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Texas Textbooks Battle Is Actually an American War
ideonexus writes "I've been lackadaisical when it comes to following stories about Texas schoolboard attempts to slip creationism into biology textbooks, dismissing the stories as just 'dumbass Texans,' but what I didn't realize is that Texas schoolbooks set the standard for the rest of the country. And it's not just Creationism that this Christian coalition is attempting to bring into schoolbooks, but a full frontal assault on history, politics, and the humanities that exploits the fact that final decisions are being made by a school board completely academically unqualified to make informed evaluations of the changes these lobbyists propose. This evangelical lobby has successfully had references to the American Constitution as a 'living document,' as textbooks have defined it since the 1950s, removed in favor of an 'enduring Constitution' not subject to change, as well as attempting to over-emphasize the role Christianity played in the founding of America. The leaders of these efforts outright admit they are attempting to redefine the way our children understand the political landscape so that, when they grow up, they will have preconceived notions of the American political system that favor their evangelical Christian goals."
...dismissing the stories as just 'dumbass Texans,' but what I didn't realize is that Texas schoolbooks set the standard for the rest of the country.
I knew this and am not even American. Every piece of coverage I've seen on this issue has explained how wide reaching the ramifications are. How can anyone have missed it?
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
One is science the other is religion. Guess which one does not belong in a schoolbook?
I asked a lawyer who believed in this, pre-market crash, if they believed in a "living mortgage." Why is the Constitution the only legal document we do that to?
Anyone who wants to teach that is going for a particular point of view. Why is the opposite view nefarious but this one all sweetness and light?
This whole summary is ignorant. Everyone is pushing a point of view. It has to be somebody's.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It's worth revisiting the lesson of the sixties that the Hippies got right, such as not to trust the government and that the purpose of public education is to lie to you.
Students should regard any political lesson taught in school as propaganda, should never trust their teachers, an in general fucking hate the government. Bible Thumpers have always sought to rule by infiltration and dominionism.
Know this, fight back, agitate others to fight back, and above all disregard anything any religionist says to defend their superstition. We don't respect Scientology for obvious reasons, and there is no reason any other superstition should get a pass, especially on a geek site. We are modern people, and modern people don't need gods.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Regardless of "academic qualification" (Most people with the paper don't have the ethical or logical capability to be truly considered qualified), the Texas school board was responding to its own concerns about the insertion of bias into textbooks.
Textbooks are already biased. How many people are around that are willing to stand against bias in ALL directions? I'm sick of bickering between defining "unbiased" as "suiting my own personal bias".
"After all, the initial singularity from which the universe sprung had to come from somewhere. "
Nice asserted conclusion. Asserted conclusions are not proof, but thanks for trying!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Here is the problem. The bible, and jesus, pretty much considered the worst thing one can do it be a hypocrite. A hypocrite is one who does things in a crowd to make others believe he or she has faith. Here is a famous verse of prayer.
Mathew 6:5-6"When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you."
We also know the verses on giving money to be seen. The idea is that one does these things because they are in our heart, not to gain profit. And we are putting our children in jeopardy when we ask them to do these things we know are wrong, such as acting like hypocrites.
The problem with these nut cases in Texas is they have no faith. No amount of science will sway me from what i feel to be true. No amount of world religions will change my mind what I know to be right. This does not mean I am inflexible, but that flexibility comes with experience, not cult brain washing. And because these people have not faith, how can they build faith in their children. They can't. So they limit their exposure to the world knowing the false faith could never withstand the truths in the world.
In some ways I agree with this. If one is not able to build faith in a child, then ones options are limited. What I disagree with is making all the rest of us suffer. Sure, a parent may have a right to screw up their own child, but that does not mean they have the right to screw up everyone else's. The parent can home school, turn off the TV, but there is no reason that those of us who are responsible should have to suffer because a few are irresponsible. It would be like saying I can't buy a beer because some children weren't taught discipline, or because genetically they can't have beer, and haven't been trained to stay away from it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Tax dollars.
Creationism means that people descend from a dude missing a rib who was sculpted from mud. It's not only incompatible with evolution, it's incompatible with rational thought.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Two immediate responses are prompted by this article...
First is to call to mind the fate of the Muslim civilization in the second millennium. The Muslims kept the lights on during the Dark Ages. They're the reason we know about the ancient Greeks. In those days, science was considered good, because it was discovery of God's world and ways. Somewhere about the middle of the second millennium the Muslim civilization encountered other pressures (like invasions) and turned their backs on science in favor of religious dogma. (Don't know if there was cause and effect there, coincidental timing, or some other relationship.) They've never been at the forefront of civilization since. We're starting to do the same thing here in the US. One key part of science is to face the world truthfully, whatever it tells you, and deal with it. Religion can help you deal with it. But when you impose religion as a "truth filter" between you and the real world, you've lost it.
