How to Raise an Ideological Warrior

When I was five my mom was away a few weeks (selling her flat in Tel Aviv) and we lived at my grandparents. The first weekend our Grandmother took us to a farm to see the 'Moo moos and baar baars'. That was very exciting. The next weekend, while I was just beginning to eat our Sunday lunch, she said;

'You're a clever boy Max, tell me what's on your plate and where it comes from?'

So I began to explain that 'Potatoes come from in the ground, green vegetables from the ground and sausages from the supermarket'.

'Yes very good, but can you tell me what sausages are made of?'

'Meat'

'And where does meat come from?'

(I knew this was a trick question and that - I didn't have the right answer, but the only answer I had was:)

The Supermarket?'

'Do you know last week when we went to see the Moo moos and baar baars?'

(I was so excited by the memory and the vision of a baby baar baar suckling from its mommy, that I had completely forgotten about the context of the conversation and where it might be going)

Yes!' I said - (like an excited salivating puppy wagging it's tale - just from the sear notion of something nice happening)

Well' - she said as she slowly reached down into her small black handbag with a golden clasp and thin black handles.

This is what the do to Moo moos and baar baars to make meat!'

She opened up a black and white pamphlet with graphic photos of cows and sheep with there throats cut, guts ripped out and having been cut in half.

I almost puked in disgust and felt a wave of sadness come over me, which I've never been able to shift.
-------

The point I'm trying to make is, whether you agree with my grandmother’s actions or not, whatever ideology we try to give, or subconsciously impart to our children is still always indoctrination and propaganda.

Unless we can give our children the whole picture, not just both sides of the story - but a third way - a total view - we will always be giving them half truths, lies in whatever shade they might be.

To try to 'educate' your son is this or that view of the world, means that ultimately you don't TRUST him to make his own mind up, to come to his own decisions about life the universe and everything.

It - (life the universe and everything) is so much more complex than either/or views of reality. Both are ultimately short sighted and simplistic.

But I trust that you know that already.

He will probably be intolerant of Judaism too. 

Neal-

"“And they turned into jellyfish which turned into lizards and fish and insects and then they grew legs and went onto land and some of them became dinosaurs and some of them became mammals and then there were monkeys or primates and they became people! Is that right?”

Hope you told Elijah that, no, that's not right. Jellyfish didn't turn into lizards, etc. (There'd be no more jellyfish, then, would there?). Besides savoring the joy of pedantry, I bring this up to underscore that this view of evolution-that monkeys become people, for example- suggests a teleological dimension to Darwinism that isn't there. Similarly, loose talk of "higher organisms" also hints of a directionality that we'd best guard against-evolution did not "lead to" us, anymore than it did to a gnat or a mackerel. We're each successful in an ecological niche due to the selective pressures which favored the adaptations, etc, etc.

Expunge any trace of The Great Chain of Being! Down with Upwards! Up with Sideways!

Max-

Three baseball umpires were having a drink after the game, when their thoughts turned to the philosophy of umpiring. The first ump says, "What's there to say? I call 'em as I see 'em, and that's that."

The second ump fixes ump #1 in his gaze and says, "Oh, yeah? And what if you're wrong? Forget about callin' 'em as you see 'em. Do what I do; call 'em as they are."

The third guy looks at his colleagues, takes a swig of his Bud Light, puts the bottle down on the bar, and says, "I don't know why I waste my time you guys. You're both out to lunch. Can't you see? They ain't nothin' 'til I call 'em somethin'."

The point, of course, is that there is no "third way", no view which is uninflected by theory or purpose or disposition. Our experience comes into being via its being subsumed into some sort of framework-the view from God's eye, as Wm. James noted, would be a "booming, buzzing confusion", and no help to anyone.

And of course we don't trust our children to make up their own minds. After all we don't trust them to adequately wipe their asses without a reminder. The process of ceding to them their full personhood occurs in stages. You seem to think that if you provide guidance to a child, you're somehow sullying them, constraining their possibilities. This is true only if you regard, e.g., the requirement that a haiku have 17 syllables as a constraint.

