What exactly do you think the first ammendment prohibits? Specifically, I mean? If the state explicitly endorsing the idea that the only god is the god of the Old Testament isn’t establishing a state religion, what does the phrase even mean?
You would think they would give up on thinking God was a good thing after dozens of hurricanes in the last decade.
If God exists he hates Florida.
So, actually, you DO believe in incorporation (applying most or all of the Bill of Rights to the stats, via the Fourteenth Amendment), you just reject the accepted interpretation of the Establishment Clause. The argument doesn’t have anything to do with states’ rights.
I heard a rumor that many former residents of Polk County, Florida have actually moved out of the county and out of Florida to other states. Some have become teachers. What can we do to stop this flow into healthy educational systems if Polk County’s science classes become tainted with misinformation?
Also, does anyone have an airplane and a printing press so that we can bombard them with correct information? (Pilots should be Anglican and fly in sunny weather only, please.)
This has been an especially entertaining thread. It started out in true pit fashion, with an ad hominem directed at the ID folks. (If I were feeling contentious, they’d be high on my list of punching bags as well; as much as anyone can, they deserve what they get.) Then it got derailed into something more like a GD with bad language for most of the thread. Isn’t it supposed to go the other way? 
Anyhow, I don’t much belong here–not really a pit type, myself. I’ll stick in a personal attack somewhere here, just to stay on topic. But I had to pipe up here, just to say: Be careful with your attitude towards the 10th Amendment. Unless Nino up and retires during a Democratic Administration, we’ve got a long stretch ahead of us with a 5-4 ‘conservative’ majority on the Court. It’s too soon to say for sure, but it’s likely that we won’t be seeing such a expansive interpretation of the Establishment Clause in the years to come.
That means that if you think that we shouldn’t open the school day with a nod to somebody else’s lord and saviour jesus christ, you’ll have to look somewhere other than the federal courts. That’ll be either the state courts, interpreting their own state constitutions and statutes, or the democratic process in one form or another–whether that’s voting out the school board or passing a state constitutional amendment, or anything in between. You might want to get friendly with states’ rights then; they’ll be all that’s between you and the Roberts Court. Yesterday’s bogeyman might just be today’s best friend.
Oh, and, uh, Fred Phelps can suck my sweaty left nad. Just for the Pit.
May I ask something? Something really simple?
What the hell is there TO teach?
What are the facts? The hypotheses? The arguments? Who could this supposed intelligent designer be? How did this designer make designs? Is this still going on to this day?
For all the noise about how this needs to be taught, the actual content that I’ve seen would barely fill a 5-minute slideshow. Shouldn’t a course of study, y’know, at the very least take a little effort?
Mark my words, once put up or shut up time comes…i.e. someone has to actually teach ID…it’ll be revealed as the ludicrous nonissue it is and die a quick death. If it takes that long.
Google Gettier. In the meantime, there is, to me, a fundamental difference in knowledge between the person who “knows” that there are undecidable propositions because he has read something about Godel’s theorem, and the person who “knows” the same thing because he has read (and comprehended) Godel’s paper. The differences often show up in ordinary converstaion. The people who ascribe Godelian limitiations to every system clearly do not know what he was saying, much like the people who ascribe entropy to social chaos or Darwinism to social order. If all you know is what Smith said about Godel, then what you know is about Smith, and not about Godel.
Gettier isn’t talking about an ordinary definition of knowledge.
The point here is that I can know that X theory is the best theory the scientific community has to explain Y phenomenon without having personally tested X theory. This is true for evolution, anthropogenic global warming, and a host of other issues.
Good point.
As far as who the designer would be, if the lecture is being given in a church, IDers say, of course, “God”. But in a public school environment, they say “We don’t know; he is some kind of supernatural being.”
Which shows up the hypocrisy of the movement, since IDers don’t believe that Zeus is the Creator of All Things; they just think that such a statement gets them off the hook. The Dover trial showed that it doesn’t. If it walks like a duck…
As far as what there is to teach, about the only thing ID can claim is that science doesn’t have all the answers, therefore there is no natural cause and the answers it does provide, while believable, are insufficient. Pretty thin for a philosophy; pretty poor for logic; doesn’t lead to any testable predictions; and is just plain wrong in many cases. What it does lead to is 14th Century thought and no more.
