March 11, 2008
Bill promotes school religion at expense of educationDave McNeelySpecial to The Sun
EDMOND — The Oklahoma House of Representatives Education Committee has just approved House Bill 2211. The bill is expected to pass the full House, and then to go to the Senate. Its authors describe it as promoting freedom of religion in the public schools. In fact, it does the opposite.
HB 2211 is identical to bills widely introduced into state legislatures across the nation, where they have met various fates. Texas’s Legislature passed it, and Texas is experiencing serious problems as a result. Liberty Legal Institute of Plano, Texas, a group of fundamentalist Christian lawyers, drafted the bill and promoted to legislatures, including Oklahoma’s. It was not written by its Oklahoma legislative “authors.”
The bill requires public schools to guarantee students the right to express their religious viewpoints in a public forum, in class, in homework and in other ways without being penalized.
If a student’s religious beliefs were in conflict with scientific theory, and the student chose to express those beliefs rather than explain the theory in response to an exam question, the student’s incorrect response would be deemed satisfactory, according to this bill.
The school would be required to reward the student with a good grade, or be considered in violation of the law.
Even simple, factual information such as the age of the earth (4.65 billion years) would be subject to the student’s belief, and if the student answered 6,000 years based on his or her religious belief, the school would have to credit it as correct. Science education becomes absurd under such a situation.
(Read more...)Thanks to atheistmedia and DoctorE for the link.When I logged on to my computer after my long conversation with my friend, the above piece of news came as a frightening nightmare that got me screaming deep within my soul. Again and again, whenever I log on to the Internet and wherever I go, it seems that the religious world-view is turning into deeply held irrational belief that has become an apparent threat to our civilisation. At one point in time, it cultivated the notion of moral philosophy: in teaching individuals to love one another, even though the notion of spiritually is present (such as God or deities to be respected and worshiped). And through the generations, religious beliefs have evolved. There were radical changes to many different religious beliefs over the course of history. Such evolution of religion is inevitable, which is partly due to the ambiguity of their misinterpretation-prone scriptural texts. Presently, it seems that most religious people, especially the Christians in general, could not differentiate between the church and the state; fact or fiction; evidence or fairy tale; science or superstition.
Jesus said, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's". (Matthew 22:21)
By these words, Jesus has made it very clear that there must be a line to draw between the church and the state. There must also be line to draw between what is of your personal belief or superstition, and those of the reality (the issues we are facing today in the society). Do not EVER think that only the Christian faith, or the Muslim faith, or the Jewish faith is the way and truth to life - depending on which of these religion you are embracing (in a sense that such faiths, like any hardcore religious individual would deem as "truth", constantly prostitute themselves in a contradicting manner, and at the same time, rejecting the reliability of all evidence-based sciences). That said, I think irrational faiths and beliefs in this case, are totally insane, narrow-minded, fanatic, and utterly out of this world.
By the way, what is so difficult in accepting the fact that the earth is indeed billions of years old? And what is it so difficult in accepting the fact that our DNA contain specific information of our own physical characteristics, and will be passed on to the next generation, where they would acquire certain features that we now have? And what is so difficult in accepting the fact that HIV viruses evolve, from harmless simplicity to a complex death threat to an individual clueless about this infection? What is so difficult in accepting the reality that evolution is a scientific fact? The answer lies with one word: RELIGION.
Religion is to be blamed for coercively indoctrinating the misguided information that science had not and did not even discover. Although there may be millions of things that scientists have not disproved, it does not give the lay man permission to create a Utopian evangelistic committee just to pin themselves onto false hopes, rejecting the advances of medicine and science altogether. With the degree of reliance upon scientific evidence in our daily lives, there would be hope for progress, free thought, critical thinking, and reason. Morality (either from personal ethics or religion) should be secondary to evidence and fact, not because it is of less importance, but because of its subjectivity and ambiguity.
Guess what, with the contamination of these religious nutcases, stem cell research has been halted. There goes our scientific progress, which would in turn affect our social progress as well. With the presence of such religious fundamentalism, and the ignorance of not being able to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, science and religion, church and the state, then I would not be surprise to find myself waking up one day to a time when the pope is the central authority of the entire world.
Do you want a theocracy? No, I don't want it. I detest it. I hate it. I am disgusted by it. If ever theocracy becomes the world's dominant rule, instead of capitalism and secularism, then we would all become slaves to falsehoods - the earth is flat, the sun rotates around the earth, the earth is 6000 years old, man appeared magically from the dust, snakes could magically walk and talk, water could magically turn into wine, money could appear from nowhere and so on...
There is a limit of respect to which the secular state can ever give to religion. This piece of news is utterly shocking, and the way such religion (in this case, Christianity) has literally brain-washed much of the American population, is in my opinion, too much to take. I think there should not be any more tolerance to this atrocity for the sake of appeasing or "respecting" such religious faith. Immediate action must therefore be taken.