Darwin, Marx, Freud, Chomsky, Leonardo, Scorsese, Wittgenstein, Gershwin-I'll bet they all had parents who told them how to hold their forks, and each opened the world in ways no one had ever done. I'm not afraid that human brilliance is in danger of being strangled by a parent's daring to insist to her child that human pre-history was not as depicted on The Flintstones.

Sometimes it scares me how religious I have become, but then I remember that I am a hard-core evolutionist just as much as I believe that the earth rotates around the sun.  We weren't created physically in the image of God, rather we are the way we are today because our progenitors ended up with the adaptations necessary for them to survive their environments long enough to reproduce.  Now is the time for ourselves to consciously to decide to select for the adaptation that we have acquired that truly makes us in the image of God - to be ethical moral beings that promote life in all its forms.

1.  Good points. 

2.  Your grandma sounds frickin' AWESOME.  

Neal -

I love your ump# story - But I think it WAY more profound than I think you do?

The thrid way - "booming, buzzing confusion" is the sound i hear in my ears, in my mind and in my heart. That is the messiness that is closer to a bigger picture, never the whole picture, but ever-so-slightly more honest.

I'm not sure that it's 'no help to anyone' - it's no help if you are trying to make logical sense of it all - to put things in to nice liniar - trains of thought - but confusion - messiness multiple views - multiple realities, multiple coliding worlds - is very helpful - if you've given up trying to make sense of the world in a conventional manner and just accept whatever it is that we are part of as it is.

OK - so my own view of - pre-history as you call it is VERY confusing!

Evolution and Creation are the same thing - but just different views of the same process.

I belive BOTH - that the world is approximately 15 Billion years old and also Literally 5768? years young.

Simply because Time is relative depending on where you are in or outside? of the Universe

Moreover, it is Conscious Humankind's viewing of the world that Makes it actually exist - and there it didn't exist at all previous to 5768 years ago.

If everything is God - what are you? What are you a fraction - image of?

all this need a bit more explaining - but for now - you gonna have to think I'm simplistic - which I am - of course not.

Helen - THANKS xXx 

I am sometimes so glad to live a country where religion takes a back seat to education.  Here in Japan religion is barely part of consciousness and has little to no say in school content.  Not that things are perfect here... the government must "approve" text books before they can be used in class and sometimes this approval comes in form of historical sanitization of the facts to put it mildly... but at least it is not done out of faith... social engineering yes... and "false" self image preservation yes... and these are bad too... lets face facts... by the way I appreciate the comment about teleology and evolution... evolution is a pragmatic sideways affair... there is no up or down...  no goal other than replication... what replicates lives... what doesnt well... doesnt... 

Max-

I think you were addressing me, not Neal. It's hard for me to reply to your comments since I hear them as possessing such a vast degree of generality as to defy specific commentary. As you suggest, I adore logical rigor and linearity, which I imagine you can take or leave, so maybe we're just talking at cross-purposes.

Rich-

You live in Japan and ride a Bimota? Brave lad. 

Yep - you are correct

care to comment on my 'vast degree of generality' then, as you might comment on a poem?

Or don't you do poems?  

In my mind a Warrior is subtle, suple, agile, able to see everything, to know his/her enemy, (see The Art of War) to understand one's enemy is to be able to be victorious.

an ideological foot soldier on the otherhand doesn't have to understand anything - in fact it is best that they are only 'educated' in their sides propeganda.

Neal - are you trying to creat a Warrior or a mindless Solider in the battle over your own idological problems, which btw - are not his?  

When I was very young, I believed in god, the tooth fairy, and santa claus. Then I found out that 6 million Jews were murdeered by the Nazis and some religious leaders explained that sinning brought about punishmenbt for them. Then I leanred that one million children were destroyed during the Holocaust and they were too young to have sinned. What Wiliam James said "back then" might have been wise back then but has been modified. What was said during the Renaissance about witches and angels on pinheads has been modified. And back and back. There is not just evolution that is physical. There is cultural evolution too. In the best democracy the world has yet known there was a time, very recently, when slaves and women could not vote. That too has changed. I expose my children too all sorts of views but  do not continue to insist on god as walt whitman, angels, hell, the tooth fairy, or the need for special interest groups hanging out around the halls of congress.

