Public and Religious education

My colleague rants about how his daughter cannot spell after graduating high school but somehow I think that if he read this over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub he might be more grateful.

What value is a religious education if it prevents students from understanding the natural world? At one time, the Church had the power to compel people to believe in witches and demons in the natural world. OR to kill them because they did not believe. Are we to go back to that? That was a time when religion dominated science and the spread of knowledge and science was restricted. Heretics were people who expressed what the Church did not want people to believe.

Anyone can populate the supernatural world with all sorts of hobgoblins and things that go bump in the night. Just take a look at all the movies and books about it. But the world that you and I can touch, see, hear, taste, feel, and measure is another matter entirely. The Church believed the world was flat for the longest time and virtually decreed it to be so. After all, it was not mentioned in the Bible and if it was not mentioned in the Bible then it could not possibly be true that the world was round, could it?

I suppose we will now have to give up Louis Pasteur (bacteria) , Madame Curie (radioactivity) , Mendel (genetics), and a host of scientific concepts proven by scientists because they were not mentioned in the Bible either. After all it is much easier to blame devils rather than bacteria and to blame witches for causing blue-eyed children from brown-eyed parents than to accept the laws of genetics. in other scenarios it was not tectonic plate movement that destroyed innocent and guilty people alike in an earthquake, it was because the good did not leave the evil places as decreed by God through portents and rumblings. All these things with sound and proven scientific explanations are now at risk. 

So now we have ignorant children and intolerant children brought up in the faith of false teachings. This was prophesied so long ago. Where does the false Prophet hide? In religion. There would be no room for his kind in a scientific world.   

I have told my children for years that we live in an age of magic. The magic of science brings into existence tomorrow that which we imagine today. I meant my statement as hyperbole and not as reality. Yet today, some would turn the clock back a thousand years. The haters of knowledge would turn our clocks back because knowledge and science show them to be false prophets and they do not want the truth to be known.  

Some people confuse the Origin of Species with the Origin of Life. Others confuse Natural Selection with ordered Creation and some people just plain confuse God and God’s Natural Laws. Our world is a scientific world brought into existence by God who challenges us to discover how He did it and how it works everyday without His express involvement.