Creationism again stalks the classroom

[Geo]

Best of both philopsophies?

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, Yitzi has it exactly right, even if you have some reason to disbelieve evolution; learn the science at school - arrange for religious instruction privately.  Matters of faith are hardly the proper domain of Ceasar.

[Yitzi]

Well, Yitzi has it exactly right, even if you have some reason to disbelieve evolution; learn the science at school - arrange for religious instruction privately.

That has its own problems and is not what I was saying.  My position is that you should learn the science at school, paid for by taxpayer dollars, and if you want that school should be able to be a religious school that also teaches the religious instruction, not paid for by taxpayer dollars.

[Buster's Uncle]

ACLU alleges comically unconstitutional religious harassment in rural Louisiana school
The Daily Caller
7 hours ago



ACLU alleges comically unconstitutional religious harassment in rural Louisiana school



The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Louisiana filed a lawsuit this week against a public school district in rural western Louisiana contending that school officials and at least one teacher harassed a Buddhist sixth-grade student for not adhering to Christianity.

The ACLU filed the suit against the Sabine Parish school board in U.S. District Court in Shreveport on behalf of parents Scott and Sharon Lane, reports local CBS affiliate KSLA. One of the Lanes’ children, called “C.C.” in the suit, is a Buddhist of Thai descent.

The parents claim that school officials began harassing him about his religious beliefs almost immediately after he showed up at Negreet High School.

“This particular child he had to leave that school because he was subject to repeated harassment,” said the ACLU of Louisiana’s executive director, Marjorie Esman, according to the station.

The ACLU lawsuit alleges comically unconstitutional actions on the part of teachers and administrators.

For example, explains ArkLaTexhomepage.com, the suit claims that science teacher Rita Roark routinely includes fill-in-the-blank questions on her tests such as “ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The ACLU claims that the credited answer for the question is the word “LORD.” When the Buddhist student didn’t input that answer, Roark allegedly made fun of him in front of the entire class.

The suit says Roark also called Buddhism “stupid” in a comparative religions segment.

In addition, the suit asserts, Roark told students that the Bible is completely factual, that God created the earth about 6,000 years ago and that evolution is not possible.

Beyond Roark’s classroom, the ACLU lawsuit accuses the school of regularly having Christian prayer in school and featuring all manner of Christian representations including a portrait of Jesus Christ and Bible verses that school on an electric marquee at the school’s main entrance.

The suit claims that the boy’s parents noted their objections to these overt Christian messages. Sabine Parish superintendent Sara Ebarb allegedly responded by suggesting that the kid either “change” his religious beliefs or enroll in a school some 25 miles down the road where “there are more Asians,” according to ArkLaTexhomepage.com.

The school district has released a statement in response to the ACLU suit, notes KLSA.

“The Sabine Parish School Board has only recently been made aware of the lawsuit filed by the ACLU,” the statement reads in part. “A lawsuit only represents one side’s allegations, and the board is disappointed that the ACLU chose to file suit without even contacting it regarding the facts.”

The statement goes on to say that the school district “recognizes the rights of all students to exercise the religion of their choice and will defend the lawsuit vigorously.”


http://news.yahoo.com/aclu-alleges-comically-unconstitutional-religious-harassment-rural-louisiana-141242881.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Public School Crams Christianity
The Daily Beast
By Andrew Cohen  10 hours ago





 
Congratulations, you are the parent of a public school student! And welcome to Sabine Parish, Louisiana. We are so happy to have your child learning with us and we are so grateful that your tax dollars have permitted us to establish the educational programs and academic atmosphere we’ve developed over the years here. Let us provide you with a brief guide about what your child’s life will be like while he or she is at school with us each day.*

Let’s start with what your child will see when she enters or departs our school. “Paintings of Jesus Christ, Bible verses, and Christian devotional phrases adorn the walls of many classrooms and hallways, including the main hallway leading out to the bus pick-up area. A lighted, electronic marquee placed just outside the building scrolls Bible verses every day.

“In the main foyer of the school, one display informs students that “ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS.” It includes several posters urging students to “Pray,” “Worship,” and “Believe,” while a poster displayed near the waiting area of the main office announces that “(I)t’s okay to pray.”

