I'm pretty sure it was the "bong hits" part - references to alcohol and drugs are routinely censored and squelched in high schools, and rightly so (at least on school grounds/trips), just as pornographic, racist, and vulgarities are censored. Children do not have unlimited free speech in schools.
Well I'd like to go outside and shoot video of kids riding their bike full speed down a very narrow sidewalk, or people riding their bike through a crowded mall, or people dutifully stopping at intersections (while remaining on the sidewalk) and checking for traffic, or people moving out of the way for bikes because they can tell that there's one behind them because they're used to bikes being on the sidewalk, etc., but I don't have a camera and I don't know enough technical Japanese to look up bike accident statistics. So you'll just have to take my word for it that everyone in the city rides their bike, on the sidewalk.
All of the behavior that you and the other cyclist pages talk about as making sidewalk riding dangerous just doesn't occur here - people check for traffic, warn pedestrians they are coming, etc.
Completely unrelated: in Japan, you can leave your bike unlocked for weeks outside and it will still be there when you return. You can leave your expensive merchandise in your bike basket for hours outside in a crowded street and no one will touch it. Some common sense things in America just don't apply elsewhere.
You've never ridden in Japan, where almost everybody gets around by bicycle, and does so mostly on the sidewalk. In fact the streets are so crowded and narrow in Japan that the sidewalk is really the only place to ride. People are more used to riding on the sidewalk, so bicyclists respect pedestrians for the most part (bells are standard) and they aren't stupid enough to blow through red lights. Similarly, pedestrians are more aware of bikes around them. I've only ever had and seen incidents on small back roads with blind intersections.
It's a chicken and egg thing - is riding on the sidewalk inherently more dangerous for the bicyclist? No, it's less dangerous if the bicyclist is careful. Are the statistics higher? Yes, because they aren't being careful. It's a shame that there were no statistics about pedestrians in that link, but I would think that if you could ride on the sidewalk to begin with, more people would ride, making things safer overall.
No. It was a bloody awful debate, full of contradictory statements and non sequiturs.: Guy 1: Microsoft doesn't innovate. Guy 2: Yes they do! They innovate by improving their own software! So clearly they are more innovative than themselves! Guy 1: Apple doesn't innovate either. Guy 2: Ah, but what about Halo?? Guy 1: Um, Microsoft bought the company that made Halo. Guy 2: That's just how they innovate: buying people who do! Um, I guess that's not innovation, so.... remember how much more Apple innovated in 1989, but then Microsoft made more money than them? That proves that Microsoft can innovate in this new horrible way that I just made up! Guy 1: No, that doesn't make sense and you know it. I think Google is the top software company now because I use their products. Guy 2: Well, Google shut down one of the things they do, and I like how Microsoft ranks my blog better than how Google does it! That's the kind of thing that makes Microsoft innovative: providing a better search result for a single query. Vista has an RSS aggregator. Is that innovative? Oh...no but it's cool. Also the XBox is popular. Guy 1: Big corporations are all assholes and none of them innovate. Guy 2: A friend of mine that works at Microsoft says he's happy that Google is innovating, because that means he gets to work on his projects to play catch-up...I mean innovate. Here's a bunch of random stuff Microsoft did that has nothing to do with innovation.
This uninformed waste of time brought to you by the Wall Street Journal.
A lot of the inner parts of the city that are more congested really suck for biking though. You'd get clobbered by some crazy drivers if you rode in some parts of Chicago with your earbuds on. And Chicago drivers are fucking crazy. American streets are not very hospitable to biking - they should really allow bikes on sidewalks, like Japan (and some European countries) do. You don't see people getting hit by bikes there, and a lot more people ride their bikes.
Yahoo! Answers has 4 kinds of questions, in order of popularity:
The "do you agree with me" questions that are not actually questions, but rather flamebait. Usually these questions look like "Why do Christians believe in a fairy tale?", "Why don't people realize that evolution is a bunch of lies?", "Why are liberals a bunch of pussies?" and generally they'll award the question to whomever best augments their position.
