We’re a little off topic from where we should be. It’s not why the law was passed, it’s how it was taught.
A school can teach everything it wants about the laws against murder, so long as it doesn’t use religious views. Same with the theories of how we came into existance; you can’t really argue creationism per se without religion… or really bad science.
I will be able to teach my child not to kill without relying on religion. I would not be able to teach my child creationism (as in, the story of Genesis) without religion.
My thesis is that the US incarnation of these laws (and possibly many others) have a strong basis in religious views, dating back to long before the laws were framed. I suppose it’s possible to argue that the (generally rather religious) men who framed these laws set aside tradition and their education when framing them, so it’s simply a coincidence that the laws coincide with Judeo-Christian beliefs. But I find that implausible.
If you want to invoke the Genesis version of Creationism, I believe you are right.
But I suspect you could concoct a non-religious “creationist” view of things without great difficulty. The Big Bang can be seen as such a theory: no explanation of causality or the process by which it came about – it just happened.
Since it starts with “Congress shall make no law …” the naive reader might be led to believe that it pertains specifically to Congress and lawmaking, and thus has little bearing on, say, the US Mint.
The Big Bang has nothing to do with evolution. The issue in the OP was alternative theories to evolution. There are no alternate scientific theories. The only competing views are religious.
It would be more accurate to say that the only widely expressed competing views are religious. Here’s a non-religious creationist view that’s not widely held: all life on planet Earth was created in a single instant about 200 million years ago by the effects of an intense gravitational field associated with a near-collision with a black hole.
I give this view about the same credence as more popular creationist views of ther origins of life. That all such views must be religious is inaccurate.
Xema, a series of Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1920’s have held that the Fourteenth Amendment extends many of the strictures against federal action within the Bill of Rights to state and local governments as well. This is called the “doctrine of incorporation”. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is one such clause which has been “incorporated”. Under this doctrine, neither Congress, nor any state or local government, nor any agent of a state or local government (such as a public school teacher) acting in their official capacity as a government employee may promote the establishment of religion. If they do so, their employer is liable to a lawsuit.
It happens by extension. Congress is responsible for appropriating and distributing taxpayer money. Congress cannot use taxpayer money to fund religion. All government institutions, including public schools, are funded by taxpayer money. Therefore no government institution may endorse a religious viewpoint. A public school teacher is hired with the understanding that he/she cannot use taxpayer money (cannot accept a publicly funded salary) to propogate any religious viewpoint.
And it would be even more accurate to say that theories of origin are independent from those of explaining the diversity of life, and therefore irrelevant. Not that irrelevancy has proven to be much of a deterrent thus far in the discussion.
I’m not sure what you are maintaining here. Laws against murder have stong basis in certain religions. But they also have a strong basis in human society in general, since it’s pretty hard to concieve of an organized society that doesn’t proscribe murder. So which came first? And which presides? From all accounts, there are tons of long standing religious proscriptions (like “I am the Lord your God, don’t have a beer and cheet on me”) that aren’t law, and tons of laws (like “no slavery, thanks”) that aren’t derived from religious tradition. The law is a much more complicated animal than religion, since it primarily concerns the day to day affairs of worldly men. The vast body common law, for instance, has a lot more to do with the ins and outs of business transactions than almost anything else.
I suppose if we had a magical crystal ball we could look back in ti… oh wait. The framers were actually kind enough to set down in ink their rationales! First of all, we find men that were considered significant in their oddball areligiosity: a bunch a crackpot deists who didn’t think that the Creator had any real interest in the affairs of human beings, but had simply created a rational world whereby moral truths could be derived from logic. I’m not sure where in the Bible you find that rationale, since it doesn’t really show up in human thought until the European Enlightenment, of which most of the founders were children of. Their thinking was this: that religion was a matter of personal conscience, and that it would be best off if left in the hands of the people, the government not concerning itself with it. Instead, the government would be constituted on the grounds of the best system that human reason could think up.
It’s hard to underscore how radical these views were, especially compared to other nations all over the world at the time, which couldn’t imagine the idea of governments that didn’t claim to draw their authority or direction from God. Yet, this radical idea won out, and the idea of secular government has spread to almost every corner of the world, with only a few states remaining as holdouts (and even they constantly slipping towards at least secularism in practice, if not in rhetoric)
This is much the best argument in favor of the position that Creationism cannot be taught in public schools yet brought forth in this thread – all the others seem feeble by comparison. The relevant part of the 14th amendment is: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” (What is, or should be, the exact construction of this is of course a broad debate of it own.)
I think we agree that a teacher can get a school into trouble by advancing a private religious view in a classroom, and that an employee who causes his employer to become embroiled in legal action gives grounds for dismissal. But I still do not see that the teacher can be charged with the violation of a law, absent some specific statute dictating what can and cannot be taught. Though I don’t know for sure, I strongly suspect that there is no such federal statute.
I feel certain that the first amendment alone gives no grounds for charging an individual with a crime.