Those sparkling electronic bible verses help students follow along as “staff members routinely lead students in Christian prayer” and “also distribute religious literature to students. Recently, for example, “one teacher” gave students “copies of a book from the “Truth for Youth program… “Truth for Youth” Bibles consist of the entire New Testament and with cartoon tracts that denounce evolution, spread scientifically inaccurate information about birth control and sex, and warn students about the evils of rock music, drunkenness, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, sorcery, witchcraft and other subjects.” These kids these days—with their evolution and sorcery!

But if you aren’t religious, or if you aren’t a Christian, don’t worry. The school’s overt emphasis on religion—and on one religion in particular—is all perfectly legitimate and lawful under the Constitution and the First Amendment. Just ask the superintendent of schools in the parish, Sara Ebarb, who has said, “[t]his is the Bible Belt” and who asked the parents of a Buddhist student recently if he “has to be raised Buddhist” or if he could “change” his faith and suggested to them that he should transfer to a school where “there are more Asians.” Religious objectors, Ebarb has said, should simply accept the pervasive of official Christianity in Sabine Parish public schools. Easy-peasy, folks, just convert!

If your child is in sixth grade and interested in science, good news— the school has the perfect teacher for her! “Rita Roark regularly asks her sixth-grade students for professions of Christian faith in science class and teaches the Bible as scientific fact, claiming that the Big Bang never happened and that evolution is a “stupid” theory that “stupid people made up because they don’t want to believe in God.”

Instead of the theory of evolution, your child instead will learn about Roark’s “beliefs about ‘Young Earth’ creationism, informing students that the Big Bang never happened and that the Universe was created by God approximately 6,000 years ago. She also teaches here students that evolution does not exist and has stated that, ‘if evolution were real, it would still be happening. Apes would be turning into humans today.” We are indeed so blessed to have this woman of science teaching our children.

The science class is rigorous, you should know. “Roark also routinely requires students to prove written professions of faith on science exams and other tests and assignments… On one occasion, the final question on an exam presented students with the following fill-in-the-blank question: “ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _______ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.” (The correct answer, of course is “the Lord” but don’t worry if your child is not a Christian or otherwise doesn’t know the answer. The teacher will correct him, in front of the class, even if he writes “Lord Boda” because he is Buddhist and in sixth grade).

Here are a few tips. You can get extra credit in that class if you include “verse or religious affirmation” in your responses but be careful if you cast doubt upon Bible stories! For example, “on a handout asking ‘What mountain did Moses supposedly get the Ten Commandments from?’ Roark crossed out the word ‘supposedly’. She also has told students that the Bible is ‘100% true” and that ‘scientists are slowly finding out that everything in the Bible is accurate.’” This is convenient, of course, since, as Roark told her class recently, Buddhism “’is stupid. Speaking about the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha, she proclaimed that ‘no one could stay alive that long without food and water.”

Does your student like math? Last year, he might have been lucky enough to get teacher Stacy Bray, who asked “her students to bow their heads and pray aloud before lunch every day. Bray selected a different student each time to lead the class in prayer and participated in the prayers herself. Another teacher, Angela Knight, leads her class in daily prayers before lunch.” Nothing like a good prayer in public school to whet your public school student’s appetite!

If your child still isn’t satisfied with the level of prayer in individual classrooms don’t fret. There is an awful lot more prayer in our school. You should know that “nearly all school assemblies begin with prayer”—at the Drug Abuse Resistance Education assembly, at the school’s annual Class Ring Ceremony, you name it. And on Veterans Day, “including the most recent, school officials invite a local Christian preacher to hold a group prayer at a mandatory faculty/student assembly honoring the Nation’s veterans.”

I’ll tell you a funny story. A family objected to all this prayer in public school recently and had a meeting with Superintendent Ebarb to voice their concerns. She “defended Roark specifically, declaring that ‘[t]eachers have religious freedom.’ She further stated ‘if they were in a different country,’ Plaintiffs would see ‘that country’s religion everywhere’ and that, therefore, they ‘shouldn’t be offended’ to ‘see God here.’” Just another reason to be thankful for Louisiana’s good graces!

