It’s a reasonable accommodation for a very large societal majority. I don’t think it’s too wise an idea to keep poking the tyrannosaur.
My old Anthropology prof said much the same thing. “Inside this classroom, evolution is a scientific fact, and your grade will depend on how well you understand it. Out there, you can believe whatever you want.”
So long as it’s a matter of faith, it cannot be a “lie.” It’s just something someone believes without evidence. When they trespass across the boundary, then, yes, they need to be brushed back. But it can be done respectfully, and, given their enormous majority, probably ought to be.
The desire not to turn off some of the students, in itself, is a pretty good reason. Why make enemies when you can (at least) establish a treaty of neutrality.
Outside the classroom, they are going to believe in creation. So why make them angry creationists when, with some skill, you might actually get some respect back from them in return?
I have no choice about being an atheist, I was raised without religious observance of any kind, and simply cannot say I believe in a supreme being and then do so. I accept that many feel that way about their faith. In fact, I don’t think believers converted to atheists had a choice either, they acted as their conscience dictated and they struggled far more than I to come to terms with that.
In specific response to the OP, I object to the way any group of said beliefs chooses to provoke others. At the end of the day, when you get right down to it with affairs of this nature, atheist bullying isn’t all that different from religious bullying. I’ll grant that atheists aren’t starting any wars and are by and large well educated, but that doesn’t make atheist bullying right. I’ve seen it firsthand (even outside of the SDMB, gasp!) and it’s an extremely antagonistic and immature pissing contest to see who can be king of the moral majority, whether that means science or faith takes precedence.
I know religion is responsible for many terrible things. It’s also responsible for a lot of good in the world. The same can be said of almost anything, and I think we’d be even worse off as a species without a little bit of faith or ritual of some variety in our lives. That being said, teachers should be teaching and leaving matters of worship to clergy. I’m personally more of an agnostic so I may not be a true non-believer, but I take the approach of to each his own, live and let live, separation of church and state, etc. It’s when one group starts causing trouble for another that it escalates. Believe what you want, but if you start stepping out of line to impose your perspective on other people then you’re part of the problem, not the solution. Religious groups are overall more guilty of this than atheist groups, but try to remember this and take the high road when reminding the devoutly pious about the scientific facts and figures, my atheist brothers and sisters!
Do you mean those threads labeled “attack” and/or “anti-religious” threads? When you say you want “the ant”(atheists) to give it a rest, what exactly do you mean? It’s not like they have 1/100th the voice of religionists out there-if atheists gave up 100% of their public exposure on television, radio, magazines and lectures, and religionists gave up an equal number of hours, the public would never notice the drop in religious programming. While these extremely rare push-backs from atheists may bother you and some others, it bothers me more that they are extremely rare, given the elephantine amount of pushing going on.
When you use the same amount of effort to get the ant and the elephant to stop, it’s pretty well evident that the real target is the ant, because the elephant doesn’t even notice that size weapon.
The problem here is that it seems to imply equivalence, or that essentially all points of view here are of equal validity. That is not true. They contradict one another. They’re mutually exclusive. Someone is right and someone is wrong, and the implications thereof are very important for human well-being. Pretending otherwise, not having the courage of your convictions, and trying to swim in the shallow sea of ecumenicism (or pretending that sea is both deep and clean, to continue the metaphor) strikes me as being in very bad faith.
Does it count as taking the high road when I don’t bring up my atheism for its own sake? I only bring it up when it comes up ("No, there’s no such thing as karma … there’s no empirical evidence for Native Americans having chariots and broadswords, Noah’s Ark is obviously impossible…), but I do not shy away from it, because this matters. It isn’t just a game where we should feel free to choose teams at will.
As to symbols, we’ve got [del]one[/del] several, and they’re all utter shit. I’d really quite like someone to figure out something better. It’s not like the bar is set high.
But so long as they’re matters of faith – and not imposed on others by force – who cares? One guy’s faith forbids him to eat pork: hey, that’s his loss, not mine! The other guy believes that God loves him: how is that a problem?
At best, it’s like following one sports team over another, or preferring one cuisine of food over another. What can it possibly matter to me if you like the Packers and eat Thai food?
This, I think, is where the problem lies. Religion, properly limited, offers benefits – a sense of comfort, a sense of purpose, an ideal of love. The benefits may only be illusions, but they are illusions that make many people happier in their lives. It’s only when it trespasses against others that it becomes a problem.
At this point in time, in U.S., European, Japanese, and other industrialized nations, religions is mostly benign. Yes, the Catholic Church is doing immense harm with its insane campaign against birth control (and also promoting the spread of disease by opposing condoms as barriers to transmission.) This evil needs to be opposed, strongly, but not because it’s religious in nature. Instead, because it is evil in nature.
Otherwise, unlike times past, no one is coming round and dragging me to church on Sunday. (And I actually kind of like the church bells.)
Perhaps, but factual validity does not make you a better person any more than faith makes someone a bad person. There is always common ground to be had. I tried to state this by saying that religions abuse their power more than atheists abuse religion. I know that by comparison, atheists are the minority by a huge scale of magnitude and as an agnostic, I’m closer to the atheist camp than the religious one, but we will win little favor by not first finding common ground to have a meaningful dialog.
No, I don’t think it does. I see your point and agree with you, but this is less about proving empirical evidence than keeping one’s spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof, to themselves. I don’t think we as atheists or agnostics can sway true believers in one-on-one debate. We are open to new ideas and ways of thinking where they arguably are not, so we are not likely to change their minds. It all starts with education, which is a growing problem in the United States and I picture it only becoming worse before it gets better. It may be unrealistic to expect education to fix the problem in this country, but I know they’ve managed to do it in other developed countries. Part of our country’s goal was to secure separation of church and state but that vision has obviously has eroded over two centuries, and other countries have taken up that mantle instead. The rise of the religious right in certain popular media here has not helped matters any.
