Creationism Out Of The Classroom In The UK

We need this for US classrooms, badly.

Creationism out of the classroom

The UK government has issued new guidelines to teachers on what to teach about creationism and intelligent design in science classes. They are pretty explicit that creationism and ID do not belong.

The move seems to be a response to efforts by the ironically named campaign group “Truth in Science“. Last year it sent DVDs promoting ID to every school in the land in the hope that they would be used to teach the creationist idea alongisde evolution in science lessons.

The new guidelines could not be clearer:

Creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science.

That doesn’t mean it cannot be mentioned of course, but the guidelines state that it should only feature as part of discussions about what does and does not make a scientific theory.

The use of the word ‘theory’ can mislead those not familiar with science as a subject discipline because it is different from the everyday meaning of being little more than a ‘hunch’. In science the meaning is much less tentative and indicates that there is a substantial amount of supporting evidence, underpinned by principles and explanations accepted by the international scientific community…Creationism and intelligent design are sometimes claimed to be scientific theories. This is not the case as they have no underpinning scientific principles, or explanations, and are not accepted by the science community as a whole.

There are even specific guidelines about using materials from groups like TIS:

While these resources may be used, it must be remembered that they do not support the science National Curriculum and they present a particular minority viewpoint that is not underpinned by scientific principles and evidence.

“One Nation, Indivisible”

Students standing up for their rights. It’s great to see students fighting for separation of church and state.

Boulder High students walk out during Pledge, recite own version

About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting “one nation, under God.”

The students say the phrase violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

They also say the daily reading of the pledge over the school public address system at the start of the second class takes away from education time and is ignored or mocked by some students.

A state law passed in 2004 requires schools to offer the opportunity to recite the pledge each day but does not require students to participate.

The protesting students, members of the Student Worker Club, want administrators to hold the pledge reading in the auditorium during each of the school’s two lunch periods for any students who want to participate.

Otherwise, they said, they plan to walk out each Thursday when the pledge is read and recite their version, which omits the reference to God and adds allegiance to constitutional rights, diversity and freedom, among other things.

“Youth For Christ” Shut Down After Director Has Sex With 13 Year Old

I think my job is getting too easy. I don’t even have to make arguments anymore. Just take a look at the news, I see these types of articles once a week.

Youth For Christ shuttered

SARASOTA COUNTY — Youth For Christ officials said Saturday the center for teenagers will be closed until further notice following accusations that the director had a sexual relationship with a girl beginning when she was 13 years old.

Martin Moore, 42, handed in his letter of resignation Thursday and was arrested later that day on sexual battery charges. He remained in the Sarasota County jail Saturday on $251,000 bond.

The local chapter of the Christian teen center, located at 2800 Ashton Road, closed Friday and officials said they are unsure when it will reopen.

“The number one concern is the kids and all of the emotions,” said Don Gingerich, chairman of the Youth For Christ board. “We have been in touch with parents and churches that we work with to make sure they have what they need.”

Gingerich declined to comment further on the accusations against Moore.

Moore was arrested after the girl, who is now 17, told a teacher that she had a sexual relationship with him since she was 13.

The View: I Don’t Know If The World Is Flat or Round..

If you watch ‘the View’ (you probably already lack a few brain cells), it’s time you stopped. When two out of the five hosts don’t believe in evolution and think the planet Earth is in fact flat, your attention is definitely not deserved by them.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Is the world flat?

SHERRI SHEPHERD: Is the world flat? (laughter)

GOLDBERG: Yes.

SHEPHERD: …I Don’t know.

GOLDBERG: What do you think?

SHEPHERD: I… I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

BARBARA WALTERS: You’ve never thought about whether the world was round or flat?

SHEPHERD: I tell you what I’ve thought about. How I’m going to feed my child–

WALTERS: Well you can do both.

SHEPERD: …how I’m going to take care of my family. The world, is the world flat has never entered into, like that has not been an important thing to me.

ELIZABETH HASSELBECK: You’ll teach your son, Jeffery, right?

SHEPHERD: If my son, Jeffery, asks me ‘is the world flat,’ I guess I would go…

JOY BEHAR: You know, didn’t some person already work this question out? I mean, why are we doing this again? (laughter, applause)

Child Brides

Yeah, I know “it’s juuuust a cult religion, no one believes this stuff”..  but you know what, people do. This is what happens when you give a free pass to religion and say religion is sacred and not allowed to be criticized.

