theory, much like the theory of relativity, the big bang theory and so on are all presented as theories. Unfortunately, I've seen too many instances where evolution is presented as fact, not a theory. As you eloquently stated, it is a theory and those presenting it as fact are wrong.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
No, there is only one theory about the origins of life. The theory is called the theory of evolution. Creation is based on old testament fables passed down from generation to generation by the tribes of Israel and put to text by scribes. The stories are supposed to teach deep lessons to the unwashed masses about what it means to be a person, not offer a theory on the creation of life. To come away from the book of genesis with the idea that God created the earth in 7 days means you completely missed the lessons the author was trying to teach. This is the reason why I think Christians are way off track, they have a totally wrong interpretation of Jewish texts. Maybe they should ask a Rabbi for help.
For sake of succinctness, in my experience, most of our scientific theories are presented as fact. Have we proven that photosynthesis takes place in the mechanism we believe it does? How about that cells have a phospholipid bilayer? That the universal law of gravitation is universal? All of these are presented as facts, but, in reality, we have simply made repeated observations that imply they are true, and none that imply they are not.
im in ur
This can easily go either way. You could instead have "Crusader" christians and "Allah is peace" muslims. It depends on the convictions of those behind the movement.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Well, if it does discuss religion negatively, I'd think in the US it would fall afoul of Freedom of Religion issues, given that it's being used in a public school. In any case, I would be looking for another textbook as any discussion of God or religion is really entirely irrelevant to the subject of biology and would make me doubt the book's quality.
Actually, I got the idea that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is kind of a state religion after moving to Utah and watching similarity in many of the small everyday things. Different ideologies and goals, but visible features looked very similar to me. Authorities in the USSR never claimed to have communism - it was just a religious goal, an unreachable desire - and the people treated it accordingly, the reality of the communism was similar to the reality of the Heaven - you have to have faith in it.
Sometimes there were crop failures, due to a wide range of competence problems with "scientific socialism", and the war obviously led to starvation as well as deaths from bombs and guns, but the main events of mass starvation during the Stalinist period were deliberate - groups of farmers that didn't cooperate with collectivism, or were rich enough that the Communists were jealous of them, got deprived of their animals and land, and either killed, sent to Siberia, or left to starve. Wikipedia article on kulaks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Nobody with half a brain will refute Natural Selection. However Natural Selection does not infer Evolution Directly. What if things happened in reverse of what you think and there were an infinite number of species and Natural Selection has dwindled that down to what we have now? I know there are problems with that Hypothesis but I'm just saying that Natural Selection as a Theory has nothing to say about how diversity came about. Granted most people take for granted that beneficial mutations created the diversity; however this is an entirely different hypothesis.
n _Christianity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_prophecy
The point here is that we could have been intelligently designed and the Theory of Natural Selection doesn't disprove this. Furthermore there are a ton of rather strong arguments for the existence of a god nevermind the very strong historical arguments based in facts for the existence of the Christian God. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_prophecy_i
Er, the "failure of the broken political system" was a direct result of the fact that the political system was based on and promoted adherence to acceptable ideological dogma as the bases of policy, even where that dogma concerned matters of empirically verifiable fact and was contradicted by systematic investigation of fact.
Lysenkoism and the associated marginalization of Darwinism was a symptom of that problem.
Understanding what was broken about the system is important.
Yes, I think creationists in general have totally misunderstood the point of science. As much as all scientists would love to know the absolute truths in the universe, wouldn't anyone, the point of science is to find explanations that fit the observations and use them to our gain. Darwinism and evolution isn't there to compete with religion or prove creationists wrong, it is there to help us understand the progression of life, which might then be used to perhaps improve our own genetics, find other planets that can harbor life, save animal species, etc. Science helps us do things on Earth. Removing evolution from schools because it doesn't feel right is like making the hunter hunt without a weapon and with a blindfold on. All it does is slow the process and make it more random, more dangerous and less effective.
No one makes you teach evolution in church. Because evolution belongs in a science curriculum. Just like creationism belongs a long way away from a science curriculum. There is no point mixing the two. Evolution is a scientific theory, like everything taught in science. It is based on observations, and used by people. Like you know the sun will come up in the morning because you observed that process occured on previous mornings. You can't guarentee that it will come up in the morning, but it is better to use the knowledge that you have than be shocked every morning when it rises and never learn the process.
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