Second, a more tactical response, is to quit following Texas' lead on textbook purchases. Is there any reason we have to let them set the standard, or is it a combination of laziness and their purchasing power?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, one offers testable theories the other just magic. The fact that something cannot yet be explained is not reason to start assuming magic, fairies, unicorns and the sky wizard are all real.
Science is not the search for truth, just facts. If you want truth you should seek out philosophy.
you refer to people as "dumbass Texans".. if you're so smart, why not reason with them and fight the good fight instead of dropping below their level and resorting to name calling. those "dumbass Texans" are winning...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Is that, some would argue that the present "living document" and history as given in textbooks from the 1970s and later was done by a concerted left wing effort to make the country swing left.
Instead, it backfired miserably.
My 1970s textbooks in grade school and high school went out of their way to define progress as a big march to the nanny state.. and as I remember flipping through pictures of poor people doing nothing, along came Ronald Reagan, to say that, well, it was all a bunch of crap.
Propaganda for kids doesn't work, because, the truthful documents are there. The truth is this: The wingers have this much of a point: The constitution is a strict document that defines powers given to the government, not, giving people rights, and the framers did base their ideas on Locke, that, because we've all got souls, we've all got rights. But what wingers also neglect to mention is that the framers were decidedly against much of their agenda too.
The founding fathers, in particular, want a standing army or a standing military at all. Indeed, up until the 1900s, the USA was barely a 2nd rate military power and looked on European military spending as a colossal sort of stupidity.
The founding fathers envisioned no federal power to regulate drugs or marriage or anything else. They would tax whiskey, and that was about it, and that was only to pay down the debt from the revolutionary war.
Bottom line is this, if you believe in the Constitution as it is written, there may not be any federal right to entitlements making, but there's no right to having a big army or any of the stuff the right wing wants, either.
The founding fathers were libertarians.
This is my sig.
And why is that precisely? And if the Universe requires a prime mover, then why doesn't the prime mover? And if you're going to assert that the prime mover is exempt from the very logic you claim makes the prime move necessary, then why can't I apply Occam's Razor and declare the universe can have that property you claim for the prime mover, and thus declare the prime mover unnecessary?
Or, more to the point, why would this posited singularity be bound by causality?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why can't we just have education books just present multiple popular theories along with the pros and cons of each?
Do you expect students to carry the new 10,000-page science volume entitled "Things That Aren't Science" home and back each night?
Because there are thousands of popular theories about thousands of things that Aren't Science. Bothering to mention any of them in a science class distracts from the limited time where students are able to learn about . . . science.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Religion has a huge impact on many aspects of society: language, culture, politics -- even science. Religion could certainly be a legitimate topic of academic study, done properly. For example, I doubt it is possible to truly understand the history of the United States without understanding the role of religious belief. It's just too intertwined.
Your point about people trying to pass religion off as if it were science is well taken, however. Bugs me when people try to pass humanism off as science, too.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
You know, I have to chuckle every time I see one of these stories. When I was back in school, it was pretty standard classical stuff - the Greeks, Shakespeare, Newton, the Scientific Method, etc. Now, it happened to be that dead white guys came up with most of that stuff, but that was just how it was. But sometime after I left, the Deconstructionists, the Postmodernists, the Moral Relativists, and the Frankfurt School got their hands on the reigns. No ones 'truth' was any better than another. The scientific method was no more valid than animism. Everyone got their own truth.
Well, guess what, folks? Now the Christian Fundamentalists (and the Islamic Fundamentalists) are pressing for their own 'truth'. Remember, yin and yang - everything contains within itself the seed of its opposite. That's one piece of non-white guy wisdom that holds up pretty well.
Evolution has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. More than 99 of biologist believes in it. Anything that gets that level of acceptance is considered a FACT by scientists.
They may also believe in a God, but that does NOT mean they believe in Intelligent design. If in fact they do believe in Intelligent Design, that still does NOT mean they think it is science. They are all more than smart enough to recognize Intelligent Design is a RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE.
Your problem is that you ignorantly believe several blatantly false theories:
1. Only science counts. No. You can have a belief that is not science without it being invalidated. My religion is not invalidated merely because it is not science.
2. Science does not have rules. No. Science is based on the idea of testability. If something can not be falsified, then it is not science. Period. If it can be proven false, then only then is it science. You must propose a test, then do the test and then ABIDE by the test.
Intelligent design is inherently unfalsifiable. People that believe in it will never disbelieve it no matter what you say or do. The very power of God means he can do things that we can't do. He can ineffect CHEAT at any test he wants to. (I.E. He can plant dinosaur bones and make them look like they are million years old. He can create a whole set of fake dead bones that illustrate man's evolution from ape to man. Etc. etc.) That means it is NOT science. It can't ever be science.
Yes, people can believe in Intelligent Design, but that is never science, that is RELIGION.
The problem is a bunch of lieing shmucks that want to teach their personal religion and pretend it is science. That is against the highest laws of the United States of America.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I figure that there should be mandatory classes, at the mid to upper high school level,
in basic epistemology and metaphysics (i.e. meta-level topics such as):
-How to think carefully, logically.
