Educator ripped for her book calling for Christianity in school and politics

Educator ripped for her book calling for Christianity in school and politics

A member of the State Board of Education is drawing fire from a watchdog group because of her critical views on public education in a new book she has written that advocates more Christianity in the public square.

Sometimes, it's hard to avoid that feeling where you want to bang your head into the wall because of how stupid people are. Or bang their head into a wall. Depends on how stupid they are, I guess. In this case, despite being an educator, she's pretty stupid.

She calls public education a "subtly deceptive tool of perversion." The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even "tyrannical," she writes in the book, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

It's fine if you want to have a debate over whether public school are constitutional, I think that's really a valid question. It's NOT valid to argue that the reason they are unconstitutional is because of magic and superstition. Ooops, I meant "god" and "scripture".

Dunbar endorses a belief system requiring "any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern."

Now, this is where the constitution really does come in, and it's very clear. Article VI, Section 3 states that

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

It's not even one of those ambiguous things. It's pretty clear, the constitution is right, and she's wrong.

"I don't think most people in the churches are aware of the venom against Christian America," she said. "So, it's more of a wake-up call to be informed, to be involved. They are fine with the body of Christ as long as we stay hidden in our four walls of the church, sitting quietly in our pews.

"But if we become civically involved or active in public policy issues, then we're going to be shot down," Dunbar said.

That's right, it's a little hang-up we have called the First Amendment. Separation of church and state: it works for everyone if you let it be. You're absolutely right, Ms. Dunbar, we are fine with you as long as you keep your religion within the walls of your church. No problems at all, we won't try to come and take it from you. But when you try to bring it to politics, we will fight you with everything we have.

Thumbs up for hands-only CPR :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Health News

Thumbs up for hands-only CPR :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Health News

In a major change aimed at getting more bystanders to do CPR, the American Heart Association now says it's OK to skip the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when performing CPR on adults having a heart attack.

New guidelines issued by the organization Monday encourage non-medical professionals to use hands-only CPR -- doing hard, fast chest compressions -- instead of a combination of chest thrusts and rescue breathing, as long recommended.

By making CPR less complicated, the aim is to get more people to try doing it in an emergency.

"Many times, people nearby don't help because they're afraid that they will hurt the victim and aren't confident in what they're doing," said Dr. Michael Sayre, lead author of the new recommendation. "We want people to know that they can help many victims just by calling 911 and doing chest compressions. Don't be afraid to try it."

The shift is supported by evidence from three large studies done last year that found survival rates weren't hurt when mouth-to-mouth wasn't used, the heart association said.

However, important to note, prayer remains a non-viable alternative. If someone around you is choking, please DO NOT pray for them, please DO SOMETHING instead.

Murder vs. faith-healing (or doing nothing)

The FFRF has a new press release with their perspective of the death of Madeline Kara Neumann from diabetic ketoacidosis while her parents did nothing while praying for her. I fully agree with their strongly-worded press release, and the authors seem to be putting up with the same sort of fractal wrongness that I talked about last week. These parents, their supporters, and frankly the Wisconsin Legislature, are wrong at such a fundamental level that they can't even understand why brights are so saddened and enraged by this.

What's even more appalling is the ambivalent reaction: "Ethicists say case unclear," reports the Wausau Daily Herald. The Herald quoted bioethicist Dr. Norman Fost of the University of Wisconsin Medical school warning that it's important not to be moralistic or pass judgment on parents who think they can heal a child through prayer: "They believe they're helping their child; they love their child, and they believe prayer has an effect."

However deluded the parents may be, the rest of us need not countenance or indulge that dangerous delusion.

Dean Zuleger, the administrator of the Village of Weston, was quoted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saying, "There is a general sense of grief and sadness. Because I know the family a bit, there is a great deal of concern for their well-being." The parents' well-being?

"Death draws out difficult issues" read a headline in the Journal Sentinel. While Madeline's drawn-out death, involving nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, weight loss and weakness, is very difficult to read about, there is nothing difficult at all about deciding where the blame lies. "The prayer of faith will heal the sick," according to James 5:15. The fault lies in society's laudatory attitude toward a "holy book" which teaches superstition and faith-healing, whose passages are latched onto by bible literalists, and whose obedience to such injunctions has been given a pass in the criminal statutes of many states.

Hattip to Friendly Atheist for the update

Certifying Parents - WSJ.com

Certifying Parents - WSJ.com

Apparently Nebraska isn't the only state grappling with what sorts of regulation is needed for homeschooling. The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece last week responding to a California judge's ruling that requires a teaching credential to teach children, even if they are your own and even if they are homeschooled.

This case is different from the Nebraska one in that Nebraska's issue was raised by the legislature, not the judiciary. Not that it makes a difference to the legions of homeschoolers who have been gnashing their teeth over this infringement of their rights. Or at least if you listen to all the hyperbole. For some reason, any attempt to regulate or quantify results of homeschooled kids is met with large-scale opposition.