Irrelevant "party" questions - generally "what are your favorite" or other joke questions.
Legit questions that can range from difficult, requiring a specialist to answer, to middling, which can be answered by a simple Wikipedia query, to blatantly obvious, which generally cover algebra homework and basic US government principles ("Why do people say the US is a Union?"), to disgustingly awful, which generally are questions about life that show how sick humanity is ("HOW DO U GET PREGNANT" "MY PENIS IS TURNING GREEN WHAT SHULD I DO????")
Completely unintelligible ("WHAT" or "I NO U R NOT GOIN DOWN 2 U WHAT IS THE DEAL PLZ HELP")
He might be a super genius, but intelligence has very little to do with things like personal beliefs or morality. Most likely he has a completely logical and consistent position and/or argument for these things, they're just simply based on values that are against traditional American ones.
But don't bring in this "book smart"/"street smart"/"common sense" bullshit. Your beliefs, be they religious, political, or moral, have very little to do with your intelligence on any level.
In this case, it looks like you have two possibilities: the AP was lazy and just copied the Union Leader's story, or you have the same thing being said from two independent sources.
Nowadays religious folk trying to reconcile the universe we see and measure with their beliefs are cornered to the moment just before the big-bang. It is the last infinitesimal moment in which a deity, chosing the values of the different constants governing how the Unvierse works, would have any relevance left.
South Park:
Couldn't evolution just be the answer to how and not to why?
Deists were of the belief that there was a creator and were men of science. This is not a new position. Why do atheists seem to think that the presence of God necessarily implies that God is forever mucking about in the universe*? Wouldn't it have been an equally great feat to create the universe with a single explosion and let it go from there, like a great domino artist? You're getting too caught up in the specific Judeo-Christian beliefs, and while it takes faith to believe that a man came back from the dead, and while that can be a topic for later discussion, the existence of a creator or higher power doesn't rest on the stories people tell about that creator.
*See "The Baroque Cycle" for an interesting discussion of this.
So Geneva Convention BAD, big business buying votes GOOD.
Also in the Globe story, it implies that there were many changes discussed as far as free speech, and the Geneva convention only one of them. If the Internet speech restrictions weren't reported, I bet the reason is because the reporter did not understand them because of the technical nature.
I'll be honest, I didn't really read the whole thing. But he should do something. I suppose asking exactly how is a valid question, but not one for Slashdot.
Not at all - you cannot have an enjoyable game until you can learn to recognize the end of the game. Yes, the computer will not declare "I win" right away; they will pass. But it is nearly impossible for a beginner to understand why he or she has not won. The chess analogy doesn't compare at all - you know when your piece is taken, and you know when you have lost. You can begin playing unambiguously from the beginning. Go is a lot more subtle, and it takes a lot of time before you can even understand why you have lost. I began learning go on a small board versus a computer, and when the game finished, certainly they showed the colored areas, but it was very frustrating because the beginner thinks "Why the hell does he control that area? I have him totally surrounded!!"
I guess maybe a better way of putting it is this: Go is easy to learn, but not at all fun until your skills have progressed to a certain level. You say that learning to count the endgame is part of learning the rules - that directly contradicts the "easy to learn" mantra because endgame counting is not easy. You can't have it both ways.
Perhaps specific instruction sets are difficult to understand, but an assembler pseudocode would hold the properties I desired. Ok, let's set that analogy aside. You know what else is easy to learn but difficult to master? Brainfuck.
Yes, you can learn all the rules very quickly. But you have attain a certain level of "mastery" before you can even begin to play and have fun doing so. When a Go beginner sits down with another beginner, they could probably play for hours even though the game was over long ago. When a beginner plays a computer, all of a sudden the computer goes "I win!" and the beginner is like "what?!! huh?"
It's quite frustrating, especially for a game they have been promised is "easy to learn." You know what else is easy to learn but hard to master? Assembly code.
He did, in fact, say that they would be tested on it. If it makes you feel better, he did say they'd just be tested on the "topic" not an understanding of it.
