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Teacher Cannot Be Sued For Denying Creationism
gzipped_tar writes "A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a public high school teacher in Mission Viejo, California may not be sued for making hostile remarks about religion in his classroom. The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by a student charging that the teacher's hostile remarks about creationism and religious faith violated a First Amendment mandate that the government remain neutral in matters of religion. A three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the lawsuit must be thrown out of court because the teacher was entitled to immunity."
So if a teacher came out in favor of creationism, a radical form, let's say one that proclaimed blacks, asians, and all other non-whites as descendants of evil evil Cain, would it be possible to sue that teacher?
Clearly and obviously Adam and Eve never existed and this should be taught to any young person as truth is always preferable to falsehoods, but what about someone promoting a falsehood?
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
That pesky Constitution really mucks up frivolous litigation sometimes
TFA includes a shortened transcript of the teacher's comments, and it doesn't sound to me like he was criticizing religion per se. Rather, he was criticizing attempts by people to pose religion as science (such as intelligent design), by saying that the "logic" used to argue in favor of creationism is fundamentally flawed and nonscientific. And especially if intelligent design advocates continue to insist that their ideas be taught as science in a science classroom, then such criticisms should certainly be fair game in science classrooms.
At least from the transcript, it didn't seem like he was directly criticizing those who nevertheless believe in a creator as a matter of faith and not of science.
Interesting quote from TFA:
In the 1994 case, the Ninth Circuit ruled that religious neutrality required that the biology teacher’s positive views of religious ideas must be excluded from public school instruction. But in 2011, a different panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled that the history teacher’s hostile views of religion and faith must be permitted to protect the “robust exchange of ideas in education.”
It looks like the Ninth Circuit is hostile to religion and faith. They clearly didn't get that from the First Amendment.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
If you have to ask the question then you don't understand the real issue.
Religious belief is 100% completely unprovable and relies on "faith" and good feelings as confirmation instead of tests and observation. (I would be wrong but is there a "god test" that can be performed to prove the existence?)
Religious people see this as "two sides opposing" because "everyone believes in something." That is also ridiculous. People who want to know and understand seek to learn by evidence, testing and experimentation. Religion offers none of this. In the end, religion fosters an end of knowledge in favor of belief. If there are two opposing sides of the issue, it is "persuit of knowledge" vs "belief." But no one on the religious side wants to admit that is the truth.
Creationism is an infectious idea that has the potential to do a great deal of damage amongst the less educated. The last thing the United States needs is public resistance to fundamental research. If left to their own devices and accommodated instead of confronted, the supporters of this ideology could (and would) push the US back to before the Renaissance. It's happened before.
Of course, that being said, the Chinese would pick up the slack (and arguably already have), but their government is fantastically corrupt and secretive and probably wouldn't make the best flag-bearer for human civilization.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Why is it that teaching against religion is protected speech, but if the teacher were to favor religion then that is not protected?
It is an interesting question. If you look at the transcript, you will see that what was said did stay within the bounds of science, in that there was no statement that there was no God; just that there is no scientific proof of creationism and that the methodology of creationists does not meet scientific standards. He then continued to talk about the history of the dispute about teaching creationism in schools.
What is bizarre is that this is exactly what the creationists want - to teach the controversy. The trouble is that if you start asking scientifically minded people to do this then you are bound to end up with them teaching the flaws in creationism.
As long as it's factually based....
Which might make the lecture a little shorter.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You can teach science without attacking religion.
That only works if religion doesn't actively attack science. Religious organisations have attempted to prevent evolution being taught because it conflicts with a story written 2000 years ago. When they couldn't stop it, they tried to start teaching their stories as facts in schools. When Creationism was rejected, they cynically made up a "science" so that they could force that into schools.
Intelligent Design is a very anti-science topic. By definition it cannot prove any of its claims, so it uses negative arguments attacking evolution. It claims that some things cannot be explained by science, so therefore ID is right. It claims that missing links prove evolution is wrong (and if a missing link is found, then they just move the goalposts and find another missing link).
It claims that some organisms (or parts of them - eg eyes) are so complicated that they couldn't possibly evolve, despite scientists being able to show fossil evidence of precursors to those organisms.
And finally, I didn't see anything attacking religion in the transcript so this whole argument is moot.
