Issue:Education - The Religious Right's holy war on public education.
| Issue:Education - The Religious Right's holy war on public education. |
These are common-sense facts, but for the Religious Right, the motto has always been to never let facts get in the way of ideology. And for every single one of these facts, the Religious Right wants the exact opposite taught to every American child. And for a good reason: if every child in America received an education based on accurate information and facts, the Religious Right's cultural war on America would already be lost. In order to proliferate, the Religious Right must do what it always accuses gays and lesbians of doing: recruit the young generation.
Religious political extremists thus pursue a two-fold strategy. They try to change the curricula in public schools to accomodate their ideology, and at the same time they try to abolish public education altogether, by promoting "voucher" programs, i.e. scholarship systems to channel public money into private (usually sectarian) schools.
amazon.com: Between Church and State : Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America
The two main targets of the Religious Right's campaign against fact-based education are evolution theory and comprehensive sex education. They want the former to be replaced by creationism, and the latter by abstinence-only sex education curricula that use scare tactics and disinformation (sex-education curricula created by Religious Right organizations claim that if you have premarital sex, you will die, that the failure rate of condoms is nearly one-third, and that you can get HIV from tears).
All serious scientific studies agree that comprehensive sex education, i.e. sex education that discusses all methods of preventing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including abstinence, is highly effective in achieving these goals, while the benefits of "abstinence only" programs are completely unproven, and in fact highly dubious. It is hardly a coincidence that the teenage birth rate in the liberal Netherlands is only a fraction of that in the US (9 per 1000 teenagers as opposed to 64). It is also not a coincidence that American teenagers had their first sex at an average age of 16 in 1995, while dutch teenagers had it at 17.5 on average.
Everyone who has been young knows that the most desirable things are those that are forbidden. "Abstinence only" programs only increase the thrill for teenagers to do it anyways.. without protection. That's why "abstinence only" sex education is not only ineffective, but highly harmful. Policymakers should get their priorities straight and stop sacrificing the safety and health of teenagers on the altar of religious-right ideological purity.
As usual, religious right ideologues don't care about facts. On its website, the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, a right-wing abstinence-only group that considers the propaganda of the Family Research Council and the Concerned Women for America "research", discusses a Princeton study that clearly shows the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only programs, only to arrive at the opposite conclusion. The Princeton study found that after one year, 20% of teenagers who had been taught abstinence engaged in sex anyways, as opposed to only 16.5% of the teenagers who had received comprehensive sex education. This evidence is dismissed with the hypothetical argument that if those 20% had just been abstinent, they would have had zero risk of unwanted pregnancies and STD's, and that therefore abstinence is the best option. True, but entirely irrelevant. Similarly, one might observe that not driving a car at all would be more effective in preventing death from car accidents than driving and wearing a seatbelt, and thus conclude that therefore, driving instructors should try to discourage people from driving instead of teaching them how to drive safely.
July 2001 update:
Surgeon General David Satcher has released a report on sex education that calls abstinence until a person is involved in a "committed, enduring monogamous relationship" the only completely safe means of preventing unwanted pregnancy and STDs, but conservatives are outraged regardless. They are outraged because Satcher's report does not call for abstinence education as the only legitimate kind of sex education, and they are even more outraged at the suggestion that there are non-marital relationships that can be commited, enduring and monogamous. In short, they are outraged because the Surgeon General based his report on scientific facts and reason, instead of on the ideological predilections and taboos of the loony christian right.
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According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, as reported on Salon, Abstinence Education, to the degree it works at all,
works by encouraging a sort of virginity chic-- students abstain not due to any great philosophical conversion or health-based pragmatism, but because
they have been introduced to the notion, reinforced by peer pressure, that it is "cool" to do so. This superficial commitment delays incidence of first
intercourse on the average of eighteen months. While this may initially seem a somewhat impressive figure, the benefits of this extra year and a half
of virginity pale next to the fact that, due to the active encouragement of ignorance on the subjects of contraception and practical sexual hygiene in
abstinence-only programs, incidents of first intercourse for the programs' alumni are dramatically more likely to be incidents of unprotected, unsafe
sex. Furthermore, abstinence programs tend to encourage the old-fashioned notion of "in virgo intacta," defining virginity as abstention from vaginal
sex-- there is much anecdotal evidence supporting the notion that some teens in Abstinence Education programs displace vaginal intercourse with
oral or anal sex, neither of which is necessarily safe from a disease prevention standpoint.
source: Facing Sexual Reality (07/02/2001 article) |
| Creationism |
Creationism, a.k.a. "creation science" a.k.a. "intelligent-design-theory" is a pseudo-scientific theory that attempts to justify the Christian fundamentalist view that all plant and animal species were
created in their final state by divine intervention. It is uniformly rejected by scientists as pure nonsense. And with good reason: true science starts with observation, and then
draws conclusions from the observations. Creationism, on the other hand, starts with the conclusion and then uses selective perception of reality to justify that preconveived conclusion.