As I've mentioned before, I don't believe that there's a "bright-line" between who's right and wrong on these issues. Of course parents should have the right to raise their children as they see fit, barring any sort of abuse. I'm just not sure what ought to count as abuse. Is it young-earth creationism? In any case, this issue is a useful one to tease out whatever particular biases your news source has. For example, the Wall Street Journal opines:

That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure -- namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly. According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the majority of states have low to moderate levels of regulation for home schools, an environment that has allowed the option to flourish, especially in the South and Western U.S. Between 1999 and 2003, the rate of home-schooling increased by 29%.

For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT -- and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.

In 1994, a federal attempt to require certification of parent-teachers went down in flames as hundreds of thousands of calls lit up phone banks on Capitol Hill. The movement has since only grown larger and better organized, now conservatively estimated at well over a million nationwide. But what they can't accomplish legislatively, unions are now trying to achieve by diktat from the courts.

So, to them, homeschooling is both an issue of free markets and inappropriate judicial activism. The homepage for the "Homeschool Legal Defense Association" showcases this perspective:

So clearly to them, it's both a religious and a constitutional issue. Although in the rhetoric about various homeschooling issues, the HSLDA invariable asserts that homeschooling is a "fundamental" right, apparently their website argues that it is a right that requires constitutional protection. I'm terrified what constitutional changes they are seeking, especially if Dr. Dobson is on board. Here's the text of the proposed constitutional amendment:

DRAFT PARENTAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT
FOR THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

SECTION 1
The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right.

SECTION 2
Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served.

SECTION 3
No treaty nor any source of international law may be employed to supersede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.

What do you think? It appears to be ambiguous, over-reaching, and completely unneccessary to me.

Biblically Correct Tours of Science Museums

Thanks to Dangerous Intersection for the tip on this ABC News Report about a group that offers tours of Denver area places like the zoo or the museum, but do so from a "biblical perspective". Which, of course, means "wrong and utterly mistaken perspective". As far as I can tell, this does little more than poison the well for these student's future education. This is the problem with homeschooling... at some point I believe it becomes child-abuse. I don't know quite where that point is, as I mentioned here, but it's certainly doing them a disservice. Here's a lesson:

"If you want to map out life through time, the fossil record is really great for doing that," he continued. "There's a really nice record of what happened on this planet from the first real life forms we know of about 3.4 billion years ago until today."

Out on the museum floor, Jack and Carter stopped the group in front of a window display that contains samples of sandstone that have ripples created by water and fossils of ancient life. Bill Jack asked his group, "How do they date the fossil? By the layer in which they find it. They date the layer by the fossil and the fossil by the layer," he said. "That's circular reasoning."

In the next moment he stepped past and turned his back to a display on radiometric dating, the method by which scientists determine the age of rocks through the rate of decay of their natural radioactivity.

When later asked why he skipped the display, Jack said simply, "We can't cover everything."

Inside the museum's expansive bone and fossil storage room, Johnson said, "They have no clue about how accurate it is … Now it's plus or minus a tenth of a percent."

How does +/- .1% equate to "no idea how accurate it is"? I guess they haven't covered statistics in their homeschooling yet. Ha, you've got to love the chief curator's response. "Regardless of what the tour guide is saying, some of those kids are going to start thinking for themselves," says Kirk Johnson, chief curator.

Fundie Blue-hair Representatives from Oklahoma

I first heard about this hateful speech given by Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern at Atheist Revolution. Since then, I've seen it a couple of other places, and decided to do a little more research on her. Thanks to God is for Suckers! for the tip on the video below.



Her Wikipedia entry is brief, but tells me about all I need to know about this psycho bible-thumper. She's married to a pastor, she "also made headlines for authorizing a bill . . . mandating that students who espouse Young Earth creationism still receive passing grades in Earth science classes", she apparently likes giving hate speeches about the dangers "the gays" pose to society, and somehow in spite of all of this, managed to graduate from college (albeit with a Sociology degree).

Here's the transcript (emphasis mine):

The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, okay? It’s just a fact. Not everybody’s lifestyle is equal, just like not all religions are. You know, the very fact that I’m talking to you like this here today puts me in jeopardy, okay? And I’m not anti- and I’m not gay bashing, but according to God’s Word, that is not the right kind of lifestyle. It has deadly consequences for those people involved in it. They have more suicides, they’re more discouraged, there’s more illness, their lifespans are shorter, you know, it’s not a lifestyle that is good for this nation.

As a matter of fact, studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it’s the death knell for this country. I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat.

Because what’s happening now, they’re going after, in schools, two year olds! Do you know what they’re trying to get into early childhood education? They want to give our young children into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them. I taught school for close to twenty years. And we’re not teaching facts and knowledge anymore folks. We’re teaching indoctrination, okay? And their going after our young children, as young as two years of age to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle.