Child bride testifies in polygamy trial

A Utah woman testified she tried to kill herself on her wedding night after she was pushed into marrying her cousin by polygamous-church leader Warren Jeffs.

The woman, identified in court as Jane Doe, said she was so appalled by the consummation that she felt “evil” and downed two bottles of Tylenol and ibuprofen in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Jeffs is charged with rape in Utah on the grounds he coerced the underage marriage, which allegedly led to forced sex. The Arizona Republic said Doe was 14 at the time and had been stunned to hear from her father than she had been ordered to marry a 19-year-old first cousin whom she didn’t like.

Doe, now 21, faces cross-examination Monday in the St. George, Utah, courtroom.

Delightful Quotes

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
~ Jean Rostand

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen Roberts

Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
~ Michel de Montaigne

Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?
~ Nietzsche

We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
~ Abraham Lincoln

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
~ Steve Eley

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
~ Sigmund Freud

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
~ Abraham Lincoln

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
~ Albert Einstein

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
~ Thomas Szasz

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
~ Napoleon

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
~ Albert Einstein

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
~ Susan B. Anthony

One man’s magic is another man’s engineering. Supernatural is a null word.
~ Robert Heinlein

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
~ Gene Roddenberry

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
~ George Orwell

If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don’t see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?
~ Bill Hicks

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith … we need believing people.
~ Adolf Hitler

I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

If god created us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
~ Voltaire

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
~ James Buchanan

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
~ Jack Gurney – “The Ruling Class”

Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
~ Ron Patterson

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
~ Jeff Burroughs

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
~ Annie Dillard

I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.
~ Adolf Hitler

The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
~ Douglas Adams

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
~ Thomas Jefferson

All Bibles are man-made.
~ Thomas Edison

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own; a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms…
~ Albert Einstein

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
~ Carl Sagan

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.
~ Mark Twain

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
~ Galileo Galilei

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
~ Bertrand Russel

I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
~ Thomas Jefferson

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
~ Jonathan Meades

I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
~Saint Augustine

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
~ Robert Heinlein

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil. Suddenly the light broke through to me and I saw a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty. Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?
~ H. G. Wells

The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
~ Pope Pius IX

To date, despite the efforts of millions of true believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus.
~ Joseph Daleiden

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
~ Bertrand Russell

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?
~ Epicurus

To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
~ Julian Ruck

The establishment of Christianity arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.
~ Andrew Dickson White

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
~ Albert Einstein

Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a Christian.
~ Lenny Bruce

The church tries to save sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
~ Elbert Hubbard

I can’t embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages; and that persecution still goes on today, all over the world.
~ Amanda Donohoe

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
~ Steve Allen

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
~ Gary Zukav

Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
~ Tao Te Ching

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
~ Sir R. F. Burton

All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
~ Thomas Paine

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, the religion which based on experience, which refuses dogma.
~ Albert Einstein

I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.
~ Thomas Edison

If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
~ Aleister Crowley

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
~ Steven Weinberg

Mythology is what we call someone else’s religion.
~ Joseph Campbell

Beware the man of one book.
~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

USA is A Christian Nationâ„¢! Right?

Here’s a shocker, most Americans have never read the Bill of Rights, if they had they wouldn’t assume the US is a “Christian Nationâ„¢” like so many of them do. Let me help all those people out who don’t know since it’s the first damn thing in there, here’s the first amendment of the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Most think founders wanted Christian USA

Most Americans believe the nation’s founders wrote Christianity into the Constitution, and people are less likely to say freedom to worship covers religious groups they consider extreme, a poll out today finds.

The survey measuring attitudes toward freedom of religion, speech and the press found that 55% believe erroneously that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation. In the survey, which is conducted annually by the First Amendment Center, a non-partisan educational group, three out of four people who identify themselves as evangelical or Republican believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation. About half of Democrats and independents do.

Most respondents, 58%, say teachers in public schools should be allowed to lead prayers. That is an increase from 2005, when 52% supported teacher-led prayer in public schools.

More people, 43%, say public schools should be allowed to put on Nativity re-enactments with Christian music than in 2005, when 36% did.

Half say teachers should be allowed to use the Bible as a factual text in history class. That’s down from 56% in 2000. Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, says the findings are particularly troubling during a week when the top diplomat in Iraq gave a report to Congress on progress toward achieving democracy there. “Americans are dying to create a secular democracy in Iraq, and simultaneously a growing number of people want to see a Christian state” here, he says.