Teach the Controversy
After failing to be allowed to teach Creationism in public classrooms across America, Creationists moved to the idea of Intelligent Design. Now that watered down version of Creationism has also been thrown out of public schools for being a ridiculously poor attempt to indoctrinate children about Creationism. But Creationists aren’t giving up. They have now moved to the tactic of calling for schools to “teach the controversy” in relation to evolutionary theory. In other words, since they can’t teach Creationism, they want to make up a fake controversy around evolution. Yet the only people in the scientific community who consider evolutionary theory to be controversial are the fundamentalist Christian Creationists.
With that said, now I am calling for educators to “teach the controversy.” However, I am not talking about evolution. I am talking about the Bible. Texas has passed a law which requires schools to teach the Bible. I talk about this in more detail in this Examiner Article.
There are provisions in the bill which allow for atheists to teach the mandatory Bible class. That being the case, I think that secular educators in Texas should offer to teach this class and they should teach the controversy. It has often been said that the best book for de-converting people from Christianity to atheism is the Bible. So let’s use it since the Texas legislators insist. If you live in Texas and are in the public school system in some capacity (student, teacher, administrator, parent of student, etc.) please let me know what you observe as this new school year begins.
While Texas has a reputation for being a very religious state, I see a lot of Dangerous Talkers living in Texas too. There are a lot of atheistic people there and I want to hear your stories and reports on how these schools implement this bill.
Filed under: anti-intellectualism, church/state, Current Events, education, Politics, Religion