Sorry: "Some of you probably disagree with what I've put on the board, that's ok, you're not going to be tested on it, you understand, you're going to be tested on the topics...not(??inaudible)." I think that's totally fair and not evident of any "indoctrination" garbage. I mean, right before that, he praises LaChance for making a good argument.
He told the students that they each would go to hell -- that even HE could go to hell -- if they did not each believe that god was crucified for them.
Yes, in response to a question regarding his faith. Young Mr. LaChair wanted to know why, in the Christian faith, God lets those he loves go to hell. I think it was a pretty good response and taught the kid about something he was interested in.
He pointed to Mel Gibson's Passion movie and called it history.
He said specifically that the torture was accurate.
He ridiculed evolution and the big bang as unscientific and said that the Judeo-Christian bible differed from evolution-science because the bible included prophecies that came true and was therefore "reasonable" whereas science must be taken on faith.
This was not a science class; and teachers have said much worse. Students are going to listen to the science teacher about science, not the history teacher. Plus, if we fired every teacher for every gross factual error they made, we honestly would have no teachers left.
He insisted that the old testament was the literal word of god through Moses, that prophets could impose their style, but in substance "the accuracy is assured." That Noah in fact rescued two of each animal on the ark and Noah's son spoke to Abraham. He seemed to say that at least one of Noah's sons is still alive today, but he might have meant that Noah's son was still alive in the time of Moses.
This is all within the context of the discussion.
He said that the big bang could not have happened because explosions cause disorder while in contrast God created order and he compared the big bang to the detonation of a firecracker.
Again; would you crack down on the English teacher for giving the class incorrect facts about math? I know my English teacher did it all the time.
He suspended lessons for a week to teach his religion in a public school. He had exclusive access to children as an authority figure for a significant amount of time each and every day. He used that authority to try and brainwash a bunch of gullible young kids. He was paid by the state to teach secular history and instead he attempted to indoctrinate the children in his belief system. He ridiculed and intimidated at least one non-Christian in his class. He lied about it when confronted by the principal and one child's parents.
Why, exactly, was a recording of the class necessary then? The material is all there, he made handouts, and if they were tested on the material, that evidence exists as well. If you listen to the tape, it's a frank and open discussion, and he welcomes objections from the class. No kid is forced to believe what they do not believe, and high schoolers are mature enough to handle this. This doesn't sound like brainwashing to me, this sounds like a good old-fashioned conversation to me. If you think this audio tape was "brainwashing" students, you aren't giving kids enough credit. These aren't scared little 9 year olds, they're high school students with strong opinions (as you can hear in the tape), and one of them had a strong enough opinion he tried to entrap the teacher. Insulating kids from serious debate like this surrounding controversial topics is doing them a disservice.
Now, I ask you again -- same question. No evasions. Why, when you have story A and you have story B and neither one has a shred of evidence, do you go atheist on the one and agnostic on the other? Why do you feel it is inapropriate to fail to believe in god (atheism) and instead retreat to "I don't know" instead of the same healthy reaction you had to the unicorn?
Let's say Story A is the Unicorns and Story B is "a creator caused the universe to exist."
Story A has strong evidence against it because we are familiar with the natural world, and Story A makes a claim about the natural world.
Story B has no evidence either way because it makes a claim about something that by definition, we cannot ever observe - something that existed before the universe.
An analogy I like to use is this: Suppose you and your friends meet a man that says he went out into the woods where no one could have heard him and said what he had for breakfast. Then he promptly shoots himself in the head. Some of your friends say that he said "eggs" in the woods. Other claim he said "bacon and eggs." Others claim that he said nothing at all, and that he could easily be lying. Yet others want to know "why are we debating this and can't we go have some breakfast ourselves?" and refuse to debate the subject.
There you have the Jews, Christians, atheists, and agnostics. The only logical stance to hold is the latter one, because the options are infinite and choosing any one of the options is arbitrary. This demonstrates that atheists have made a choice where it is most logical to make no choice. It's like any good math conjecture - it is either true, false, or unprovable.
