Also, the longer you refrain from satsifying a frequent (and polite) request for a cite for your claim that 20% of public HS grads cannot read their own diploma, the harder it is for you to be taken seriously.
How is Creationism a “moral” belief? That’s the problem right there. Not just the idea that it’s amoral to believe something else, but the idea that scientific facts are based on “deeply held beliefs” as opposed to evidence.
So you’re trolling?
Non-religious isn’t “anti-religious.” Your rhetoric betrays your statement above that you don’t believe as they do. If you didn’t, you do have all of the pat fallacies: that scientific method is amoral, that it’s “anti-Christian” to deny Christians the right to teach mythology as science. I’m just waiting for you to say science itself is a “kind of religion,” and suggest that it’s faith-based.
So you vote for school board members (sometimes to the detriment of public education, of course, when you would rather indoctrinate kids than teach them, as the right is so bent on doing. See Texas.)
It wouldn’t work economically for a vast majority of people. If you want to abolish public education, you have very different values than me and there’s not much ground for discussion. I would say that no public school is better than the complete horseshit factory you envision where any asshole with an opinion spouts off their theories of the world and kids are given no epistemological compass to navigate the sea of horseshit.
Maybe what I need is a statistic for liberals too lazy to use Google..
I generally don’t do this, because left or right, they do one of two things when I post something backing up my claims.
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pretend they didn’t read the proof and change the subject.
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Pretend the source is biased or can’t be trusted.
But here’s what the report said…
If you make an assertion, it’s YOUR responsibility to back it with a cite if challenged.
I’ve argued with the other side, and frankly, some of them make pretty strong (if incorrect) arguments.
I also have to truly wonder why there is such an insistance on the left that THIS science has to be fully indoctrinated into the system. Frankly, most Americans, even the 80% who can read their diplomas, don’t understand a lot of science or get through the science test by cribbing the multiple choice answer from the person next to them. And no one thinks twice. But, man, let a kid express an opinion that God had something to do with evolution, and you guys go ape-shit… if you’ll pardon the pun.
Really? So when the schools insist on handing out birth control to kids and giving them instructions how to find the Planned Parenthood clinic over their parents’ objections, there’s no indoctrination going on there at all, right?
People cling to what is important in their lives. That does make it valid.
No, I’m only obligated to do it if I feel like doing it, and I usually don’t because you guys pretend you don’t see it when I do. And this isn’t restricted to the left, I’ve seen people on the right do the same thing.
Now that I have, will you admit, “Gosh, Joe, you’re right. We really do have a problem?”
Either you believe that we evolved from apes, or you believe we were created by a God in his image. These are ultimately to completely contradictory philosophies. Now I think there is a way to reconcile them, in that Evolution may have been the tool God used, and frankly, it’s a lot more impressive than the talking snake story.
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No, just that my religious views are very nuanced and will probably tick people off. I look at this more ofa political problem that the Democrats didn’t have until fairly recently. There was no “social issue” divide between the two parties 50 years ago.
The Republicans really only represent the interests of the 20% who own 90% of everything. The rest of us who are down here scratching and fighting over what is left are pretty easy to divide when one half attacks the others religious views.
The ironic thing is, you can make the argument that Jesus was a liberal. None of you guys will, of course.
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You know, you are having so much fun beating those straw men, I’m not sure if I should interrupt or not.
You know what, I learned Genesis in religion, Darwin in Science, and I was pretty much able to work it out. I think the kids are smart enough to, too.
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Kids who graduate from religious schools usually do better than kids who go to public schools. Kids who are home-schooled usually do better than kids who go to public schools. On a up note, public school kids are still doing better than kids raised by feral wolves, so they got that going for them.
Actually, for most of our history, the Church and the School were the same building in a community. It was only in the 20th century we felt the need to drive religion out of it.