He should focus less on "being right" and more on serving his students.
The best way to serve his students would be to teach them. Why should stop doing that just because they come to class with pre-conceived ideas.
The teacher is acting on the behalf of a government that is prohibited from endorsing or forbidding religion of any kind.
That teacher sounds like an imbecile, and ought to be sued on principle. His counter-argument is for a steady state universe? Wasn't that debunked like, a century ago? And then re-debunked when morons like this guy tried to bring it back by saying that a constant stream of matter was being created from nowhere at just the right rate to keep the universe expanding forever?
He sounds like the worst kind of atheist. The sort that knows absolutely jack shit about philosophy or logic, except what he picked up from internet forums and Dawkins books, and then regurgitates his talking points the exact same way creationists and climate change deniers do.
If you're going to bring up these topics in a classroom, you owe it to your students to actually read a bit and know what the real arguments are. The argument he seems to be trying to debunk here is the "First Cause" argument. The argument goes that all things that are finite in time must have a cause that preceded them. The first cause would have to be something eternal (existing outside of time) and intelligent. The "intelligent" part comes into play because if the first cause was a machine, then it either would have created the universe right away (thus making the universe co-eternal, which we know isn't the case) or else there must have been some cause to make it create the universe when it did.
The correct counter-argument is to point out that the argument equivocates. In the first point, it uses eternal to mean "outside of time". But then it uses the phrase "co-eternal" to mean "exists forever". Once you correct that fallacy, then the "intelligent" part goes away, because we know that time began with the Big Bang and is thus a feature of the universe, meaning that the universe as a whole does "exist outside of time", in the sense that there is no external time line on which it can be placed. At that point, the "god" this argument proves could just be a sort of mindless cosmological law that necessitated the occurrence of the Big Bang.
We've had a bunch of very smart people thinking about this stuff for hundreds of years. You're not going to improve on their arguments with your gut feelings and regurgitated talking points. For most people, it's all a bunch of navel gazing -- they don't care if God exists or not, and that's fine. But if you're going to get in front of a classroom and tell a bunch of young impressionable minds what to think, you damned well better make sure your own thoughts are sorted out and logical.
So basically what we have here is the schools mandating teachers only teach the official State religion.
You have a sad, strange definition of religion, my friend.
Faith is belief without evidence. Religion is based on faith. Religion can't answer the great questions about life, the universe, and everything, because religion is indistinguishable from making shit up.
Evolution is an area of scientific study, with much experimental support. Next to gravity, it is the best-supported theory in science. And, it is understood to a greater degree than gravity.
The teaching of evolution is not the teaching of religion, but the teaching of science. Attempting to conflate the two is just plain silly. Any argument based on the conflation of the two (such as your weird rant about "Political correctness," which is just code for, "I want to be racist/sexist/homophobic without feeling guilty") is therefore unsupported, and quite likely just plain wrong.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The problem is that a scientific theory can only be displaced by another scientific theory. Creationism has been demonstrated to make no testable predictions. Therefore, it's not a scientific proposition.
And after a theory has been proven correct as often and as firmly as evolution, it becomes more and more likely it is the correct proposition.
More tellingly, though, is the reason people propose creationism. It's almost invariably because of their religious belief. That's not a good reason to challenge the validity of evolution. In fact, it's the stupidest reason there is.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Mischaracterizations aside, one of these ideas is supported by multiple lines of evidence (the cosmic microwave background radiation, observable expansion of the universe, etc.) the other is supported by a 2000-year (give or take) idea.
And... "anti-Creationists"? Seriously?
HAND.
And when science doesn't know the answer that is what science says: we don't know.
When religion doesn't know what the answer is it just makes stuff up. Then the truly faithful sticks to this made up stuff no matter what the evidence. Occasionally when there is overwhelming evidence religious views are modified, but it is a slow painful process.
Science does a better job of answering the big questions because it is seeking the truth, not making up its mind a priori. The scientific method is the best method we have for seeking true answers to questions about the actual universe as it really is, not how we wish it was. Religion is not as good at answering any question about the actual, real universe, because its conjectures are just stories made up by men who were woefully uneducated by our current standards. Science constantly seeks to test its theories, broaden its knowledge, and is quite happy to admit when it was wrong or partially right. Religion has none of these desirable features.
Anarchists never rule