Personally, I am Christian - I will readily admit that this is a decision not based upon any scientific principle. It's a decision based on faith, and I made it because it simply makes the most sense to me. However, I argue that atheists who have made the decision not to believe that something created the universe have also made that decision in faith, and therefore should not hold themselves to be somehow logically or intellectually superior.
In any case, it's certainly not a question science should even concern itself with.
Again, you're tying things into reality. Of course it's silly that unicorns are running around upside down - we know about earthquakes and why they happen because we can observe those things. You're trying to make an analogy to reality when it just doesn't fit.
Now, maybe you might believe that some guy with a crazy name (XHIDSAslw) created the universe for some crazy reason (because all young deities are required to create universes for deity school). But saying that there is no reason the universe was created or that there is no Creator is a tale just the same.
I'm saying it's a thoroughly uninteresting question for science to answer because there's no way to approach it or even test it. So if you are going to be scientific and logical, your best bet is to ignore it than answering questions that don't need answering from a scientific viewpoint.
If he lied it is certainly of concern and he should be disciplined. However, it seems that the student made accusations of him incorporating religion into his history curriculum, which he certainly did not. It was a free and open discussion, not a lecture. This really looks like a complex situation.
Well, did we fire any teapots towards Earth and Mars? If not, where would a teapot come from? There are plenty of reasons it is unlikely, because we know about the rules that govern the existence of teapots.
I liken the question more to the existence of a life form on another planet that has something that looks like the number "5" on its body. You can't even begin to think of how to prove or disprove this, and therefore scientifically, the question is not an interesting one. (It makes great fodder for artists, though.)
Secondly, while a good rule of thumb in real life, the "burden of proof is on existence" rule is not a logical one. Mathematicians prove negative theorems all the time.
No, the point is that you're trying to appeal to absurdity by making them flying elephants or something else goofy like flying spaghetti. (It's always "flying" for some reason.) However, there are no laws of physics (or any other field of science) which preclude the existence of a creator. There ARE laws of physics that preclude conservation of mass-energy, and evidence from biology that show that purple elephants that can fly just aren't around.
The point is that for your absurdity argument to work, you have to tie it in to natural laws of the universe when we are talking about a force that some claim created those laws - there's just nothing we can say about it, so logically and scientifically we shouldn't postulate anything.
I think we should call for a Separation Between Religion and Science and enforce it strictly. Religion, you're not allowed to say anything about how the world works. Science, you're not allowed to say anything about something that isn't about how the world works.
Did you listen to the tape? He's not trying to brainwash his students, they're having a lively and interesting discussion. He's not, as far as I can hear, teaching his students any incorrect facts about history (his subject). This guy is getting a raw deal.
Did any of you actually listen to this? This guy is getting a harsh deal - this was a class where ideas (the very ideas we were discussing) were to be discussed openly. He's not discussing history - in fact he says that he's not saying Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark are not facts or scientific or even true. They're trying to openly discuss ideas. They're not being tested on this.
The guy wasn't telling his class that they would go to hell. They are having an argument, and he's allowing his students to maintain their beliefs, but also expose them to other beliefs. I have no problem with this kind of discussion in schools. The guy's an idiot, but so are many high school teachers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure it was the "bong hits" part - references to alcohol and drugs are routinely censored and squelched in high schools, and rightly so (at least on school grounds/trips), just as pornographic, racist, and vulgarities are censored. Children do not have unlimited free speech in schools.
Well I'd like to go outside and shoot video of kids riding their bike full speed down a very narrow sidewalk, or people riding their bike through a crowded mall, or people dutifully stopping at intersections (while remaining on the sidewalk) and checking for traffic, or people moving out of the way for bikes because they can tell that there's one behind them because they're used to bikes being on the sidewalk, etc., but I don't have a camera and I don't know enough technical Japanese to look up bike accident statistics. So you'll just have to take my word for it that everyone in the city rides their bike, on the sidewalk.
All of the behavior that you and the other cyclist pages talk about as making sidewalk riding dangerous just doesn't occur here - people check for traffic, warn pedestrians they are coming, etc.