You know, gays are infiltrating city councils. Did you know, Eureka Springs, anybody been there, the passion play? Okay, have you heard that the city council of Eureka Springs is now controlled by gays? Okay? There are some others, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Takoma, Maryland; Kennsington, Maryland; in Vermont, Oregon, West Palm Beach, Florida; in a lot of other places in Florida. What’s happening? They are winning elections.

One of the things I deal with in our legislature, I tried to introduce a bill last year that would notify parents, schools had to let parents know what clubs their students were involved in. And the reason I did that bill primarily was this: We have the gay-straight alliance coming into our schools. Kids are getting involved in these groups, their lives are being ruined, their parents don’t know about it. So I introduced a bill, you have to notify all clubs and things.

And one of my colleagues said you know, we don’t have a gay problem in my county, that’s why I voted against that bill. Well you know what? To me that is so dumb. If you got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, you know, I’m just going to forget about it because the rest of me’s fine. It spreads, okay? And this stuff, it’s deadly and it’s spreading and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation.

Yeah, that's a horrible thing to teach our (two-year-olds?) children in school- tolerance and acceptance. It's much better to teach them that gays are like cancer.

Now, in response to all of the attention her remarks gathered, this crazy bitch says that her remarks were taken out of context and "were directed at wealthy, politically active gays who support gay and lesbian candidates for public office in Oklahoma and other states" according to the Norman Transcript."I have never said hate speech against anybody. I would never do that."

“I was talking about an agenda. I was not talking about individuals," said Kern, the wife of a Baptist minister. "They have the right to choose that lifestyle. They do not have the right to force it down our throat."

Sally, it was not out of context- it's a fucking tape recording of your voice, going on and on about how much you hate gays. If that's not hate speech, then I don't know what is. I bet if we replaced "Gay" with "Christian" in her speech, she would think it was hate speech. Let's try it:

• The Christian agenda is destroying this nation...
• Studies show that no society that has totally embraced Christianity has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it’s the death knell for this country. I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat.
• Because what’s happening now, they’re going after, in schools, two year olds! Do you know what they’re trying to get into early childhood education? They want to give our young children into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them. I taught school for close to twenty years. And we’re not teaching facts and knowledge anymore folks. We’re teaching indoctrination, okay? And their going after our young children, as young as two years of age to try to teach them that the Christian lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle.
• Christians are infiltrating city councils. Did you know, Eureka Springs, anybody been there, the passion play? Okay, have you heard that the city council of Eureka Springs is now controlled by Christians?
• And one of my colleagues said you know, we don’t have a Christian problem in my county, that’s why I voted against that bill. Well you know what? To me that is so dumb. If you got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, you know, I’m just going to forget about it because the rest of me’s fine. It spreads, okay? And this stuff, it’s deadly and it’s spreading and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation.

There, that's better.

Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions - New York Times

Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions - New York Times

Along the same lines as my post last week on the willful ignorance of the American population, comes this story from the New York Times, which indicates that

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492.

The survey results, released on Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, said the group that commissioned it, Common Core.

Then, Friendly Atheist ran this story about the frustration an assistant English professor faces as the essay assignment he hands out inevitably is returned by students who read Jesus into everything (but specifically literature of the Romantic Period).

Three papers in a row this evening found references to poets' beliefs that were both counter to all evidence in their biographies, to what was discussed in class, and which are completely ahistorical: the kind of personal teddy-bear god that has inf(l)ected a lot of popular American religious discourse--especially for teens. I learned that when Wordsworth speaks about nature in Tintern Abbey, he really means "Jesus," that the Tyger solves the problem of evil because it shows us that all of creation is part of God's Work, God's Plan and God's Love. The third paper references the author's desire to find "the presence of God in Blake's writing," but then finally acknowledges that this isn't an appropriate strategy. I'm not entirely sure why the author felt the need to signpost a rejected interpretive strategy, but I wish more students understood this.

I understand that many students with an evangelical upbringing will naturally transpose the ineffable and infinite of the sublime into the vocabulary of "my god is an awesome god," and I tend to understand this issue a bit more, often with a simple comment like "take care not to transpose your 21st century beliefs onto 200-year-old texts." But the papers where students spend the whole essay arguing that a poem about nature is really about Jesus? They unnerve me.

Are they witnessing to me? Do they believe that they are taking a stand? Are they so deeply immersed in a kind of totalizing theology that they can imagine no other way through which to view experience?