“let a kid express an opinion that God had something to do with evolution” is not an issue here. If someone says “welp, we clearly have multiple lines of evidence that evolution actually happened, but secretly god was behind it” I don’t think anyone would care. It’s totally unnecesary, and you’re just saying “whatever happened happened… just god did it”
You know, I’d imagine if there were a group of people out there that wanted to teach that the earth was flat, and that it should be taught that way in science class, and they were well funded and politically active and 60% of people believed the earth was flat, then we’d be pretty pissed about that too.
Creationism is such an issue because they are fighting specifically to deny reality on an issue that’s pretty cut and dried. They push into the political system to push it. So that becomes the battleground. If there were powerful interests trying to push some other sort of total bullshit on a cut and dried subject, non-retards would fight whatever it was.
Incidentally, for someone who claims to reject the creationists and agree on why they’re wrong (at least I get that impression from skimming the thread), you sure do use a lot of really stupid loaded language like “indoctrinate darwinism” and stuff that makes you sound like one of them. If you were truly concerned with truth and reason, you wouldn’t be acting like an apologist for them.
What? This comes up all the time. Do you think liberals want to try to misrepresent Jesus to try to make him sound like a conservative because they instinctively hate all things religious, or something? Jesus was, by modern American standards, the biggest fucking socialist communist liberal evil traitor type person ever. It’s ironic that the people most concerned about making an effort to appear to follow Jesus are the ones who most angrily and strenuously reject his teaching.
And a joke to lighten the mood…
Little johnny was a chronic misbehaver with bad grades. So his parents decided to send him to a Catholic School.
After a few months, Johnny’s behavior improved and he started getting good grades.
So his parents asked him what was different about the new school. Johnny replied.
“When I went in the front door and saw that guy they had nailed to the cross, I knew they weren’t fooling around!”
Well, like I said, I am “recovering”.
And I agree, there is a lot of liberalism in Christianity. So why don’t we have a “Christian left” to counter the “Christian right”? Why is Jesus such an unwanted houseguest on the left side of the table? Personally, I can’t answer that question.
I know that in 1976, Jerry Falwell endorsed Jimmy Carter. But somewhere along the line, there was a big wedge driven between religious working folks and much of the Democratic base. So we get people who vote for tax cuts for the wealthy and free trade treaties because they are angry about abortion or gay marriage or evolution.
For the record- I’m not a member of any religion. I think that there is a purpose to creation, because the universe is much to well organized to be random. I do, however, beleive that the bible is a book of stories, nearly all of them fiction. I also think that there are some truly horrible stories in the bible that make me hope that if there is a God, he isn’t the God of the bible.
You’re obligated to do it if you care about your own credibility.
My personal opinion about reading problems is not that kids are being taught poorly, but rather that the culture of reading in America has been greatly diminished in favor of watching TV and playing video games. I also do not believe your cite is correct, unless you’re using a ludicrous definition for “functionally literate.” 20% functional illiteracy strains credibility for me, but admittedly based only on my personal experience. I don’t have a counter cite.
But in any case, discussing problems with education in America should probably go into a new thread.
Nonsense. What a kid expresses is not what anyone is concerned about. What people are legitimately concerned about is what teachers say and present in the classrooms. Presenting creationism is not valid science, and it does not belong in any public classroom.
I said most of the extreme cases of politicizing education are on the right. Your example isn’t even about education, but rather about providing teenagers with necessary medical services and advice. In my opinion that is not remotely as extreme as (for example) trying push through textbooks that whitewash controversies in American history and promote right-wing values, such as has happened in Texas among other states, and which is about politicizing education. And it’s entirely propaganda for the right. There is no such thing as a leftist textbook in use anywhere in American schools K-12, but there are right-wing history textbooks and moderate right history textbooks.
No, it doesn’t. And it never did. Otherwise, you’d have to agree that things like slavery and Jim Crow laws were valid.
This is not a valid approximation of evolutionary biology, and your credibility continues to be doubtful the more you insist on it.
Actually, there absolutely is. Sad that you aren’t aware of that.
Funny, I must have missed the Christian Left over the sound of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart mocking Christians.
I’m sure they’ll put in their two cents any minute now.