Completely unrelated: in Japan, you can leave your bike unlocked for weeks outside and it will still be there when you return. You can leave your expensive merchandise in your bike basket for hours outside in a crowded street and no one will touch it. Some common sense things in America just don't apply elsewhere.
You've never ridden in Japan, where almost everybody gets around by bicycle, and does so mostly on the sidewalk. In fact the streets are so crowded and narrow in Japan that the sidewalk is really the only place to ride. People are more used to riding on the sidewalk, so bicyclists respect pedestrians for the most part (bells are standard) and they aren't stupid enough to blow through red lights. Similarly, pedestrians are more aware of bikes around them. I've only ever had and seen incidents on small back roads with blind intersections.
It's a chicken and egg thing - is riding on the sidewalk inherently more dangerous for the bicyclist? No, it's less dangerous if the bicyclist is careful. Are the statistics higher? Yes, because they aren't being careful. It's a shame that there were no statistics about pedestrians in that link, but I would think that if you could ride on the sidewalk to begin with, more people would ride, making things safer overall.
No. It was a bloody awful debate, full of contradictory statements and non sequiturs.:
Guy 1: Microsoft doesn't innovate.
Guy 2: Yes they do! They innovate by improving their own software! So clearly they are more innovative than themselves!
Guy 1: Apple doesn't innovate either.
Guy 2: Ah, but what about Halo??
Guy 1: Um, Microsoft bought the company that made Halo.
Guy 2: That's just how they innovate: buying people who do! Um, I guess that's not innovation, so.... remember how much more Apple innovated in 1989, but then Microsoft made more money than them? That proves that Microsoft can innovate in this new horrible way that I just made up!
Guy 1: No, that doesn't make sense and you know it. I think Google is the top software company now because I use their products.
Guy 2: Well, Google shut down one of the things they do, and I like how Microsoft ranks my blog better than how Google does it! That's the kind of thing that makes Microsoft innovative: providing a better search result for a single query. Vista has an RSS aggregator. Is that innovative? Oh...no but it's cool. Also the XBox is popular.
Guy 1: Big corporations are all assholes and none of them innovate.
Guy 2: A friend of mine that works at Microsoft says he's happy that Google is innovating, because that means he gets to work on his projects to play catch-up...I mean innovate. Here's a bunch of random stuff Microsoft did that has nothing to do with innovation.
This uninformed waste of time brought to you by the Wall Street Journal.
A lot of the inner parts of the city that are more congested really suck for biking though. You'd get clobbered by some crazy drivers if you rode in some parts of Chicago with your earbuds on. And Chicago drivers are fucking crazy. American streets are not very hospitable to biking - they should really allow bikes on sidewalks, like Japan (and some European countries) do. You don't see people getting hit by bikes there, and a lot more people ride their bikes.
He might be a super genius, but intelligence has very little to do with things like personal beliefs or morality. Most likely he has a completely logical and consistent position and/or argument for these things, they're just simply based on values that are against traditional American ones.
But don't bring in this "book smart"/"street smart"/"common sense" bullshit. Your beliefs, be they religious, political, or moral, have very little to do with your intelligence on any level.
Seems to me that this is more of an example of laziness or pressure to fill deadlines rather than some kind of liberal agenda. There's plenty bad going on in Iraq without making things up.
In this case, it looks like you have two possibilities: the AP was lazy and just copied the Union Leader's story, or you have the same thing being said from two independent sources.
South Park:
Deists were of the belief that there was a creator and were men of science. This is not a new position. Why do atheists seem to think that the presence of God necessarily implies that God is forever mucking about in the universe*? Wouldn't it have been an equally great feat to create the universe with a single explosion and let it go from there, like a great domino artist? You're getting too caught up in the specific Judeo-Christian beliefs, and while it takes faith to believe that a man came back from the dead, and while that can be a topic for later discussion, the existence of a creator or higher power doesn't rest on the stories people tell about that creator.
*See "The Baroque Cycle" for an interesting discussion of this.
From the Associated Press:
http://www.wmur.com/news/10413138/detail.html
Generally they only doctor photos, not report biased stories. Unfortunately, we still don't know what he actually said.