Are you seeing the trend yet?? As to the last question posed by Horace (the Assistant Professor of English) I would tend to argue that the students expressing this kind of nonsense are not so much "immersed" in this type of theology as they are bound by it. Like Chinese foot-binding, this restriction of intellectual free thought has weakened and atrophied the students' critical abilities and reasoning. This anti-intellectualism naturally comes from religion, especially the more religion resists empirical evidence. That is, the more they rely upon "God did it" or "Because the Bible says so" as explanations for the voids in their knowledge base, the more those seem like acceptable answers to any question, regardless of whether the answer is "known" by the rest of the world (e.g. evolution).

*sigh*

In a possibly related matter, parents that home-school their children in Nebraska are bitterly opposed to a new state legislative bill that would require their children to pass a test above the 50% percentile. If they fail to pass the exam, the child would be required to attend an accredited school. How very draconian.

I have been thinking quite some time about where the proper limit is between security and liberty. The debate over intelligence gathering by the administrative branch, religion and schools, abortion, taxes, etc... are all, at their root, questions over the proper role of government and the ways in which it is permissible or advisable to interact with the individual. Accountant by Day has a couple of good posts on the issue, here and here. Homeschooling is one of those issues that are tricky to me. On the one hand, they are your children and you ought to be able to raise them with the values you deem appropriate. On the other hand, if those values or teachings are handicapping the child for life in twenty-first century Earth, do you still have the same unfettered right to teach them any damn way you please? Where do you draw the line?

The homeschooling experiment really gained traction with the evangelical Christian community. They thought the schools were too godless, and figured they better take their kids education into their own hands. Fair enough, I'd rather you take your kids out than try to change public schools (back?) into Christian indoctrination camps. But I wonder why they are opposed to having their children meet some kind of minimum standard? I just don't get it. Sorry, off on a tangent there, the amusing thing really is that now there are atheist homeschoolers that are worried about the amount of religion that their kids are still getting in school, or even facing persecution over their atheism. But do you see the contradiction? Christian parents think the schools aren't Christian enough, atheist parents think the schools are too Christian. Could they both be right?

A little slow, just plain dumb, stupid, stupider, and religious

The Dumbing Of America - washingtonpost.com

and

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason is apparently causing quite a stir, already. The New York Times article above was reprinted in my local paper this morning, and I found it quite interesting.

I know that as atheists, we often find ourselves seemingly defending education, science, and logic in a nation that couldn't care less. Or worse, pays them lip-service, all the while insisting that schools would be better or safer if we put prayer back, put god back, and plaster the ten commandments all over. I've noticed this attitude several places lately, usually in response to a school shooting. The most recent place I remember seeing it was over at Friendly atheist, citing this letter to the editor. Narika Kendrick opines (emphasis mine):

Just because you don’t believe in Jesus, who died for your sins and mine, don’t hold it against a politician who has done a heck of a job in the school system just because of your corrupted, immoral, individualistic outlook. By the way, the last time I checked, it’s people like you that cause Columbine or other school shootings to happen because you want prayer, the Ten Commandments, Christians and every other precious good out of the school system. That’s what’s wrong with America today. Be blessed and have a nice life. But leave the morally righteous people alone.

Ignoring the blatant grammatical errors, this attitude encapsulates what Susan Jacoby argues to be a climate of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism that holds sway over much of the populace. Atheists reading this will no doubt have their own experiences to bolster that claim. When (not "if") we win debates with the religious, their last line of defense often ends up along the lines of "Atheism is a religion too" or, "I have as much right to my opinion as you do, there's no proof that you're right."

The unique problem facing atheists is not that we lack facts, logic, reason, evidence etc...; clearly we have all of that in spades. The "debate" between belief or atheism has not really significantly changed in hundreds of years. All the arguments have been hashed out, posted on myriad internet sites and available to anyone who's curious. It's not that atheists are unapproachable, so unimaginably evil that we would drink the blood of anyone asking to know more about humanism or free-thought. The problem is that the religious are willfully choosing to ignore evidence contradicting their belief. They are wallowing in their own ignorance. From the Washington Times:

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

Which is why atheists cannot stand by and leave religion alone. It's not just a difference of opinion, it the difference between truth and lies. And those of you who CHOOSE to believe in lies are trying to hijack the government of this country and force it back into the dark ages!

In the wake of the "New Atheists" and their books, the most common criticism has probably been that they are "elitist" or somehow intellectually snobbish. I fail to see this as a criticism however, and I fully agree with the sentiment. I don't know how much plainer I can say it, but if you believe in something that you don't have good reasons to believe in, expect to get made fun of and demeaned.

All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists -- Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale -- a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. (from Alternet)

Granted, there's still a stray scientist or two who profess belief, but overall that's quite a statement. Facts, evidence, study, research, a thirst for knowledge all seem to almost inexorably lead to atheism. Repression, denial, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism are symptomatic of religion. I rather like Sam Harris' challenge to the religious to name one area in which we used to have a scientific explanation but now we have a generally accepted religious explanation that is better suited to explain the phenomenon.