But the topic was only “Creationism” because the prof made it so. He had no reason to do that.
Now, since this is a state school, he needs to be neutral wrt to religion-- neither advocate for it nor against it. By ridiculing it, he’s advocating against it. If the prof had started the lecture with a prayer (just the prof, not him asking the students to pray along with him), would you have objected to that? If so, it’s the same thing here. Had this been a private school, then it would be a different story. He would just have been a jerk, not potentially inviting a lawsuit.
Some atheists are assholes in the same way that some religious individuals are assholes. This is because a certain percentage of people are assholes. It’s usually best to ignore them
Atheism is not the same as secularism. Atheism is a belief system, the important distinction being that atheism can be proselytized just like religion, and I object to crusading atheists almost as much as I object to crusading religionists. This is what I think bothers me about this prof; I have the sense that he’s a bit of an atheistic crusader, so that he’s not content just to teach the facts, which make it very clear that creationism is nonsense, but he finds it necessary to explicitly mock religious belief. I’ve read the prof’s defense and to me it doesn’t come across as very genuine.
I disagree with a previous poster who implied that advocating atheism is OK because it has truth on its side. Not always. That atheists tend to be on board with evolution theory is fine, and creationists are clearly nutbars. But you have crusading atheists like Lawrence Krauss who take it much too far. Krauss cites quantum physics as proof that you can create something from nothing, and therefore you don’t need an explanation for the Big Bang. As a physicist he is well aware that quantum fluctuations in empty space are at best just an analogy, and not a very good one. Krauss has also written books and given lectures and interviews expounding his view that modern physics has rendered both religion and philosophy obsolete. If he thinks all aspects of religion are useless then he has a poor understanding of the human condition, and if he thinks philosophy is useless he is just profoundly wrong and is both a shallow human being and a scientist of limited vision.
I get the sense that this prof is a lot like Krauss. It appears from the slide that this is an introductory biology course. While I don’t consider that slide to be a big deal one way or the other, I fail to see any way in which it improves anyone’s knowledge of the subject matter. What it does more than anything else is satisfy a crusader’s need to proselytize.
But the criticism isn’t towards religion as a whole-it’s toward an offshoot of it that pretends to be science(Creationism) that some religionists use to push their anti-science agenda into state run schools.
Are any of you that are upset that he put up a slide that had a friendly “Buddy Jesus” happen to look at the right half of the slide…the one that with the big-headed, big-nosed caricature of whom I presume to be Charles Darwin? Jesus actually looks better represented than Darwin in comparison.
Any of y’all want to take offense of this mocking of evolution?
It’s not an “offshoot”. It’s an important part of a certain religion.
So what? Again, people aren’t fungible. That fact that Christian Guy #1 tries to push an anti-science agenda into state run schools does’t mean you should go and insult some random Christians.
But I don’t really care if you think it’s OK, etiquette-wise. We can agree to disagree on that. But this is a public school. You don’t proselytize at a public school and you don’t denigrate religion at a public school, either. If this guy did this one time, it’s probably no bid deal. But if he makes a point to do this every semester, he’s going to be shut down by the school or the courts. Just as those Creationists have been shut down for trying to teach creationism in school.
Well, I’m not offended by the slide personally, but the constitution doesn’t prevent profs from mocking particular humans in public schools. It does prevent them from mocking religion, though, and that’s what this guy has done.
You want to answer my question about the prof opening the semester with a prayer and tell us why that’s not OK but opening the semester by taking a jab at religion is OK? And by OK, I mean OK per the latest jurisprudence regarding the 1st amendment and schools.
He took a jab at Creationism, which religionists claim to be science. If/'when religionists ever publically admit that creationism isn’t science at all but religion, you might have something to squawk about, discrimination-wise. In the meantime, he is perfectly within his rights to point out bad pseudoscience, no matter which religiosos stand behind it.
He’ll be shut down by the school, and if he decides to take his case to court, he’ll lose. He has no right to teach anything the school doesn’t want him to teach at a public school.
It “ridicules” Creationist religions just by existing.
Almost half of Americans are creationists, and most of the rest think God “guided” evolution; what makes you assume it can be taken as a given at a university level?
The difference is, there aren’t a significant number of people who believe in anything involving “voodoo or astrology” that touches on biology. Meanwhile, creationism is a major threat to American scientific education.
42% is not “small”.
Of course they do; that’s the whole point of faith. You’re supposed to not use any of those things, and just believe.
A very dangerous attitude, since the real world doesn’t care what you believe. Disease organisms won’t stop evolving resistance to antibiotics just because doing so offends creationists.