And then do you know what Superintendent Ebarb did? That rascal—she wrote a letter to the school’s principle, Gene Wright, ‘stating that she approved of Wright’s practices in general and that she approved of the fact that the teachers” at the school “acted consistent with their religious beliefs.” Wright then “read the letter to the whole school over the public-address system.” I guess that’s what the Bible teaches us when it says, in 2 Samuel 22:31: “As for God, his way is perfect. He shields all who take refuge in him.” Incidentally, you can see that verse in a poster on the walls of our school!

In closing, we want again to welcome you and your child to our school district. As it also says on the walls of our school, from Phillipians 4:6-7: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.”

• All of the information and quotes contained above come directly from the claims and allegations made in the Verified Complaint and/or Memorandum in Support of Preliminary Injunction that were filed Wednesday in federal court in the Western District of Louisiana by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Lane family. Here is the link to the complaint. Here is the link to the Injunction Memo Brief. Here is a link to the powerful statement offered by Scott Lane, C.C.’s father, titled “If You Want to Fit in At This Public School Just Become a Christian.” And it is Lane, an aggrieved father, who gets the last word. He writes:

We don’t begrudge others their right to their Christian faith. But that’s why the separation of church and state is so important: It gives us all the breathing room and freedom to believe what we want to believe and to practice those beliefs without undue influence or interference by the government. Forcing your beliefs on another is not freedom; it is oppression.

And when official religious practices are this rampant and pervasive, like they are in Sabine Parish public schools, it is tantamount to religious discrimination. It excludes children and families of minority faiths and beliefs and creates a hostile environment for them. It undermines everyone’s religious freedom. I see that now.

http://news.yahoo.com/public-school-crams-christianity-114500832--politics.html

[Yitzi]

Snip article

If you're going to be in the thread anyway to post more articles, I would appreciate a response to what I said, even if it's just an apology for accidentally misrepresenting what I had been saying.

[Buster's Uncle]

?

Well, this is definitely the internet.

[Yitzi]

?

Well, this is definitely the internet.

?

[Buster's Uncle]

The internet - where bright people, who really ought to know better, all too frequently conflate disagreement with lies and demand apologies.  Happens  often wherever us nerdz chat online, and you come irritatingly close to doing both.

(No fault of yours, but those are buttons of mine.)

Were you making an argument from fairness before?  I was asserting that my faith (and therefore, the education of my children in that regard) is my responsibility, (and not The Man's) - the two positions strike me as not being miles apart, ultimately.

Sometimes, I just don't feel like getting into it.  A simple request for reaction ("Nothing to say to my last?") would have been more polite.

[Yitzi]

The internet - where bright people, who really ought to know better, all too frequently conflate disagreement with lies and demand apologies.  Happens  often wherever us nerdz chat online, and you come irritatingly close to doing both.

(No fault of yours, but those are buttons of mine.)

Ah, I see the misunderstanding; I was not objecting to your own position, merely your representation of my own.  I understand that it was a mistake, but just as demanding apologies for disagreement is one of your buttons, having my position misinterpreted is one of my buttons (although to have it be by someone who's not trying to argue with me is a refreshing change, at least.)

Were you making an argument from fairness before?  I was asserting that my faith (and therefore, the education of my children in that regard) is my responsibility, (and not The Man's) - the two positions strike me as not being miles apart, ultimately.

They are not miles apart, to be sure; the important difference, though, is that your position is compatible with the way things currently work (where, if you want your kids to be taught religion in school, you have to pay double for secular studies, as you end up paying school taxes but any school that teaches religion cannot have even its secular studies funded by school taxes, so you have to pay private school tuition for that too), whereas my position is most emphatically not compatible with that set-up.

Sometimes, I just don't feel like getting into it.  A simple request for reaction ("Nothing to say to my last?") would have been more polite.

Probably, but as I said, being misinterpreted is one of my buttons.  Sorry for the rudeness.

[Buster's Uncle]

But private schools are just that - seems to complicate things unnecessarily to combine the three Rs with religious instruction, and expect any subsidy...

[Yitzi]

But private schools are just that - seems to complicate things unnecessarily to combine the three Rs with religious instruction, and expect any subsidy...

The problem is that otherwise, how are you going to avoid effectively creating a penalty for religious education?  Obviously the government shouldn't pay for religious education, but by the same token it shouldn't penalize it either.

