This pisses me off. I had no idea this tommyrot was still getting taught and supported with taxpayer money.
True, but Babale’s post (#29) does show how teachers can still come up with ways to not teach evolution. And maybe the map needs updating, where it can show some of the things that Babale pointed out.
Are you suggesting that Christian philosophers/intellectuals are intentionally deceiving people into believing in God?
You don’t believe in witches? Here’s photographic evidence that they do in fact exist. I have never heard of a witch walking on water, but maybe you can provide a documented instance of it.
Witchcraft is something that witches have historically practiced, 500 years ago and today.
However, if there exists a non-physical world, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that humans might be able to do apparently supernatural or “magical” things with assistance from intelligent beings in the invisible world. If you choose to use the word “magical” to cover anything that falls under the apparently supernatural, then okay.
It goes back longer than that, but that’s not photographic evidence that they exist. It is evidence that women like to dress up and pretend.
And pah-leese, a witch walking on water or Jesus, it doesn’t matter. Seriously, when has gravity or any other laws of nature been suspended, even temporarily, and actually ever been authenticated by any credible source? Nature doesn’t work like that, and you don’t have to understand Einstein’s equation to know this. Magicians duplicate this trick all the time, generally with plexiglass or similar material.
They just as well had call God magical, it’s not reality based, but the figment of ones imagination to give him whatever admirable traits their hearts desire.
And of all the gods people had to pick from back then, how in hell this Jehovah/Yahweh/Jesus character got the vote for the most omni-benevolent bad ass, and concluded for them that this was God, beats the Jesus out of me.
Because it’s a case of two ill-raised, snotty older kids ganging up on his daughter to make her sad, while said brats are guests in her home?
While I’m super-excited that this is becoming another “does God exist” thread, I would love for the OP to come back and comment on some of the more on-topic replies if possible.
OP: Is it your position that if the teacher told the class there was no God that there would be less of a shitstorm?
Maybe not less of a shitstorm, but I do think such a teacher would get a lot more vocal support on social media - “He’s just telling it like it is! They can’t take the truth.”
Also, I don’t mean this thread to be about school kids necessarily. It seems to be much more acceptable to tell adults that God doesn’t exist than to tell kids that Santa doesn’t exist. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that adults aren’t considered emotionally fragile, is that it?
A teacher doesn’t ever have to tell the class “There is no God” to get involved in a shitstorm of misrepresentation and hate.
and the news had a field day, falsely reporting that students were forced to deny that God exists, that the exercise would be graded(one girl claimed that the teacher put a big “F” on her paper and that the paper would count as 40% of their final grade. The Governor even chimed in and praised the the student that reported the incident.
BTW, the teacher was Christian.
I think your view is utterly wrong that there would be less pushback about a teacher telling kids that God doesn’t exist.
As to your second paragraph, it’s generally more acceptable to tell adults controversial things than to tell kids controversial things, so I’m not sure what your point is. There are many things I can say to adults that I can’t say to kids.
These are both my opinion, and I don’t have cites, certainly not for the first point, so I’ll back out of this conversation given that this is GD and all.
I’m not sure that “vocal support on social media” is a useful metric for anything, but I will repeat that for americans who don’t consider the constitution toilet paper, teachers opining on the existence of god to their students, for OR against, is pretty damned unconstitutional. You doubtlessly could find dipshits who still support it, perhaps even very loud dipshits, but pretending that liberals (or whoever) in general would be all happy about it sounds like fantasies based on demonization.
It’s very certainly not the only difference. Even getting away from the “teacher saying it = unconstitutional” angle, the god question is a Big Deal with massive societal and political consequences. The santa question…ain’t. Equating them is sort of like saying that hitting somebody with a feather and hitting them with a baseball bat should be considered equivalent for all discussions.
A good definition of magic would be the intended violation of natural laws through supernatural means. So how is God not doing magic? Since magic seems cheap to many people, admitting that God does magic - in those terms - would demean God. Reason enough.
Back then they’d kill witches just for being pagans, but the accusations, as you well know, involved magic supposedly practiced by the witches, such as making cows die.
If you think anyone can do anything magical, feel free to offer evidence. And too bad you or they would be too late for the Randi challenge.
But that Christians back then (and maybe some today) thought witches did magic is indisputable.
No, adults don’t have parents who are considered to be in charge of their development. In many places sex ed in the classroom needs parental permission. Sex Ed for adults doesn’t.
