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South Korea Will Revisit Plan To Nix Evolution References in Textbooks
After reports that South Korean had "surrendered to creationists" by removing references to evolution in several textbooks, openfrog writes with this excerpt from Science Insider that indicates the fight is still in progress: "The South Korean government is poised to appoint a new committee that will revisit a controversial plan to drop two examples of evolutionary theory from high school textbooks. The committee, to be led by insect taxonomist Byoung-Hoon Lee, a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, has been asked to re-evaluate requests from a Korean creationist group to drop references to bird and horse evolution that they argue promote 'atheist materialism.' At the same time, about 50 prominent Korean scientists are preparing to present government officials with a petition, organized by the Korean Association of Biological Sciences, which calls for rejecting the proposed changes. 'When these things are done, I think it will turn out that after all Korean science will not surrender to religion' says Jae Choe, an evolutionary biologist at Ewha Womans University in Seoul who helped organize the petition."
According to Wikipedia:
... So my comment is: What? What's going on here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Korea
Only 53% percent of South Koreans claim any religious affiliation, and 55% of those are Buddhists.
Need some Korean person to explain.
Non-believers are SINNERS. Religion means fighting non-believers and taking power FROM them in Allah's/Yahweh's/FSM's name.
If you are not of a sect, it is your enemy (in a large or small way) like it or not and never forget that. If they had the power they would kill you or torture you into submission as they did before secular enlightment weakened the hold of superstition.
In some places where they roll Old School, denouncing religion can still get you murdered.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Hermeneutics is the approach one takes to interpreting a document (such as the Bible, for example). Literalism is one approach to Biblical hermeneutics in which one assumes nothing in the Bible is meant to be read allegorically or poetically. I think young-earth Creationists hold this view, which in their mind places Christianity squarely at odds with any science that gives us life older than ~ 6000 years.
I think one appealing reason for literalism is the assumption that as the Word of God, the Bible is meant to be easily understandable to every well-intentioned reader, and that's only possible if the plain reading of the text conveys the intended meaning. I.e., if you need to be a scholar of ancient Greek and Hebrew literary forms to understand it properly, something is amiss.
However, literalism is not generally accepted as a valid hermeneutic by most Christian theologians, as far as I know. I don't know all of the reasons, but I think one of them is that when read in the original Greek, Hebrew, and/or Aramaic, some books of the Bible very clearly are written in idiomatic forms of the day that most certainly were poetic or allegorical.
I think the truth is that just as a number of scientific might explain the data collected so far, so might a number of interpretations of certain parts of the Bible fit established theology, worldly observations, and hermeneutics. Those who see science (including carbon dating of fossils) as a threat to their religious beliefs may be more attached to a literalistic hermeneutic than is appropriate.
Not good history there. The Catholic church did execute concordats with fascist Italy and Germany, but these were definitely arm's-length agreements whose only purpose (from the church's side) was to secure some basic operational rights in hostile political environments.
In Italy, the Lateran treaty with Mussolini established the Vatican city-state and closed the book on issues, such as reparation for the seizure of the papal states, going back to 1848.
In Germany, the church was more or less officially in opposition to the state since the Kulturkampf of Bismark. In the face of the much more aggressive ideology of the Nazis, the Church did waffle a bit in signing the Reichskonkordat of 1933, but it can be argued that the terms were the best available. It should be noted that it was only the Catholic-majority areas of Germany that did not endorse Nazi rule in 1932.
In neither case could it be reasonably argued that the church and fascist states were "allies".
I am a Korean and I just looked up the Korean articles. It meant "not dualism" as you explained in your first paragraph. If I was to translate the word literally, I would have translated it as "theory of materials" or "theory of matter".
This is what they said (translated as literally as I could):
"The underlying concept of evolution is materialism. The theory of evolution considers people's minds as a consequence of materialistic behavior, and if this is taught pupils will form incorrect understanding of the world. Pupils will end up thinking that because materials are recycled, taking lives is not committing a sin. The same can be said for abortion and selfishness."