The fact that a several-thousand-year tradition of religious law said, for example, that murder is proscribed. It strains credulity to argue that US law to the same effect was uninfluenced by this.
(Now it’s your turn.)
Does teaching evolution with ID spin mean rather more than simply saying that evolution is the process and there may or may not be someone/ something that kicked off the process in the first place?
I’m not familiar with the new ID – when I was doing anthro back in the 80’s “creation science” was still the major opponent of evolution – but why would the basic “concept” of ID be anything less than compatible with evolution? Certainly the idea of theistic evolution is popular in my country (30% of population or so, IIRC).
For example, my father-in-law is a Methodist minister and a firm believer in / supporter of evolution. He’s very comfortable with the idea that the universe is umpteen billions of years old, that evolution is the process that has led to us, and that god set the whole thing off in the first place. Me, I’m agnostic, but his views seem to keep science and religion to their logical corners – science answers the hows, whens and wheres and religon address the why.
I’d agree that open questions of an original process kicker-off-er aren’t science and may have no place in bio, but how does it make the science wrong?
Another interesting assertion. When they fail in this duty, with the violation of what law(s) are they charged? When was the last time that a public school teacher was charged with violating a provision of the US Constitution?
Proscriptions against murder are not dependent on any religious belief, creationism is.
Quote the part of the US Constitution that you feel prohibits religiously derived laws.
Doesn’t strain me a bit. If I wanted to establish a totally atheist state, I still wouldn’t want it to be legal for folks to go around killing others at will. The inclusion or absence of this (or any other) prohibition in religious teachings would have absolutely no bearing on the laws of said state.
In fact, I think a better argument can be made that the human sense of self-preservation and related censure of murder predates human religious awareness. So both religious law and secular law (at least on this topic) derive from human nature, rather than either deriving from the other.
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In 1998:
Bolding mine.
Is the codification of this in religious belief over thousands of years is just an irrelevant coincidence? Those who drew up US laws on murder were uninfluenced by this – they invented the concept of murder as crime independently?
“No new laws are necessary, there is no possible violation of so-called separation of church and state, since no religious teaching is involved.”
This sounds like complete nonsense. Obviously, religious teaching IS involved.
“… teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of mankind to school children might be done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.”
Creationism, of course, is NOT scientific. It is religion, and therefore I believe it IS technically illegal, although with the Bush administration in charge this is likely to change, one way or another. Creationism IS taught in schools today, though only a few “hick” schools, though I think the official title is “Intelligent Design” - religion lightly disguised as science.
Yes.
ID addresses more than simply “the beginning” - it posits that specific molecules or biological structures were hand-crafted, so to speak, by a designer. This because those structures, it is claimed, could not have arisen by natural processes. Thus, it requires active intervention, rather than simply getting the ball rolling.
So your state would reject any notion of connection between its ideas and very similar human ideas of very long standing that precede it?
Xema, it’s really just this simple:
“Murder is illegal.” is a statement of fact.
“God created the Earth.” is a statement of faith.
It is illegal for a public school assert faith as fact.
And this part of the Constitution, which says that it prohibits the establishment of religion (meaning the endorsement of an official state religion) you take to also mean the prohibition of any religiously derived law?
What, exactly, is the relevance of this “murder” debate to the OP? If you wish to debate whether the teaching of creation in public schools is allowed by the Consititution, that’s one thing. This is quite another. This is but a tangent of a tangent, and would probably be better served in Great Debates. Which is probably where this thread is likely to get tossed anyway…
It wasn’t a matter of inventing the concept of murder as crime. I can assure you that folks with no religious belief or education still do not like the idea of their family, friends, or selves being killed. The fact that religious codes deal with the same concept doesn’t mean that those codes are necessarily the basis for criminal law.
There are any number of religious tenets that are not reflected in secular laws, and any number of laws that clearly have no relationship whatever to religion. I don’t see any support for the notion that if law and religion happen to agree, there must be an influence or relationship.
That’s the very nature of a secular state. If every religion on Earth espoused murder as a good way to solve problems, I’d still expect a secular government to prohibit it.
It’s not just “how I take it,” it is, in fact, what it means.
Yet you supply no evidence of her being charged with any crime, which means your post did not respond to mine.