August 12, 2008

Judge Rejects Christian Schools' Complaint of Bias in U. of California Decisions on Courses

A federal judge has ruled that the University of California did not discriminate against Christian high schools and their students in deciding that some of their courses failed to meet its academic requirements for college applicants.

A school in Southern California, an association of Christian schools, and several students had sued the university in 2005, arguing that its refusal to honor the courses had violated their rights to freedom of speech and religion. The judge in the case, S. James Otero of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, rejected some of their arguments last March, when he ruled that the university’s policy for evaluating high-school courses was not unconstitutional on its face. But he allowed the plaintiffs to continue pressing claims that applications of the policy in decisions regarding specific courses had violated their rights.

In his latest ruling, issued Friday, Judge Otero rejected a number of the plaintiffs’ motions on procedural grounds, then evaluated the schools’ and the university’s arguments regarding decisions on five courses, in biology, English, government, history, and world religions. In each case, the judge found that the university’s decisions had been based on rational considerations and had showed no animus toward the plaintiffs.

In a written statement, Wyatt R. Hume, the university’s provost and executive vice president for academic and health affairs, praised the judge’s ruling. “As we have said all along,” he said, “the question the university addresses in reviewing courses is not whether they have religious content, but whether they provide adequate instruction in the subject matter.”

Robert Tyler, a lawyer representing the schools, told the Associated Press that he had already appealed Judge Otero’s latest decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. —Charles Huckabee

Comments

1. Good luck trying to reverse the decision at the Ninth Circuit…

   — Red State University    Aug 12, 10:33 PM    #

2. There is much more to this case than meets they eye, of note being the many non-Chrisitian schools who use similar religious textbooks send students who are admitted to UC Irvine no questions asked. The bottom line here is that UC faculty would rather not have evangelicals sitting in their classes. These kids from Calvary Christian are likely just as academically capable as many non-evangelicals and would probably do just fine at UC Irvine.

   — EggsnHam    Aug 13, 08:35 AM    #

3. There may well be more than meets the eye, but having the same textbook does not make the same class.

   — doubtit    Aug 13, 08:53 AM    #

4. It seems as if some private schools no longer believe in the Enlightenment and feel they can create their own giants for students to stand on. Perhaps in the future a Beer Pong should meet a PE or Personal health requirement.

   — me 2    Aug 13, 09:16 AM    #

5. Perhaps some private schools do not subscribe to your brand of enlightenment, number four. I believe that useful academic enlightenment is achieved sooner if magic and other religious fluff is removed from the curriculum. Also, put down you croquet mallet and give Beer Pong a try; you might enjoy it!

   — Jack Mac    Aug 13, 10:46 AM    #

6. EggsnHam, could you be more specific about which non-Christian religious schools are flooding students into UC Irvine while Christian schools are discriminated against? I taught at UC Irvine for 20 years and don’t recall the flood of students from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Scientology high schools. Also, I didn’t know a single faculty colleague who didn’t want evangelical Christians in class. And we had lots of them.

   — John    Aug 13, 10:52 AM    #

7. Although I haven’t followed this case closely, here my best guess at what occurred. The kids are the victims in this case…at the hands of the schools they attended and their parents who didn’t develop/ push for an integrative curriculum that met the UC admissions requirements AND provided a faith-based perspective. There are plenty of Christian High schools that do this well…and their graduates don’t have this problem. I don’t see this as an attack on evangelicals (which describes me) but rather an entitled response from parents who failed to do their homework on assessing the rigor of the courses their children were taking and schools who thought that “God would see them through” regardless of what they were teaching students in their classrooms.

   — robert    Aug 13, 11:14 AM    #

8. I definitely agree with Robert, #7. My children attended a private Christian school because it was both academically rigorous AND taught Christian values. Although small, the school was able to offer some AP classes and also encouraged seniors to concurrently enroll at the local community college. I know of other religion based schools whose students did not receive the academic rigor that colleges require. Many such schools do not even seek accreditation in New Mexico where I am a resident. They are even brazen enough to put the word “Academy” in their names, yet they don’t even off their students a quality precalculus or trigonometry class.

   — Robyn    Aug 13, 11:40 AM    #

9. The Biology text in question (Biology Student Text (3rd ed.- 2 vol.) by Thomas E. Porch and Brad R. Batdorf)
   says the following in the introduction:

   “You may even find a “scientific” explanation of the biblical locust (grasshopper) plague in Egypt. These statements are conclusions based on “supposed science.” If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.”

   Can you guess why UC rejected this as a “science” text?

   — Mark F.    Aug 13, 11:45 AM    #

10. After reading the ruling, I have come to the conclusion that the UC system’s actions in this case were justified. The schools were expecting a college prep biology course to be accepted when the primary text stated that all scientific conclusions must first be justified by biblical evidence (or else rejected despite the evidence). They were unable to even produce an accurate citation for the world religions text. The literature curriculum failed several tests that had absolutely nothing to do with religious perspectives (i.e. the exclusive use of excerpts and not completed works), and their government course stated that the US government acquires its power solely through the divine will of god. Throughout the entire rejected curriculum, the emphasis was on obedience to dogma and a discouraging of critical thinking. I’m all about pushing academic understanding beyond current ways of knowing, and believe that evolution is evidence of the greater intricacy and strength of the divine, but I think the comment about leaving the enlightenment behind is accurate on this one.