You would think requiring any schools to have actual science curriculums and no faith based learning would be enough to cure this problem within a few generations, but that will not stop the religious fringe from establishing their own private schools of worship where they teach the next generation about man walking with dinosaurs, intelligent design, et al. It is not exclusively an American problem though, as this happens in lesser developed countries and I don’t think we can abolish religion or the fringe that perpetuate superstitions, which may be part of my whole point. Just look at what goes on in the Middle East.
That being said, I do sort of believe that you get from the world what you give, which is sort of what karma is. Statistically speaking, if you believe in and practice having positive karma, you will attract other positive karma. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. It’s just the law of attraction and even though karma’s a religious concept there is definitely science behind the law of attraction. We as atheists/agnostics (and a minority) have to learn to get along better with lesser-educated groups if we seek to make inroads toward expanding other people’s horizons, but our political culture will also have to undergo a lot of change for that to happen as well. It’s sort of a chicken and the egg thing. I think maybe we just need to find better ways to make science fun and introspective for those of religious persuasion, rather than confrontational and challenging. Part of why I love and miss Carl Sagan so much… he was the master guru at this kind of thing.
I totally agree; not only is it a bad symbol, it’s also intentionally antagonistic and another example of why we aren’t going to win over any church congregations anytime soon.
Thinking you’re right and being right are not the same thing. A conspiracy theorist who demanded that their delusion that the moon landing was faked be treated as seriously as the truth would be laughed out of the room. Why does your conspiracy theory that says everything was orchestrated by an all-powerful, perfectly stealthy conspiracy of one deserve any better?
You can’t have it both ways. You cannot simply call your toaster “God” and then claim that that the existence of this toaster is evidence Jehovah exists. If you define “God” as being an impotent, intangible being who has never been seen and has never done anything because you are afraid that any kind of scrutiny will destroy him utterly, why the fuck are you a Christian?
I don’t think that’s a useful approach. Believing in creationism is rejecting the fundamental principles of science, and that’s a problem.
However, biology class is not the place to fix that problem, and insisting that people believe in evolution just makes the people who don’t fail biology, which doesn’t help anyone.
A more suitable forum for such a discussion would be a philosophy of science class, but I don’t think that’s taught in high schools or in most college/university programs. Which is too bad.
Which is why the argument “because X is right and Y is wrong” is a useless argument, but “X is the best current understanding of the observable facts, Y can’t explain the observable facts and Z is untestable” is a much more usable way to decide whether to teach X, Y and/or Z.
The toaster exists; I haven’t gotten around to naming it.
That makes you a deist, which is the most reasonable form of religious belief. (I.e., god set the universe in motion and didn’t meddle afterwards.) Not sure to what degree that’s compatible with christianity.
Sure: but you can say that, and not mock, gibe, crow, or taunt. Explain the incompatibility in clear, factual terms.
Exactly. Making them understand evolution is valid, but not making them believe it. In many such classes, there will be a hard-core stand-out who refuses even to study the material, and such students need to be flunked, not because of their beliefs, but because of their refusal to learn.
(Most atheists are willing to study religion, without dirtying themselves by an understanding of something they don’t believe. Why is it so important for so many creationists to fight so vigorously to remain pig ignorant of what Darwin actually said?)
Agreed. However, I’ve found that most university science classes do devote a little class time to the philosophy of science, the scientific method, etc. Astronomy classes sometimes (as noted above) go into a brief survey of a number of classes of creation stories. Any good evolutionary biology (or anthropology) class will, almost automatically, deal with the idea of creationism, purely en passant.
(How can you talk about how revolutionary Darwin’s ideas were without at least a nod to what they replaced?)
If my class had a sizeable amount of people with exactly such beliefs then I’d be failing if I didn’t address them. The job of a teacher is as much telling them how to think as what to think and where better to start then the ridiculous theories they consider to be true?
Showing what makes a proper theory and how others aren’t a theory at all is a good thing. The slide didn’t strike me as offensive, deistic creation is magic, having this pointed to students may bother them but if the teacher knows he is going to butt up against this time and time again during his course with this group then he is right to make a clear stand against it right at the beginning.
It isn’t the only way of dealing with it and others in this thread have suggested other wordings of ways of addressing it but nor is it necessarily wrong or disrespectful.
Believing that makes you fundamentally unfit to teach anyone anything, except as a cautionary tale. There are right and wrong answers, and a solipsistic refusal to commit yourself to saying that two plus two really does equal four, that the moon landing really did happen, or that God does not exist means you are at best a babysitter, not a teacher.
I think between the graphics he used and the follow-up comments he made…he did.
If he said nothing at the start and students raised creationist objection throughout the rest of the course with him replying “we don’t discuss that” or similar then I’m sure there would be complaints regarding him ignoring those objections.
Ridiculous religious beliefs are, for some reason, given undue respect. I’m not sure he can teach accurately in direct opposition to them without coming under fire in some way, shape or form.
The answers depend on your assumptions. 2 cc water + 2 cc salt does not add up to 4 cc salty water.
Whether something is true is the outcome of a process. The outcome without the process is useless, ask any scientist or lawyer. If we agree on the process (i.e., the scientific method) then our best approximation of the truth will roll out without (much) controversy.
But having everyone bring what they feel is the truth and then duking it out is a waste of time. (Example: the very discussion we’re having right now.)