OK - but what if your worldview is wrong? what if your view of God, reality and everything is still based on your map of the world when you were a child? What if, God and the World are ACTUALLY ONE THING>?

What if God isn't this nice guy in the sky? What if life doesn't work the way you want it to? What if your view isn't the whole view?

What if your childish logic has made you blind? like Isaac Asimov who said that when he looked at the preists making the priestly blessings and he didn't go blind - he stopped believing in God. In some sence he DID go blind - blind to the possibility of there being something at work greater than his five year old logic!

I am saddend by your situation - robbing yourself of the possibility of touching the transcendant, it means that you're not really living - fully.

Here's the rub:  science states that if we can reproduce a cause/effect relationship we get to call it "scientific fact"; failure to do so, despite indicators, leave it in the "scientific theory" pile.  Not that theory isn't highly valuable - we use theories all the time to predict what is probable in a given set of circumstances.

 This is the entire problem with all views of the beginnings of the physical world: both creationism and evolution - and their rigid promoters:  simply put, both are theories - neither of which we can reproduce or observe.  To be dogmatic to a theory simply violates the principles of science and reason.  

To be "fully convinced" either way is, in effect, a religious or faith view.  Yes, we should lean to conviction one way or the other, but to be intolerant or dogmatic about one or the other being absolutely true or factual makes our claims about science and reason suspect.

In theory, a middle ground is to teach both as potentially valid theories - but both sides have their ideological warriors who fail science teaching in this regard.

It's a matter of life and death: if you and the people around you take the wrong antibiotics in the wrong order then you and they could die from resistant bacteria. Evolution gives an accurate account of this effect and its solution. Creationism just tells you to pray - a small but effective evolutionary pressure. Teach your son to think for himself and then trust him to. Best wishes, count_ludwig at yahoo dot com

As my previous post but replace "take the wrong antibiotics" with "spread the wrong pesticides", and replace "die from resistant bacteria" with "die from diseases from resistant mosquitoes". Creationists in Africa or India might not live long enough to have kids, or might inadvertently kill them.

First of all Pinky, you have no understanding of Evolution if you think it cannot be reproduced and observed then you need to retake high school biology. As for creationism, you're right it can't be reproduced and observed.

Max I don't really disagree with what your grandmother did, but I think it's pretty ignorant of most people to think of meat as coming from the supermarket neatly packaged. I think that anyone who eats meat should at some point have to experience the slaughtering and cutting up of the animal. It teaches you a lot about biology if nothing else.

Peta members love to go around showing pictures of slaughtered and half butchered animals to shock people. They talk of noble animals and how we're killing them, but they never show you a picture of a lion on the savanna ripping apart a gazelle. Even the nature channels shy away a bit when it comes time to actually eat, using low angles and distance shots.

The truth of the matter is that most humans are omnivores. In many areas plant food is just not available in winter unless we ship it in. We started eating meat because we needed it to survive, because we invented the sharp piece of metal before the internal combustion engine. I read all the time about people who are "shocked" into becoming vegetarians because of the gross pictures of butchered animals.

If you ask me the smells are worse than anything you see, but then I don't number myself among the timid who will stop eating meat because I see some cow guts. 

I think that if your kid is an atheist then he will most likely not be intolerant of a religion or a religious group and most specifically will almost certainly not be intolerant of a racial group, but he will, like many athesits, be intolerant of the bad science and dogma of religion.

We can maintain stories for cultural reasons but lets not pretend that they are based on fact. T H Huxley all the way.

Oh yeah and pink lets see how the two theories stand up to clever and hard working people. 

All the people who borrow their theory from an old book (predating
almost all science and history in the last 2000) well their theory is agreed on
generally agreed to be substantiated by any checks that are performed on it.

All the really hard working people who studied the subjects like biology, geology, chemistry and medicine pretty much all agree on evolution being the best theory we have so far.  If you don't believe it just pick up 100 books and read them all and I would be very surprised if you couldn't find sufficient evidence in at least one of those to convince you that evolution is the best theory we have by a long shot. 