Followed by lots of nudge, nudge wink, wink and comments about how certain beneficial plants always wind to the right as they climb a support, while this particular weed climbs to the left, thus proving evidence of an Intelligent Designer (who “just happens” to think a certain way, if you know what I mean). These elements can then be combined with other ravings about human footprints being found next to dinosaur footprints. Next they’ll add in the evidence of all women sharing the same ancestor as proven by mitochrondrial DNA, and start spinning from there. Trust me, once the camel with dysentery get’s his ass under the tent, it’s getting filled with shit.
Sure, but if you force Polk County to teach evolution exclusively, then how about this lead in:
"In accordance with the federal court order #____, we are hereby required to teach you ONLY the theory of evolution which denies the existence of God which your parents may or may not have taught you. Here is the theory, and it’s just a theory, that all people are the children of apes and monkeys.
In the opinion of some religious people, perhaps even your parents, maybe even you, this is terribly blasphemous and may result in a soul going to hell, if that is your particular belief, but it is certainly not the belief of the Polk County school system as we love the federal court ruling and are teaching you in accordance with it…" blah, blah, blah…
Play the games all day…I know my school did 20 years ago…
:dubious:
Aside from the facts that the theory of evolution is completely silent on the existence of God and does not posit that people are descended from apes and monkeys, looks great! I mean, we haven’t exactly been bothered by facts up to this point, right?
Richard and Barrett, you are both right and I suckered you in. Since the Polk County schools think you are blasphemers, maybe they decided to “spice up” the theory of evolution, so now you have to take them back to court and win another decision.
Rinse and repeat.
Can’t we find common ground here?
Or even better, what if a teacher tells the class that ID will NOT be taught this semester because the case of ACLU v. Polk decided that it violated the 1st amendment.
When students ask questions like:
What is the 1st amendment?
What is ID?
Why does it violate the 1st amendment?
or should we get ANOTHER court ruling that prohibits any mention of court cases regarding ID or even the mention of the words or letters, or discussion in class of anything related to it and the burning of students’ eyeballs who look up ID on the internet…?
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, but if not this is the stupidest shit I’ve read on these boards in a while. Every single word is an absolute misrepresentation/gross misunderstanding of Evolution.
I love my dead gay son,
Woody
Yes, what a clever point you’ve made. If the school violates the First Amendment in some new way, we’ll have to go back to court! Therefore, we should never try to enforce the First Amendment. Well, you’ve convinced me.
That wasn’t my point, and I think you know that.
My point was that you can’t regulate absolutely every word, sentence, wink, nod, or poster on the wall of every school in the U.S.
If you FORCE a particular type of study on every school district in the country, even if the policy is against the wishes of that district, then they have creative ways of getting back at you.
“Enforce the First Amendment” Means very different things to different people. I was in high school twenty years ago in a rural area and listened to all of the teachers and principals instruct us using very careful words.
We even had the Biology teacher say that “Now you’ve heard the theory of evolution. Some folks don’t like that. Some people believe this theory. I’m giving you this not as fact or trying to force anything on you, just telling you what some people think, and I want you to be the judge”
then he whips out a Bible and tells the Genesis story.
Is he establishing a religion? Maybe. Nobody sued.
To continue my point: if you get too heavy handed we can get light handed. It’s so easy…
Why would a teacher need to explain why he or she isn’t teaching anything in science class, let alone a subject that is not science?
Free speech? Academic license? Response to a student’s question. Pick one…
You may not have heard, but coincidentally there was a recent NOVA addressing these exact questions!
Your homework is to watch this program before posting anything else. I am also delighted to recommend a presentation by Professor Ken Miller that covers the same material.
As an added bonus, if you watch either of these programs, you should be able to avoid mistakes like
and my personal favorite: