Sunday, February 19, 2006

Disservice to children's futures (edited 2-21-06)

I found this article while browsing the web and this is just astonishing to me that this is happening in the year 2006 in the most technologically advanced nation on the planet! These people want to send us back into the Dark Ages. Many children are being told by their uneducated or under-educated pastors to tell their science teachers loudly and aggressively that they are wrong about the material they are teaching. This is an extremely important issue since it concerns the brainwashing of so many young minds.

A national conference for science teachers in the spring will focus on helping them respond to creationists' challenges. In an informal survey, the National Science Teachers Assn. found that nearly a third of its members felt pressured to play down evolution.

Fortunately, most Christians are not this insane in their beliefs as to shun hundreds and hundreds of years of science and technology.
Hundreds of pastors preached a different message Feb 12th, in honor of Charles Darwin's 197th birthday. In a national campaign, they told their congregations that it's possible to be a Christian and accept evolution. We can only hope that these reasonable Christians are in the process of EVOLVING and one day, like the most Europeans and get rid of their superstitious beliefs altogether. Spud at SpudsWorld who lives in the United Kingdom writes "Europe is old enough to have grown out of religion; America hasn't yet had enough time."

Read the article below...

Their Own Version of a Big Bang
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
LAtimes.com
Feb 11, 2006

WAYNE, N.J. — Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

The children roared their assent.

"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.

"God!" the boys and girls shouted.

"Who's the only one who knows everything?"

"God!"

"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"

The children answered with a thundering: "God!"

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn't engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.

He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.

"We're going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles," Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham's ministry, Answers in Genesis.

To a burst of applause, Ham exhorted: "Get out and change the world!"

Over the last two decades, this type of "creation evangelism" has become a booming industry. Several hundred independent speakers promote biblical creation at churches, colleges, private schools, Rotary clubs. They lead tours to the Grand Canyon or the local museum to study the world through a creationist lens.

They churn out stacks of home-schooling material. A geology text devotes a chapter to Noah's flood; an astronomy book quotes Genesis on the origins of the universe; a science unit for second-graders features daily "evolution stumpers" that teach children to argue against the theory that is a cornerstone of modern science.

This is quite disturbing!
READ FULL STORY
How is this story different from THIS
OR THIS!
AND MORE BULLCRAP HERE!

2 comments:

Stardust said...

People should be educated instead of believing what some lame pastor tells them. Fundamentalist pastors have been proven to be some of the least educated and most stupid people on the planet.

Stardust said...

Stephanie over at Memoirs of an ex-christian wrote:

"Could it be that the main reason people fail to understand evolution is because they have been taught not to understand evolution? As a Christian, I was told by my non-scientist pastor that evolution was silly. As a child, I was told that god made me. So, I never tried to understand evolution....why did I need to?

Once I started questioning my beliefs, I started to educate myself on evolution. At first, it was hard to understand because my brain was still recovering from what had been drilled into my head my entire life. When someone is brainwashed, they cannot just snap out of it. It takes time to come to the understanding that everything you were told is untrue. Slowly, the past untruths embedded in my brain are disappearing and the clear evidence for evolution has made it much less confusing."