So, your basis to ridicule and oppose intelligent design is that it's archaic and makes no sense. Let's see here..."scientists" have told you that:

- Man came from monkeys (monkeys, who, by the way, never bothered to evolve themselves into anything and still sit in our zoos flinging feces at onlookers)

- Monkeys came from a fish that one day decided that it needed to "evolve" feet and walk onto land... because the Discovery Channel showed you fish that can breathe out of water and flap around with their fins for a few minutes at a time. Oh, by the way, those fish you see today on the DC, never bothered to evolve themselves either.

- The "fish with magical feet" came from a single celled organism that decided it needed to "evolve" itself into a bigger, more complex organism. Yep, again you guessed it... millions of years later, we still have Mr. Bacteria, who multiplies a few times a day, who never bothered to evolve himself either... But one day! Man, he's going to make something of himself... just you wait!

 Oh, and the two that make me laugh out loud every time I hear some brain dead liberal spout their "science" and "facts":

-  Mr. Single-Celled Organism arrived here riding a meteorite... I hope not nobody out there is so retarded that they think the organism just magically evolved out of thin air... but then again...

- And the best of the best... You think that trillions of stars, countless planets, and life itself came from nothing... yes... nothing. There was nothing, then BOOM... universe.  Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all these stars and planets just "Big Banging" themselves into existence, life created itself too... not from thin air this time, from nothing. Let me say that again for those of you not listening... something, from n-o-t-h-i-n-g. 

  Do me a favor, and actually think about what's really going on here.  You are so blinded by your hatred of Christianity, that you're willing to believe these myths. You're not athiests at all... you're anti-theists. There's no other explanation, else, why would you choose to prevent others from reading about intelligent design? Obviously, if you feel so strongly that creationism is bogus, you're going to teach your child your beliefs anyways. So... stop forcing your ideology on others, and allow for a meaningful debate... it's the least you can do until you can actually back up a shred of evidence.

Have a great day, and enjoy what God blessed you with, before you "evolve" into a blob of goo or something. 

At twenty, I always wonder how I will ensure that my children don't believe the Creationist lies. I imagine myself with my children clutching my legs and me with a baseball bat fending off boring white Christians waving bibles at us. I can only think that the worst thing that could happen is that my children somehow turn religious! (Although I'm sure there must be worse things...)

I guess it wouldn't be harmful to just tell your kids both sides of the story. Say that the Bible is a compilation of books written over various years by various authors over thousands of years and believed by some people to be the literal true word of God. But then you tell your kids the truth - that there is no evidence to support this belief, at least not scientific. Then you tell them what scientists have said about the origins of life. I don't think this view is biased, because it is the truth on both sides. To give the "viewpoint" that the Bible tells the literal origins of creation (or that it is the word of God) is just to lie.

Ultimately, there is no answer to why there is anything at all, rather than nothing. So you also have to admit this to your child, that no, science hasn't told us everything. This is what atheists and Judeo-Islamo-Christian people tend to forget. That we both can't answer the question of why there is a universe at all. God as the uncaused first cause is no better an answer than saying that the physical universe always existed. In my perspective at this point in human history, I can't fathom how we would ever know the truth, so I don't really bother thinking about it. I digress so I'll just stop talking.

Wow, "Yeah Right."  You have really demonstrated why people who actively oppose the teaching of evolution do so, because they have immense misconceptions.  Indeed, the version you propose of evolution is very false.  If this is what you think evolution is, it is false.  But that is not what scientists have said....at all.

"Man came from monkeys (monkeys, who, by the way, never bothered to evolve themselves...."