“Otherwise, you’d have to agree that things like slavery and Jim Crow laws were valid.”
And those things didn’t go away until there was a strong concensus that they were wrong.
“My personal opinion about reading problems is not that kids are being taught poorly, but rather that the culture of reading in America has been greatly diminished in favor of watching TV and playing video games. I also do not believe your cite is correct, unless you’re using a ludicrous definition for “functionally literate.” 20% functional illiteracy strains credibility for me, but admittedly based only on my personal experience. I don’t have a counter cite.”
You know, I think I should call shenannigans here. If you are going to insist MY opinion wasn’t valid until I provided a cite on it, then you should provide a cite to prove why my cite was wrong.
Yes, I do think TV and Video games are bad influences. I also think that both parents working because the middle class lifestyle has shrunk to make CEO richer has been a contributing factor. But so are the attitudes in Public Education that results don’t matter.
I could go into a whole list of other things, but you are correct, we should do this on a differnent thread. I’m off to a memorial service for my Aunt, but maybe I’ll start it in “Great Debates”.
Nope. You didn’t cite the 20% figure as your opinion, you presented it as a fact. Or don’t you distinguish between the two?
You misspelled that last word, guy.
So, RR you’ve missed all the controversy about the Episcopal Church ordaining gays? You missed all the churches that joined the protests against Bush’s extremely ill-conceived Iraq War? Did you miss that the United Church of Christ took a stand supporting gay marriage (back in 2005)? There actually are numerous Christian churches all over the world that allow blessings of same-sex unions and plenty that allow their ministers to perform gay marriage ceremonies.
I think you’re just not paying attention. Here’s some further reading for you about the Christian left.
Also, Obama is a Christian, with no reasonable cause to doubt it. Of course he’s a bad example I suppose because he’s not really leftist.
I already admitted I don’t have a counter cite about the 20% illiterate thing. It’s my opinion only.
How about you admit that we aren’t ignoring your citations when you provide one?
A consensus that was a minority opinion in many places.
But anyway, let’s play that game:
The consensus worldwide is that evolution is valid and creationism is not.
The science behind evolution has overwhelmingly achieved a consensus among those who are well-educated, not just worldwide but in the U.S. as well.
People most informed on the subject, i.e. scientists, overwhelmingly accept evolution as fact, not just worldwide but in the U.S. as well.
Creationism and the advocacy thereof is wacko. Therefore, Bachmann is a wacko for (among other reasons) advocating for creationism.
This link says that the source for this statistic is the National Right to Read Foundation, which is a group that promotes phonics-based reading programs. It looks like the actual statistic was pulled from this essay, Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Education Malpractice. I didn’t look at all of the sources they list for that, but I will note that none of them are more recent than 1989. The latest nationwide study of adult literacy that I’m aware of is the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. It concludedthat 14% of **all **adults in the U.S. were “Below Basic” in prose literacy skills and that 55% of that group had not graduated high school.
Since you do, in fact, explicitly call it an “attack” on “others religious views,” to omit religious mythology from the science curriculum in the very post where you dismiss that as a strawman caricature of your argument, obviously no straw men were harmed.
Oh, he was? Well in that case, young earth creationism should be taught as scientific fact.
Wrong. That’s not what happened. The Federal government passed legislation forcing the racist south to end Jim Crow laws and that lad to much violence and resistance. Or perhaps you have a different “opinion” about history, too.
First of all, your statement was a statement of fact, not an opinion. Whether or not 20% of high school graduates are illiterate is either true or false. In this case, I think, false. Your misunderstanding of the difference between statements of fact and statements of opinion is consistent with your notion that teachers can teach any thing as science.
I find it odd to be indifferent to the content of the curriculum but simultaneously wanting “results.” So students should be rigorously tested on how much of the nonsense they were taught they remember?
Why, you’re right, Bo, I did.
That totally makes up for 9.1% unemployment, $4.00 a gallon gasoline, defaulting on the national budget, fighting an illegal war in Libya, surrendering in Afghanistan and everything else this guy has screwed up…
I misspelled a word.