Environmental Graffiti

In defense of American Education:

I grew up in a very rural, very conservative small town in the “Bible Belt” of the Kentucky. I also went to Catholic school, and “religion” was one of my classes.

I would be a perfect candidate to come out of junior high with little or no education concerning evolution, but that was not the case. We learned evolution as scientific doctrine, and we even did gene charts to learn about recessive/dominant genes. I discovered why I have blue eyes and brown hair, even though my mom has dark eyes and dark hair. It was neat!

My teacher (who was not a nun) did describe intelligent design to us, but she taught it as an idea or philosophy - not as a fact. We discussed it, and the debate between science and religion. Then we dove into sex ed (ironically taught by nuns).

To my knowledge, none of the parents or nuns had a problem with this. I was unaware of any uproar over evolution in the class room, and in such a small community usually we got whiff of controversy. In fact, there was more uproar over reading “The Giver”.

So it’s not all that bad here. Some places are obviously worse than others, and perhaps things have changed. But to say the majority of American oppose evolution int he class room, even in conservative states, is perhaps an overstatement. Besides, if it does get worse we’ll just be shooting ourselves in the foot. I encourage the rest of the world to take advantage of that and get ahead because we’ll deserve it. Unfortuantely in this case, we’ll reap what we sow.

Catholics are some of the most secular religious people of any theistic religion. I was raised Catholic in So-cal myself, but we’re all very secular over here. We were taught science in the same fashion and today I’m a big fan of mathematics, physics, biology, cosmology, and many other sciences that help show just how completely wrong religion is in virtually every regard.

The problem isn’t with Catholics, this issue is most prominent with Christians. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Catholic that took the story of Genesis literally, but I sure as hell have met many denominations of Christians that do.

The problem is lack of education; plain and simple. Furthering this igorance are the parents and officials that see it in their position of power to force religious doctrine down these children’s throats. What real choice can you have when you’ve been brainwashed from the beginning?

As Richard Dawkins commonly states, it’s a travesty to mankind that people can get away with scaring their children into believing religious nonsense.

@CHB: I think you may be referring to “Protestants” instead of “Christians” as opposed to Catholics. That is, in my American vernacular (Latin America more commonly uses your wording).

I’d say the suburban / exurban mega-churches are more specifically aligned with this. There simply aren’t enough rural people to count anymore, so you can’t pin this on them. I grew up in a rural area, and they are more in the old-school Lutheran bent, and of much the same approach as Catholics. Call it “mainline” Christianity, although their number are dropping drastically in favor of those mega churches.

Please don’t generalize. All Americans aren’t completely ignorant fools. It’s just that pesky 20% that is absolutely insane on every issue presented to them.

Creationism has sound scientific backing. Every life form has a bioelectric field. Condensing this bioelectric field and magnetizing it on a specially arranged pile of circuit managing molecules might be a good way to ‘create’ life.

President Truman admitted ufos are real in 1952. NASA has begun looking for living electromagnetic fields, living dust, and living vibrational beings. It might be wise to presume that alien life of one of these varieties had a hand in guiding the evolution and origination of mankind.

Consider http://www.timetravelisforsuckers.blogspot.com and creationism.

When you die you will be judged. The baloney you spit out as evolution will come back to haunt you. facts or not, where did the world start? Where did micrnisms start? Animals, vegetables, minerals??? From God. You don’t like it but it doesn’t matter. get your house in order now, because when you die it’s too late, and then you will be in Hell with charles darwin.

“Where did the matter for the big bang come from and how did the physical laws come into being?”
Evolution explains the diversity of species, it has nothing to do with the big bang or physical laws.

“How did life come about anyway?”
No one knows for sure yet but again evolution does not and has never claimed to explain this.

“When abiogenesis was proposed (it was also debunked long ago by pasteur), they had no idea how complex one cell was. If one cell can be created by chance, how come we can’t create a single cell in the lab???”
There are several different hypothesis’s within abiogenesis all were proposed after Pasteur’s death so he didn’t debunk any of them. What Pasteur debunked was spontaneous generation, the idea that mice, rats, maggots etc spontaneously arose from decaying organic matter. As for why can’t we recreate a single cell from scratch in the lab thats because we don’t yet know how the first living cells arose, we can’t recreate processes we’ve not identified.

“Although I am a young earth creationist,”
Then your problem is not just with evolution its with just about the whole of modern day science.

“I don’t think there is reason to teach either of our religions (yes, yours is a religion too, you have to have lots of faith to think that we all came from rock soup, the spawn of an exploding dot)”
Science is not a religion.

“All you have evidence of is that animals adapt, creationists don’t argue that.”
There is far more evidence than that, everything from genetics to fossils all support evolution.

“We argue that cows don’t change into whales and rocks don’t change into fish - which should be obvious to a second grader.”
Evolution does not teach that, you have created a strawman to argue against.

“If you were so confident about your theory, you would be willing to look at the MOUNDS of evidence to the contrary”
And these mounds are where exactly? lol.

Give it another few years, and the creationists will be taken about as seriously as the flat earth society. loonies, the lot of ‘em.

Why do people think this “frogmander” is a proof of Evolution? Creationists believe that evolution occurs and has occurred; i.e. that types of animals change over time.

Every time I see a “proof” of Evolution in school, it’s something like the butterfly having different colors or a bird getting a longer beak. Maybe frogs and salamanders are related, but when the frog starts to grow feathers and fly I might be impressed. Until then this is perfectly in line with what creationists teach (except for maybe the time difference).