1) Man did not come from monkeys.  Humans do, however, share a "common ancestor" with modern primates.  What did not happen is that some monkeys (as we know them today) morphed into humans and some didn't for no reason.  I'll quickly explain that humans and modern chimps diverged from another primates, not all of a sudden, but over time.  The intermediate species between this ancestor and Homo sapiens spapiens are various species of Australopithecines and other homonids.  Various species of Homo have all gone extinct, leaving sapiens as the most naturally suited to our environment.  Our evolutionary advantage is mainly our intelligence, this is how we have come to control our environment.  There is an environmental niche for all different kinds of species, and in our case, although we lack strength, size, or sharp teeth like some other mammals, we used our intelligence to make spears, guns, nuclear bombs, eventually.  Dwellings. Air conditioning.  Ok i have to get back to work.  The point is, actually understand what it is that you claim to be debating before attacking.  I went to Christian school for a couple years and went to Bible study class and now I'm taking a Bible Lit class, so I don't just attack without knowing what it is that I'm attacking.  

The idea that people have the 'right' to believe anything is dangerous. What about the 'right' of scientific proof to be parmount? The problem is, we all know deep down that 'religious' people at the end will kill to stop opposition, but scientists won't do that.  The age of reason is probably a blip in  human history, soon to end. It should be illegal to teach things that have not gone through the usual scientific process of evidence, hypothesis, prediction, etc. We have reached a point where eveyone's opinion is of the same value as someone who has a specialised knowledge. Try applying that to rewiring your house. Try 'believing' that your car will run on emulsion paint.

By the way, if you don't accept the basic scientific model of earth history, you shouldn't use fossil fuels - if geology is wrong, it couldn't find oil, gas etc. Horse drawn transport for all creationists, please.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution is a grand and accurate description of how nature works. It shouldn't damage anybody's religious faith, any more than an accurate description of the acceleration of a falling body would damage faith. What's the big deal? Well, it is a big deal to conceptualize such vast time, but God, or G-d, is big enough for it. Six days we examine the facts, and on the seventh day we rise above and remember Who made all that and is behind it all. No problem. But no junk science, please!! The Creator likes facts as they are part of his Truth. We have to be grateful for all of it, facts and Truth. OK now? Oh, and "theory" just means "large idea" here, not "unproven hypothesis".

Oh, and the more you get ideological around children, the more nervous and rebellious they get. Just be yourself, works better. Children are not your warriors. Be your own warrior if you insist.

God, or G-d, LOVES SCIENTIFIC ADVANCE!!! but does realize it challenges people to see Him as ever bigger, and ever smarter, ever huger and more amazing and unfathomable. Awe is the real reason for science, as well as airconditioning, safe surgery, good stuff like that. G-d is proud of us when we discover, but the moral questions are eternal and are not affected by science, one way or the other.

I respect your right to raise your child to believe what ever you tell them is the truth, but you must respect other parents' right to tell their kids as they please. What if, obviously a big if, we find out that we were actually genetically engineered by extraterrestrial beings to mine gold and other minerals. At that point you would find that teaching your child that we came from the long process of evolution a lie.

I understand that may have sounded rather unfounded and unintelligent but we need to realize that extremism of any view is pointless because there's always a great chance everyone is wrong about everything. Why can't we teach in the view of "this is what these people believe, this is why, and this is what these people believe, and this is why. Think what you want"

 The one thing I can be certain of is that no human civilization will ever agree with itself, ever. 

-Mr Cruz 

It is interesting to see, on a blog called Jewcy, how much of the thinking about the "religious" approach to question such as these is rooted in Christian either-or and literalist approaches to science and the Torah, respectively.

his ignorance all over this website:

"Neal's son is not Jewish, mom isn't, so he's already confused.

He will probably be intolerant of Judaism too."

 Hey my mother was Jewish going back to  Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah and I am also intolerant of you.

If he were my son I would definitely teach him to avoid anonymous-anonystic assholes like you.

want your son to be able to think clearly?

Best way is not to teach him to hate "creationism."

Teach him logic and  science and philosophy and yes Jewish history and tradition let him draw his own conclusions.  

 I was taught all these subjects and grew up a Jewish agnostic with the emphasis on Jewish.

If you teach to be an atheist without his getting to know logic and philosophy and his own history and tradition he may one day surprise and become an Orthodox Jew (or whatever other faith he decides to embrace.)