[Buster's Uncle]

No, the problem is that some people want to run sunday school and real school together.  The latter is for everyone, rendering a mixing of the two redundant.

[Yitzi]

No, the problem is that some people want to run sunday school and real school together.  The latter is for everyone, rendering a mixing of the two redundant.

The problem is that separating them with after-school religious studies has been tried, and, at least for content-heavy religions like Judaism, does not work well.  Perhaps if there were a secular school that set its schedule to accommodate a real double schedule (so there might be religious studies in the morning half the time and afternoon the other half, or every other class slot having a break during which each student can either go to a nearby religious school for their religion or, if they're not religious or of a religion that does not require schooling, have a break or something) that might work, but nobody seems willing to do that either.

[Buster's Uncle]

Creationist Tall Tales on Human Tails
The Daily Beast
By Karl W. Giberson  19 hours ago






On rare occasions, humans are born with tails—real functioning tails that can even be “wagged” via voluntary muscles contractions in response to emotional stimuli. Although the birth of a baby with a tail is frightening for parents and typically requires surgery, the remarkable human tail is an important part of the even more remarkable tale of our origins—namely evolution.

Human tails are part of the evolutionary baggage that we carry in our bodies, leftover from our ancestors. As we evolved through time, responding to different environmental pressures, natural selection pruned and edited, making our ancestors better at some things—like talking—while ignoring skills and characteristics that became less relevant in new contexts—like smelling. Unfortunately, natural selection has no mechanism to eliminate useless features, but traits that become irrelevant can atrophy or get co-opted for some other task since there is no longer a disadvantage when those features show up in a weakened form.

We carry the evidence of this long history in our bodies—features useful to our ancestors but, for various reasons, not to us. We have goose bumps, for example, that our hairy ancestors used to make their fur stand up straighter when they needed extra warmth or wanted to look menacing. We have muscles that some of us, including me, can use to wiggle our ears, which would be useful for locating sounds if our hearing was more acute. We have a bunched-up third eyelid in the corner of our eye that provided a transparent eye covering for our ancestors, allowing them to “blink” without have to fully shut down their vision.

We call this useless anatomical baggage “vestigial.” Every species has some of it. Flightless birds have non-functional wings. Blind fish living in dark caves have eyes that can’t see. Most pythons have atrophied useless pelvises floating inside their abdomens, not connected to anything.

Other historical markers can be found in our genes. We have a gene to make Vitamin C but, unfortunately for those sailors who died from scurvy, it is broken, so we have to get Vitamin C from our food. Chimpanzees and orangutans have the same broken gene, which can only have been inherited from our common ancestor for whom it was functional, as it still is for many animals.

Every human being embodies the history of our species in the form of stuff inherited from the past. We are walking museums of natural history but some of the exhibits are rather dreadful. And every other species—and there are millions of them—also carry vestiges of its life history.

These dreadful exhibits are the undeniable proof of evolution, linking present species with their ancestors in the clearest of ways. From Darwin to the present, the existence of bad, sinister, unintelligent design has provided powerful evidence that species were not created in their present forms but must have evolved over time—and evolved in such a way that the designs we encounter in ourselves and other species today are often the opposite of intelligent.

The presence of so much “unintelligent” design across so many species should demolish the central claims of the Intelligent Design movement. For every “irreducibly complex” thing with more design than can be accounted for by present science, there are a thousand things in nature with inferior levels of design. For every arrow pointing toward a “designer,” there are a thousand arrows pointing the other way.

How then, does the Intelligent Design movement (ID) persist, in the face of so much damning contrary evidence?

To understand this strange phenomenon, we have to appreciate that ID handles scientific evidence the way lawyers handle evidence in legal cases, namely paid to come to a foregone conclusion, no matter how poorly supported. If 1,000 people saw you commit the crime and Joe saw someone else do it, Joe’s testimony is the only one that matters to your defense lawyer. When someone from the 1,000 witnesses appears on the stand, your lawyer tries to make their integrity appear suspect, and to call their competence into question.

The weakness of any case becomes clear when the logic used to make the arguments is strained, selective and irrelevant. I have watched such tortured reasoning—much of it by a lawyer—in the aftermath of my debate with ID theorist Stephen Meyer a few weeks ago.