But it gets worse. Science is based on the premise that nature works according to a set of laws, and that these laws are accesible to reason. In short, in order to do science, you have to assume to 1+1=2. Creationists are trying to introduce the viewpoint into science that sometimes, 1+1=3. Once you accept that assumption, the building of science comes crashing down, because you removed its foundation. If 1+1=2 cannot be guaranteed (because God might have made it 3), then you can forget about physics, astronomy, archeology, paleontology and all other sciences known to humankind, because all those sciences are based on the assumption that nature works "reasonably". When we admit God as a variable, we cannot even be certain that the world existed yesterday, because God might have created it 5 minutes ago and just given everyone the proper memory. That is why creationism is not science, but a religious viewpoint.
Despite what Christian Fundamentalists claim, evolution is not just a controversial theory. It is one of the cornerstones of our modern understanding of biology. While it is true that there is considerable disagreement among scientists concerning the exact details of how certain aspects of evolution work, there is no disagreement as to the reality of evolution. The Religious Right usually fails to understand that distinction and views every scientific criticism of current evolution theory as proof that evolution per se does not exist.
Furthermore, the logic of the Religious Right approach - proving creationism by disproving evolution - is fundamentally flawed, because it is based on the erroneous assumption that creation by God is the only logical alternative to evolution. If there was real evidence that life on earth could not have developed by itself, then the most rational explanation would be that an advanced alien species "seeded" the earth a long time ago. There would be no logical need to invoke divine intervention.
amazon.com: The Tower Of Bable. The Evidence Against the New Creationism.
Creationism
Does Butterfly Metamorphosis Disprove Evolution?
Michael Behe's False Challenge to Evolution
Is Evolution As Unlikely As A 747 Forming Out Of A Tornado In A Junkyard?
| Reality Check |
| European kids see the same violent movies and play the same violent computer games. They are taught evolution theory in school and how to use condoms. Many of them consider the bible a storybook for infants. So why are there no school shootings in Europe? Hint: to shoot someone, you need a gun. |
Supposedly, the teaching of evolution theory to school children is partly to blaim for youth violence, because it sends a message to children that we are nothing but "glorified apes" and therefore not responsible for our actions. That argument is particularly disingenuous because it ignores the fact that the almost 2000 years of Christian supremacy saw more bloodshed and inhumanity than any other period in human history. All the historical evidence shows that it is "moral absolutes", the belief that you are absolutely right and everyone who disagrees is absolutely wrong, that lead people to commit the most unbelievable attrocities, not "moral relativism". The crusades of the middle ages, the brutal slaughtering of the native population of the Americas by Christian conquerors, the witch hunts and the torture chambers of the "holy" inquisition, slavery, Northern Ireland, Israel and Bosnia all attest to that.
"Ttranscendental" morals encourage crime because they substitute true understanding of why ethical behavior is in every person's best interest, and of true human compassion, by an appeal to people's selfishness: if you do not behave, God will punish you. The religious believer behaves morally only for fear of punishment, not because he or she is necessarily a good person. Today, the US has the highest crime rate in the western world, and also the highest number of self-identified religious beliefers. US States with high rates of church attendance also have the highest crime rates, while more liberal states usually have lower crime rates. Is it really a coincidence that the Columbine shooting took place in a community with a disproportionately high number of Christian fundamentalists? What about the facts that most school shootings occur in bible-belt states?
For further reading, I recommend this article which claims to show that atheists commit significantly fewer crimes than the religious.
Did Evolution and Atheism Make Dahmer Do It?
Reading and 'Riting and Revenge
Religion is the Cause of Violence
Most atheists have a mature value system founded in common sense and reason. Some believers, on the other hand, have only the fear of divine punishment as a deterrent to unethical behavior. That makes them potentially dangerous - if a believer thinks s/he is acting in accordance with the will of the deity, or justified by religious scripture (which can be tweaked to justify absolutely anything, as historical examples show), s/he will do anything to carry out that alleged will, including torturing "witches", murdering "infidels", "heretics" and today, abortion doctors and gay people. Apes, glorified or not, don't commit such crimes - for that it usually takes religious fantatics.
You might want to read this article for some examples of what "Christians" did to their fellow men and women in the name of love. warning: this article is not for the faint of heart. It features graphic descriptions of medieval torture methods.