“MOLO, Kenya (CNN) -- Lying in a hospital bed in this rural hub of Kenya's Rift Valley, a man describes surviving two machete wounds to his head and multiple slashes to his hands. He says he was attacked by people who now live by the rules of tribalism.  Witnesses say attackers are living by the rules of tribalism, often using the machete to inflict punishment.   1 of 3 more photos »  "They have to be stopped," he said. "It is the work of the devil." Nearby, another machete-attack survivor, John Machana, said he thought he was a dead man when he was attacked. "I was sure they would kill me," he said, nursing slashes to his backside and still lying in his bloodstained clothes.  "They told me the blood in Kenya now had to be pure and clean, and they accused me of being of mixed tribal blood." Both men are among the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans victimized by a weeklong spate of violence that has left nearly 500 people dead after the nation's disputed presidential election. Witnesses and victims have said in some regions gangs of men are terrorizing people with machetes.  See photos of machete violence »”

Anonymous

01/04/08 9:37 am

"It is interesting to see, on a blog called Jewcy, how much of the thinking about the "religious" approach to question such as these is rooted in Christian either-or and literalist approaches to science and the Torah, respectively."

I actually agree with this, though, I wouldn't call the approach merely Christian. Rather it's rooted in a binary mode of thought which is foreign to classical Hebraic thinking whose logic is rarely either/or. It is often both/and.

While there are some who believe that it took god literally 7 days to create the world, most theologians can agree that among other stories in the bible, the creation stories (yes there are two different ones) are allegorical. They were told in such a way that they could be passed down through oral tradition. The emphasis is NOT on the 7 days but on the simple fact that God Created the universe. 7 days--well 7 symbolizes perfection in the bible so that's where they got that number. But anyway, Science and nature IS God. Everything we discover and learn about is our little insignificant effort to get a glimpse at God and the wonders of our existence. Truth is, no one really has any hard evidence of any ONE causality of our universe. Big bang theory and evolution remain our most convincing theories and we have generally come to accept them as fact---for now, until a "New Darwin" comes along. That said, YOU CAN BE A CREATIONIST AND AN EVOLUTIONIST! Sure...the big bang started it all...what caused the bang? What created the initial particular energy? God created the world and the universe and beyond (we have absolutely no real grasp of how huge our universe is nor how many dimensions we can not perceive) Evolution is God's way of connecting all living beings from bacteria to man. We are all one life force, one energy surging through "time" and God is that energy. Yes Evolution is real! Yes God Created us! The "issue" lies only with elitists who feel that theirs is the only opinion that matters---guess what folks, WE KNOW NOTHING. You can not prove nor disprove God's existence and we certainly can't prove who's religion is right (frankly I believe we're all dead wrong, but God loves us for trying hahaa) So the bottom line--stop the hate, stop the fighting and just enjoy the WONDER for the Wonder that it is.

For the record, I am a Christian, Catholic specifically....and if you are judging me for that, read my last few sentences again.

PEACE,

katie

Can someone prove me evolution?

Can someone tell me why on earth, the son of men kept staring and envying the birds for thousands of years but only ended up with steel wings?

Can someone show me a home built accidently. I just want one single home built accidentally.

If not I want an explanation how the whole universe the perfect ecosystem on earth have happened accidentally blindly.

The universe's creation in 7 days does sound like a stretch, but how long was 7 days when there was no sun to circle the Earth? With no man to observe the universe's creation there is no suggestion to as why a day would be 24 hrs, couldn't a day then possibly be a billion years? And also who cares? Any religion is a creation of man inspired by God and we are imperfect so we are bound to mess some things up. Whether its a theory or a hymn its still man made and its still imperfect so get over it, the greater good from religion comes from the values it installs into the fabric of a persons being. Just like any Christian requires faith in their religion you require faith in yours.

For example the evolution theory also lacks a reason for why we are the only intelligent beings on the planet. After millions of years we and the Neanderthals, are the only type of humans to evolve from monkeys why hasn't there been another variation of us like there are variations of every other animal? And why hasn't any other animal been able to evolve as far as we have? Its not as if the monkey species has been around the longest, wouldn't you expect lizards then to be a dominant race?