42% think humans were created in their present form by God; that’s pretty close to 50%.
Except it’s constantly being pushed everywhere else.
You’ve got one court case from 2005, vs. an article from 2015 listing all the places Creationism can be/is pushed. Did you even bother to look at that map? Did you see all those green dots? Those are all the public schools where state law permits creationist instruction. Your single, dated court case does not erase what is going on now.
You can throw around all the carefully contrived definitions you like, but it’s ridiculous because the very existence of those links contradicts what you’re trying to prove: if atheism wasn’t a belief system, there wouldn’t be sites and organizations whose sole purpose is to justify and promote it. At best one might try to argue that agnosticism isn’t a belief system, and it’s certainly less strident in its certainty than atheism, yet your very first link leads to an article with the title “what do agnostics believe?”
And if atheism wasn’t a belief system it wouldn’t have staunch advocates like the aforementioned Lawrence Kraus, or Richard Dawkins or any of the many others who promote it. Including, I believe, the prof cited in the OP. Which is my central point.
Don’t misunderstand me – I’m more or less an agnostic myself and I appreciate that most atheists have arrived at their beliefs through an intellectual and evidence-based route, and most of them are probably secular humanists. But it IS a belief system to the extent that it unequivocally rejects the concept of any god, which is the point of differentiation with agnosticism. I can refute that claim simply by redefining the concept of god, and that’s no mere idle wordplay, because it seems to me that in practice atheists believe that ultimately science can explain all observed phenomena. But whatever science can explain, there is always an underlying cause that it cannot, and I believe this limitation is intrinsic, somewhat analogous to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This may involve the “origin” of the Big Bang, the nature of the multiverse, or an eternal universe of Euclidian spacetime – concepts that we don’t even have proper words to express or comprehend, let alone explain. If I choose to call that unreachable explanation “God”, then the atheist belief system crumbles.
This isn’t a Muslim-style Mohammed-cartoon type objection to how Jesus was depicted. The discussion is about why creationism needed to be set up as a strawman in a university-level biology class.
Let us see…Biology 100 course in a state with laws that protect the absurd ID/creationist arguments in K-12. That kind of reality check is almost required for the teacher to provide an effective education.
Maybe because he has taught that course before, was tired of Creationists interjecting unscientific crap into his science course, and he decided to get a preemptive strike in to let them know that it wasn’t going to be tolerated again? Just a WAG…but that student was certainly ready to take that snapshot for the few seconds it was up, and he knew exactly who to send it to, didn’t he?
Tell me something-This Professor hadn’t made secret what he thought of creationists and their ilk, so why do you suppose those Creationist students were taking his course?
True…but I hold that suppressing religious freedom is also hugely dangerous, as it leads to too much power of censorship in the hands of a small minority. Leaving people the freedom to believe weird stuff is ultimately the best.
(We can interfere slightly, such as taking children away from parents who would rely on faith-healing instead of real medical care. But once a guy is a legal adult, I don’t care how many rattlesnakes he wants to juggle, so long as the only ones at risk are himself and other legally consenting adults.)
Carefully contrived? What definition of “atheism” do you prefer that doesn’t contradict your claim that it’s a belief system?
No, they don’t.
Anything that others try to justify and promote must be a belief system? That’s silly.
Atheism is being without belief in gods. That’s not “strident.”
Why not?
Your point fails. You’re simply declaring that if something is promoted it must therefore be a belief system. You haven’t demonstrated why.
That’s probably true in the U.S. but I’m not so sure it’s true worldwide. There are plenty of Buddhist atheists, for instance, that have all sorts of unintellectual and non-evidence based beliefs. All that an atheist necessarily has in common with another is that he has no belief in the existence in any gods. That’s one of the reasons atheism can’t be a belief system. But you still say “most.” If some haven’t, what makes this one non-belief some share a “system”?
There are literally billions of things I have no belief in. I sure have a lot of belief systems!
Brilliant. The belief system you claim I have crumbles when you redefine what a god is. :rolleyes: It also makes Christianity crumble. You’re quite powerful.
Yes, I read it. Did you? The vast majority of those schools are NOT public schools, and the most significant contingent, the charter schools in Texas, don’t actually teach creationism. They are trying to skirt the law by inserting caveats about evolution, not by explicitly teaching creationism. If they are public schools, and they do teach Creationism, they will be shut down.
I cited the SCOTUS ruling on the subject. That is not to say no one is going to try and work around it. Do you know that people still rob banks even though it’s against the law to do so?