If you think that telling adults there is no god is wrong in some way, do you think that telling adults that there is a god is also? If it is, you’d have to tear down most church signs.
I don’t think either is wrong, by the way.
BTW, I’ve seen some adults more fragile about being told there is no god than my kids were about Santa.
Maybe it’s time for something from the Santa-haters’ perspective.
I’ve been trying to remember if I ever believed in Santa Claus. I don’t know if my parents just weren’t theatrical enough and never instilled belief in me in the first place. (My mom would put the presents under the tree as she bought them - no magical ta-da!! on Christmas morning.) Or if they told me early on and I just don’t remember. (I was always one of those pedantically honest kids, the kind of kid who feels impelled to point out that the empty box is actually full of air. I might still be a little like that - maybe some of you can relate.) But either way, I have no clear memory of believing in Santa.
But I do have a very clear memory of being told not to tell one of my cousins that Santa wasn’t real and feeling like I was being ordered to lie.
As a teenager, I’d hear parents talking about how, “Oh, woe is me, I don’t know how to tell little Timmy that Santa’s not real.” I concluded that the parents wanted to spare their kids the traumatic revelation they’d experienced in their own childhoods, and I could never understand how they could be short-sighted enough to start this fantasy knowing how it would inevitably end. I knew better than to say anything like this out loud, but in my head I would always be thinking, “You mean you don’t know how to tell little Timmy you’ve been lying to him all his life? Sorry - you created this problem; I have no sympathy for you.”
And television definitely hasn’t helped. I really dislike shows where belief in Santa is kind of a surrogate for religious faith; the message always seems to be “don’t think - feel” because faith and reason are mutually exclusive. I find that insulting (and I’m issuing a pre-emptive eye-roll at the smart alec who will post “but they are!”) I actually prefer the secular “So-and-so Learns the True Meaning of Christmas (the birth of Jesus Christ will not be mentioned).” But both are an improvement over the ones where somebody or other “saves Christmas” by making sure Santa can deliver all the [del]bribes[/del] presents.
But I kind of married into the cult, and that means making compromises. We’ll leave out cookies (I have a theory about who eats them, but I’ve never actually seen it happen so I have plausible deniability) but I’ve asked the kids’ teachers not to send home “reindeer food.” I am not feeding the reindeer, too - that’s where I draw the line.
No offense but I would bet a million bucks that your teenage memories are a little off. I find it hard to believe many adult parents would have that conversation with a teenager and I’ve never met anyone who remembers the discovery of Santa’s nonexistence as particularly traumatic. And I’ve also never had a parent fret over how to tell the kids. Most parents just wait for the kid to figure it out.
To me Santa exists, it is a Spirit, sometimes called the Christmas Spirit - though it is basically interfaith, were adults are compelled by it to buy gifts for children. So Santa is real.
I have never never heard of a Santa that punishes anyone. One may get a lump of coal, but that is not a punishment, just a message.
Just semantics I guess. Withholding something that a child was expecting is a punishment that a lot of parents use to correct behavior.
nm
Do you also believe in the birthday spirit, and the anniversary spirit, and the Valentines Day spirit and the Mothers’ Day spirit…?
Yes, I was deliberately exaggerating to give my impression of things at the time; this is the sort of thing I’d overhear (post #6):
See? If Malden Capell’s daughter finds out Santa isn’t real, it will “break [her] heart.”
However, as I’ve gotten… um… wiser, I’ve come to question some of the assumptions I had back then. I don’t think there’s any harm in letting childhood fantasies run their course; but I still think engineering experiences is a little like planting evidence, and I resent being roped into it. I sympathize with atheists who say they feel ambushed when their kids bring home religious trinkets.
On the other hand, if there’s some kind of afterlife, then we don’t have all the information that will eventually be available to us. If it’s grinchy to hold a grudge against Santa because of the incomplete picture I formed in adolescence, maybe condemning God based on what we know now (in this life only) is a bit premature.
That’s not exaggeration - it’s a completely different situation.
I suppose “traumatic revelation” could have been an exaggeration of “break her heart” , but **Malden Capell **wasn’t trying to figure out how to tell her daughter there is no Santa. And Malden Capell’s feelings about it probably have as much to do with those particular kids as it does to her daughter finding out about Santa at 2 years old , because older kids who do that tend to be mean in other ways.
If you want to criticize the way I saw the world when I was fifteen, you should also point out how much of what little kids think is a direct reflection of their parents’ ideas, without any influence from TV, friends, books, movies, etc. 