It appears his idea of "expanding" free speech was to eliminate campaign reform: http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=5736114&nav =4QcS
So Geneva Convention BAD, big business buying votes GOOD.
Also in the Globe story, it implies that there were many changes discussed as far as free speech, and the Geneva convention only one of them. If the Internet speech restrictions weren't reported, I bet the reason is because the reporter did not understand them because of the technical nature.
I'll be honest, I didn't really read the whole thing. But he should do something. I suppose asking exactly how is a valid question, but not one for Slashdot.
and quit.
Seriously. If you're not going to stand up for your beliefs, why bother having them?
Not at all - you cannot have an enjoyable game until you can learn to recognize the end of the game. Yes, the computer will not declare "I win" right away; they will pass. But it is nearly impossible for a beginner to understand why he or she has not won. The chess analogy doesn't compare at all - you know when your piece is taken, and you know when you have lost. You can begin playing unambiguously from the beginning. Go is a lot more subtle, and it takes a lot of time before you can even understand why you have lost. I began learning go on a small board versus a computer, and when the game finished, certainly they showed the colored areas, but it was very frustrating because the beginner thinks "Why the hell does he control that area? I have him totally surrounded!!"
I guess maybe a better way of putting it is this: Go is easy to learn, but not at all fun until your skills have progressed to a certain level. You say that learning to count the endgame is part of learning the rules - that directly contradicts the "easy to learn" mantra because endgame counting is not easy. You can't have it both ways.
Perhaps specific instruction sets are difficult to understand, but an assembler pseudocode would hold the properties I desired. Ok, let's set that analogy aside. You know what else is easy to learn but difficult to master? Brainfuck.
Actually, this is a really good excuse to delay shipment! "We just wanted to have the best nailgun possible for gamers to play with!"
Yes, you can learn all the rules very quickly. But you have attain a certain level of "mastery" before you can even begin to play and have fun doing so. When a Go beginner sits down with another beginner, they could probably play for hours even though the game was over long ago. When a beginner plays a computer, all of a sudden the computer goes "I win!" and the beginner is like "what?!! huh?"
It's quite frustrating, especially for a game they have been promised is "easy to learn." You know what else is easy to learn but hard to master? Assembly code.
Here it is in all its karma whoring glory:
http://www.dranger.com/classtranscript.html
Sorry: "Some of you probably disagree with what I've put on the board, that's ok, you're not going to be tested on it, you understand, you're going to be tested on the topics...not(??inaudible)." I think that's totally fair and not evident of any "indoctrination" garbage. I mean, right before that, he praises LaChance for making a good argument.
Yes, in response to a question regarding his faith. Young Mr. LaChair wanted to know why, in the Christian faith, God lets those he loves go to hell. I think it was a pretty good response and taught the kid about something he was interested in.
He said specifically that the torture was accurate.
This was not a science class; and teachers have said much worse. Students are going to listen to the science teacher about science, not the history teacher. Plus, if we fired every teacher for every gross factual error they made, we honestly would have no teachers left.
This is all within the context of the discussion.
Again; would you crack down on the English teacher for giving the class incorrect facts about math? I know my English teacher did it all the time.
Why, exactly, was a recording of the class necessary then? The material is all there, he made handouts, and if they were tested on the material, that evidence exists as well. If you listen to the tape, it's a frank and open discussion, and he welcomes objections from the class. No kid is forced to believe what they do not believe, and high schoolers are mature enough to handle this. This doesn't sound like brainwashing to me, this sounds like a good old-fashioned conversation to me. If you think this audio tape was "brainwashing" students, you aren't giving kids enough credit. These aren't scared little 9 year olds, they're high school students with strong opinions (as you can hear in the tape), and one of them had a strong enough opinion he tried to entrap the teacher. Insulating kids from serious debate like this surrounding controversial topics is doing them a disservice.
The ridicule, on the other h
Let's say Story A is the Unicorns and Story B is "a creator caused the universe to exist."
Story A has strong evidence against it because we are familiar with the natural world, and Story A makes a claim about the natural world.