What I like is that you are giving your kid something to believe in, your facts are just as hard to prove as the very facts that followers of traditional religions preach and at the end of the day having faith in something that isn't quite provable becomes the greater lesson.

 It seems to me like it is in everyone's best interests to not be intolerant of others' ideas about the creation of the universe. As a Christian, I should tell you what I believe, and hope that you will come to the same understanding through your own research and experience. But should I block you out or teach my kids not to talk to you or listen to you? Scripture forbids me from closing you out like that. If I don't associate with unbelievers, then how can I interact with them and witness to them, or show them the light and the joy that I have found?

 But even from a purely non-theist approach, it seems like the kind of idealogical isolationism promoted in the original post would be a bad idea, for the reverse of the reason stated above. In other words, how can you stamp out the misguided (from your perspective) religions if you never exchange ideas with those who believe differently from yourself?

  It just seems to me that everyone benefits from a civil, friendly exchange of ideas and beliefs.

"Elijah goes to a Jewish preschool, after all. But the other side
preaches a dangerous ideology. When faith gets in the way of facts, I
get angry."

Faith always gets in the way of facts. Always, and in all forms. Faith is suspension of reason for a feeling. Although religion serves a nice social function -- respect for elders/society, sense of purpose, sense of self -- and I can understand that you don't want to risk alienating your son, but religions are based on utter lies, and your son may not be as acutely aware of that as you are. In the same way that blood flows through your veins and the way that dinosaurs were not on the ark, there actually was no ark, or any god telling Noah to build one. The truth is uncompromising. Selectively suspending the trickery of religion is an even greater hypocracy. You can not take the good and leave the bad because they are both based on the same book, of the same lies. Accepting things because they are written is the problem because it turns off that instinctive scrutinization so that the more "crazy" ideas can sneak in; whether specific lies are worse than other in your eyes is not enough because your kid, at his young age, can't tell the difference the way you can when he reads Genesis.

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There is absolutely no reason to compromise with creationists. We can agree to disagree insofar as they are free to believe whatever they wish, but when they fight to teach their intellectually bankrupt nonsense in schools, we need to fight them and give no quarter. It's no more an act of "intolerance" than it would be to refuse to give equal time to astrology in an astronomy class. The theory of evolution has beaten the dogma of a young earth handily, and there's no reason to pretend that this isn't true. The rest of the world is gaining on us in science as we decline. While I'm sure there are a plethora of reasons for that, I'm sure at least one is that no other world power I'm aware of spends significant time arguing over stupid shit like this. The creationists, as a movement, are liars as well; this is not about 'letting kids decide' or trying to discover the truth, it is about religious indoctrination, and despite a few Catholic and Jewish useful idiots, it's a very protestant flavored movement. Are they going to present the Vedic (Hindu) creation model as another alternative? The scientology 'aliens and volcanoes' lunacy? Of course not. Nor should they. These things can be taught in a course on comparative religion. They don't belong alongside science in a classroom, anymore than phrenology belongs alongside modern psychology and medicine.

There is a Jewishness to questioning teaching our children our own understanding of evolution, or other topics. Whereas, if you ever met someone who believes in creationism, you know this is not an issue they face. Their "belief" is rock-solid and of course their children will face such indoctrination.

My point is that it is a moral imperative to give your children the "tools" they need and at least a cursory understanding of how the world works according to the general scientific consensus. They can hammer out if evolution is a hierarchy or horizontal in due time.

No one has ever learned in a vacuum. If your not going to fill the void of how the world was made and other wonderous questions a child will have, someone else is going to do it for you.

I was brought up in a fifth-generation missionary family and now, in my fifties, I have never understood how people can believe that "God created the world in seven days", except by abstract analogy. I don't have children but my jaw would hang for days if those words were ever said to me. Very odd.

I agree with this article. I'm going to do everything I can to prove to
my daughter that Creationism isn't a science, and there is no proof of
it at all.

Brainwashing children into being intolerant of whatever you don't agree with isn't quite as high-minded as advertised.

So RHS, you're advising us to tolerate racism? My, that is high-minded!