In the debate, I emphasized the problem of bad design that I outlined above, mentioning that bad design is common in nature and poses serious problems for ID.  I gave some examples of bad design and showed a picture of an infant with a well-formed tail to illustrate one example.

The response was exactly what one would expect from lawyers. Rather than noting that apparent bad design was common and needed to be addressed by ID—a point I have made in several debates with creationists and ID theorists and has always been met with silence—the response focused exclusively on the particular example of the human tail, as if that is all that needs to be explained. One ID spokesperson, David Klinghoffer, claimed—falsely and absurdly—that I presented it a “proof of Darwinian evolution,” on which I was “very stuck.” (It is a piece of evidence, which is quite different than a proof.) Klinghoffer then attempted to undermine the argument from bad design by undermining the image I had used to illustrate my point. The image came from an article on Cracked.com which Klinghoffer described as the “vestigial online presence of an old satirical magazine, now defunct, a knockoff of Mad.” But where the image came from is of zero import; Klinghoffer’s point does absolutely nothing to undermine the universally accepted and fully documented reality that human babies are occasionally born with tails. Google has more than a million hits—and countless images—for the term “babies born with tails.”

Casey Luskin, also of the Discovery Institute, published several pieces on humans with tails that at least engaged the phenomena of tails, instead of the pedigree of the image I used. But rather than address the actual question on the table—how can ID account for bad design?—he focused exclusively on creating a tenuous speculation that there might be no such thing as genuine human tails.

Note the reasoning process here, keeping in mind that 1) there is a consensus in the scientific community that humans are sometimes born with real tails that are evolutionary throwbacks; 2) the gene for tails has been located in the human genome is the same one that mice use to produce their tails; and 3) the issue is not the human tail, but the problem of bad design in nature.

Luskin—a lawyer—starts by noting that there is “still much debate over why tails arise during development,” but fails to mention that this debate is not about whether the tail sometimes represents the reappearance of an ancestral feature. He notes that “at least one paper” recognizes that the cause of the tail is “poorly understood.” But his next logical leap is breathtaking.

The unwanted appendages attached to babies are classified as either “true tails,” which I have been discussing, or “pseudotails,” which are birth defects that only resemble tails, like a blob of flesh hanging from the lower back. The distinction between the two is common knowledge, and nobody is arguing that pseudotails provide evidence that we evolved from a tailed ancestor.

Luskin then quotes medical journals that, although certainly reputable, are not the typical sources for discussions of evolution. The articles are appropriately tentative—“we raise the suspicion”—in suggesting that pseudotails and “true tails” might actually be the same thing. If true, this would imply that the accepted evolutionary explanation for true tails should be abandoned, which would be significant, of course. Luskin, however, makes no reference to the vast literature arguing with considerable evidence for an evolutionary explanation for true tails.

Luskin makes the best argument he can, of course, but it is piecemeal and speculative. In the face of an overwhelming scientific consensus, he finds a few lone critics with a few tentative comments and amazingly ends up with “ample evidence,” to reject the received wisdom based on a much more substantial body of evidence. “Another evolutionary icon has fallen,” he concludes.

Klinghoffer and Luskin—and most everyone in the ID movement—employ the standard strategies of knowledge denial. Cigarette companies used identical tactics for decades to deny that smoking causes cancer. Today we see these tactics used to deny the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change, the safety of vaccinating children, or the age of the earth.

The strategy is always the same: toss irrelevant mud on the offending argument—“he got his picture from Cracked.com.” Find a lonely voice and enlarge its significance—“one expert thinks there are no true human tails.” Draw certain conclusions from uncertain evidence. Pluck a pebble from a mountain and pretend the mountain is gone. And never, ever, engage the actual argument on its own terms: why is there bad design in nature?

I am not trying to keep my debate with the ID “theorists” alive, for there is no debate about evolution. The generally accepted scientific ideas I presented remain alive and well and continue to guide thinking about evolution.  What I do want to do, however, is shine a spotlight on the dangerous and slippery tools used by those who deny scientific knowledge.


http://news.yahoo.com/creationist-tall-tales-human-tails-050431615--politics.html