Story B has no evidence either way because it makes a claim about something that by definition, we cannot ever observe - something that existed before the universe.
An analogy I like to use is this: Suppose you and your friends meet a man that says he went out into the woods where no one could have heard him and said what he had for breakfast. Then he promptly shoots himself in the head. Some of your friends say that he said "eggs" in the woods. Other claim he said "bacon and eggs." Others claim that he said nothing at all, and that he could easily be lying. Yet others want to know "why are we debating this and can't we go have some breakfast ourselves?" and refuse to debate the subject.
There you have the Jews, Christians, atheists, and agnostics. The only logical stance to hold is the latter one, because the options are infinite and choosing any one of the options is arbitrary. This demonstrates that atheists have made a choice where it is most logical to make no choice. It's like any good math conjecture - it is either true, false, or unprovable.
Personally, I am Christian - I will readily admit that this is a decision not based upon any scientific principle. It's a decision based on faith, and I made it because it simply makes the most sense to me. However, I argue that atheists who have made the decision not to believe that something created the universe have also made that decision in faith, and therefore should not hold themselves to be somehow logically or intellectually superior.
In any case, it's certainly not a question science should even concern itself with.
Again, you're tying things into reality. Of course it's silly that unicorns are running around upside down - we know about earthquakes and why they happen because we can observe those things. You're trying to make an analogy to reality when it just doesn't fit.
Now, maybe you might believe that some guy with a crazy name (XHIDSAslw) created the universe for some crazy reason (because all young deities are required to create universes for deity school). But saying that there is no reason the universe was created or that there is no Creator is a tale just the same.
I'm saying it's a thoroughly uninteresting question for science to answer because there's no way to approach it or even test it. So if you are going to be scientific and logical, your best bet is to ignore it than answering questions that don't need answering from a scientific viewpoint.
If he lied it is certainly of concern and he should be disciplined. However, it seems that the student made accusations of him incorporating religion into his history curriculum, which he certainly did not. It was a free and open discussion, not a lecture. This really looks like a complex situation.
Well, did we fire any teapots towards Earth and Mars? If not, where would a teapot come from? There are plenty of reasons it is unlikely, because we know about the rules that govern the existence of teapots.
I liken the question more to the existence of a life form on another planet that has something that looks like the number "5" on its body. You can't even begin to think of how to prove or disprove this, and therefore scientifically, the question is not an interesting one. (It makes great fodder for artists, though.)
Secondly, while a good rule of thumb in real life, the "burden of proof is on existence" rule is not a logical one. Mathematicians prove negative theorems all the time.
No, the point is that you're trying to appeal to absurdity by making them flying elephants or something else goofy like flying spaghetti. (It's always "flying" for some reason.) However, there are no laws of physics (or any other field of science) which preclude the existence of a creator. There ARE laws of physics that preclude conservation of mass-energy, and evidence from biology that show that purple elephants that can fly just aren't around.
The point is that for your absurdity argument to work, you have to tie it in to natural laws of the universe when we are talking about a force that some claim created those laws - there's just nothing we can say about it, so logically and scientifically we shouldn't postulate anything.
I think we should call for a Separation Between Religion and Science and enforce it strictly. Religion, you're not allowed to say anything about how the world works. Science, you're not allowed to say anything about something that isn't about how the world works.
Did you listen to the tape? He's not trying to brainwash his students, they're having a lively and interesting discussion. He's not, as far as I can hear, teaching his students any incorrect facts about history (his subject). This guy is getting a raw deal.
Did any of you actually listen to this? This guy is getting a harsh deal - this was a class where ideas (the very ideas we were discussing) were to be discussed openly. He's not discussing history - in fact he says that he's not saying Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark are not facts or scientific or even true. They're trying to openly discuss ideas. They're not being tested on this.
The guy wasn't telling his class that they would go to hell. They are having an argument, and he's allowing his students to maintain their beliefs, but also expose them to other beliefs. I have no problem with this kind of discussion in schools. The guy's an idiot, but so are many high school teachers.
Go listen to this tape before you say anything.