-How to search.
-How to formulate good questions.
-How to recognize bias; people who are "speaking for effect"; trying to
influence you, and some of the common motivations why people do
that.
How to form beliefs using epistemic responsibility.
Then set them free to explore the information from a billion sources
that we have available to us at a mouse click today.
The scariest kind of graduate is one who has been taught only to
parrot, and to conform to orthodoxy, and who does not know how to question.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yet, those folks were smart enough not to make him their governor.
But where are you learning about the wrongs of these narrow-minded zealots? Other narrow-minded zealots on the opposite extreme? I can agree that there are a lot of crazy christian narrow-minded zealots, but I think there are just as many anti-religion narrow-minded zealots. Why can't we just have education books just present multiple popular theories along with the pros and cons of each?
1) Not all popular beliefs are equal. A popular belief that the holocaust never happened, or a popular belief that the president is elected by popular vote, or a popular belief that having sex "just once" can't get someone pregnant should not be taught because it's simply wrong.
2) How you teach those "popular beliefs" is itself extremenly biased. "Of People and Pandas" supposedly teached about evolution, and abstinance-only programs supposedly teach about birth control.
That's what religion is all about.
The one that has never been proven.
This is the biggest fallacy that ID/Creationists propogate about science. It does not matter if evolution/the big bang haven't been "proven". The question is which of these is a scientific model that can be used to make statements about how the world works and make predictions to some degree of accuracy.
The Ptolemaic model of the universe was shown to be wrong, but it was science, because it claimed to predict the world worked a certain (measurable) way and it was shown to be inaccurate. But for thousands of years it was accurate enough to be useful. Newton developed a model that was more accurate and Einstein a model that was yet more accurate.
Someone will come along some day and develop a model of the universe that is even more accurate than Einstein's, but that will not mean that Einstein's model wasn't science or that the new model is "truth".
On the other hand, you cannot use the Bible to make accurate predictions about when to plant your crops, how the planets move around the sun, or what makes characteristics propogate from parents to children. This is why intelligent design is not an alternative form of science. It's not even a matter of whether intelligent design is true and evolution is wrong. Intelligent design cannot be used to do useful science. Evolution, even if ultimately wrong, can be used to make the most accurate models of the way things work.
If you don't want to treat intelligent design as religion, that's fine. Teach it in philosophy. But it is not science.
Yeah, but he's still the crappiest president of my lifetime.
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's annoying how people think they must believe that everything came from somwehere. If we can neither create nor destroy mass and energy, why is it so damn hard for people to believe that the shit was always around in varying forms and behaviors?
Naw, some dude with a beard and a toga just stamped out humanity with an injection mold. Yutzes.
Why do ignorant people that one statement by Jefferson and try to make it stand on it's own completely out of context to prove all our founders hated religion.
On the contrary, that statement proves how much Jefferson loved religion. He loved it so much he wanted to protect every kind of religion and every diversity of religion out there by not allowing the government to indoctrinate people into one mandated religion. I'm not changing anything, the Bill of Rights was frame to protect all religions, not hate them by promoting only one of them.
My work here is dung.
So let's remove gravity, most of physics, and genetics from the science classroom as well. Those are all theories. You don't prove a theory. You find evidence either for or against it. As soon as you find some evidence against Evolution, we can reconsider it.
To take this further, I'm fairly certain that gravity is a much more vague theory than evolution. Evolution is a pretty good theory; there is a pretty good consensus as to how it happens, why it happens and what makes it happen; it has also been directly observed. The current theory is an adaptation and improvement on a theory developed a couple of hundred years ago.
On the other hand, while we have some fairly good approximations for how gravity works (Newtonian, General Relativity), there are still a lot of different theories as to why gravity works (gravitons, M-Theory, quantum field theory, quantum loop gravity are the main ones, I think). The LHC is working on getting more evidence for some of these theories; but despite the fact that there is a huge amount of evidence for the basic stuff (i.e. massive things attract each other), the fine details of what, how and why are still very confused.
As scientific theories go, evolution seems a lot more straightforward than gravity...
[Disclaimer: I've only got an undergrad. degree in maths.]
If these college professors are so willing to make an argument with such an obvious flaw, they're not terribly smart after all. Don't put your faith in people smarter than you when your own brain can easily tell you that their arguments are fallacious.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They can pretend as much as they want that their shit is science. That does not make it so.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Or beyond that, why do we even have organs? I always felt that an intelligent designer would have just created us as walking, talking bags of magical life made from life cubes or something. Whenever I ask creationists why I have an appendix or a gall bladder or why, out of all the temperatures in the universe, I can only live within a tiny range of them, or out of the entire EM spectrum, I can only see a tiny sliver of it, or why leukemia exists, the only answer I get is 'God made it that way'. Seriously? All powerful? All knowing? That's why people have to poop? God wanted them to?
something goes wrong
Omnipotent designer says what?