Texas avoids going full retard

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(Reuters) - The Texas Board of Education voted unanimously to approve mainstream middle school curriculum materials on Friday in a move seen as a victory for proponents of teaching evolution in public schools.

Conservatives had complained the materials up for approval did not adequately address "alternatives to evolution" such as creationism or intelligent design as a theory of how life began.

But of course there is an educational alternative to evolution. And best of all, it's free. And it's been around for at least two thousand years. It's called "Church."

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The Texas board, which includes evangelical Christians, had been seen as the best opportunity for supporters of Biblical-based theories of creation to get their point of view represented in public school curriculum.

Cue in the "OH WE'RE BEING OPPRESSED!" cries from the evangelicals. Nevermind that they've had their own platform to teach their beliefs for, again, at least two thousand years.

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The vote followed several hours of emotional testimony on Thursday in which science teachers from around the state pleaded with the board not to require them to teach what they saw as non-scientific theories in their classrooms.

It's sad that it actually came down to this. See, I think it's a relatively easy concept to grasp. Actual real-world facts and science belong in schools. Sky magician fairy tales belong in churches. What's so hard to understand?

My hubby and I actually had a discussion about the religious strife in the US and it's possible origins.

Church and state used to be the same thing. The church is used to be the taxation center, the place where the less fortunate of society looked to to get help, the center or law, and most importantly, the center of learning. That's how they grew their populations of followers beyond the the few gullible enough to join their cult.

Now, government has taken over all of those functions, and churches can only gather the few that are susceptible to their brain washing methods, and the traditional followers are leaving in droves because science is much better at describing the world around us. The churches are getting desperate, and trying to recruit through the means that they used to, but there's this "separation of church and state" thing getting in the way. So, they frantically claw at the barrier, and try to break it down by whatever means necessary. I think that they do realize that their intentions would trample on the rights of millions and possibly bring us back into a dark age of religious wars, but they think that it would be a good thing.

This case shows that they are going to lose. Our system was built to protect the rights of its citizens. They cannot overturn that without completely destroying the system, and most of them are unwilling to destroy the system that protects them. They will fail.

It makes me feel slightly ill that science teachers had to BEG to be allowed to teach science in the classrooms.

Things they have vast proof for are thrown aside in favour of a book of fairy tales thousands of years old.

No, the bible is NOT 2000 years old. It was writen over a period of 1800 years by more than 40 people, we're not always sure who wrote what, and before that it was passed along orally before it was even canonised. It's one thing to teach it in a class of Religious Education as a load of morally based metaphors. It could even be taught as a sign of evolution of culture. It's totally another to put it as mandatory teaching in Science classes as fact.