    — JS    Aug 13, 11:51 AM    #

11. Robert (#7) – very well said. Receiving a faith-based education need not be synonymous with indoctrination and a lack of rigor; the kids are indeed the victims and the parents ultimately responsible for this travesty.

    — J    Aug 13, 12:36 PM    #

12. If the education of the children along religious lines is so important, why are they not applying to colleges with the same Christian focus as the high schools they attended? Admission to those schools should be less of a problem.

    — jmma    Aug 13, 01:21 PM    #

13. If Mark F.‘s citation from the biology text is indeed accurate, then wow! perhaps the children should retake all science classes in a secular environment…perhaps we should look at their math classes as well, given that the Bible’s record in mathematics and geometry is also worthless. While I agree with jmma, I remain puzzled that people like Robert and J above can associate religious education with rigor at all. How is that even possible? The bible maintains hundreds of inconsistencies, historical fallacies, mathematical errors, etc. So, too, does the Koran. It is safe to say that a religious “education” that stresses rigor would be paradoxical at best and end in fuzziness for the graduates. I applaud the court’s decision to back UC’s actions.

    — Darren Aversa    Aug 13, 01:56 PM    #

14. Science: A belief system (i. e., religion) that tells us that life began when lighting, at incalculable odds, struck premordial mud planted by aliens from another galaxy, who were similarly spawned (still waiting for explanations of how the lightning, mud, alien lighting, etc., originated) . . . and Bill Maher ridicules the talking snake??? Ha! :)

    — Smiley    Aug 13, 02:24 PM    #

15. #14. Science: a belief system that requires empirical evidence before assigning the words “fact” or “truth” to any datum. The words “fact” and “truth” are used in very imprecise ways in this definition. In fact, for science, there is no datum generally believed to be “fact” or “truth” that cannot be immediately dismissed and/or revised based on new, empirical evidence.

    Science is neutral on religion, since religious “truths,” which are supernatural, cannot be supported by empirical evidence. When people perceive that religion and science are in conflict, it is virtually always because a religious belief system has strayed into areas where empirical evidence casts doubt on a religious tenet.

    — JS OBrien    Aug 13, 03:34 PM    #

16. In reading the opinion, it is interesting to note that Calvary failed to disclose expert opinions in a timely manner — which affected their ability to create a factual contest for consideration by a jury. The expert opinions they did manage to submit were inadequate to support that the courses met minimum UC criteria and thereby fully rebuff UC’s experts. Strong experts that fully addressed the curricular questions would have served them better and perhaps gotten them over the Summary Judgment hurdle — maybe they were simply unable to find anyone who could credibly say their classes met the requirements.

    — babylawyer    Aug 13, 03:47 PM    #

17. I challenge Smiley (#14) to cite one article in one reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journal which argues that “life began when lighting, at incalculable odds, struck premordial mud planted by aliens from another galaxy, who were similarly spawned”
    One, just one.

    — richard    Aug 13, 03:51 PM    #

18. JSOB: Still waiting on the “empirical evidence” relating to the lightning, premordial mud, & the rest of the origin of beginning that “science” cannot explain. Religion-neutral? Nah, any belief system in which the practitioners define what qualifies as “evidence” qualifies as religion (with a small “r”) by default. Not advocating for the religious-based schools mentioned in the article (their academic quality may be lousy for all I know), just pointing out some of the outrageous hypocracy that characterizes some of their opponents. Assuming that a religion-oriented school lacks academic rigor exposes a bigotry that too often gets a pass in the age of political “correctness.”
    As for Richard, who decides what’s reputable, you? Get lost :)

    — Smiley    Aug 13, 04:00 PM    #

19. Smiley! Well said. It also amazes how those who believe life started by perhaps some microorganisms traveling from Mars via asteroid cannot comprehend that they need as much faith to believe in that as anyone who believes in God! As for peer-reviewed “reputable” documentation that Richard requires, you are again, right, Smiley, for one only need to look at the bias provided in many of these so-called journals to see the flimsy evidence used to support their faith-based conclusions on how life on Earth evolved. Here’s a good peer-reviewed piece for Richard that has fallen apart in just 20 years: the carbon 14 dating of the Shroud, which even Oxford has now been forced to admit is questionable. But I’m sure this will set a fire to the writing skills of all the faith-based carbon 14 believers out there. By the way, how many of you have actually hung around to prove and ensure with “empirical evidence” that the 50,000-year half-life cycle of any molecule is correct and did not encounter some anomaly along the way that affected its actual life span that you had not counted on, understood, observed, researched, or calculated as a possibility? The point is, those who are Christian bashers, who apparently seem to run the academic world today, should not be calling the kettle black as so much of what they believe in is also based on faith-based “guesstimates” that continually change based on the whimsical theories of those who get big fat “funding.” Anyone for life beginning on Earth via organisms from Mars, please line up on the left; the rest of us will get back to reality.

    — steve    Aug 13, 04:33 PM    #

20. Umm, Smiley, we’re all waiting on empirical evidence for what science cannot yet explain. That’s what makes it science.

    — BertW    Aug 13, 04:36 PM    #

21. The problem with faith-based education is that it causes the learner to both receive and send information through the filters of that faith, thus negating any hope for dialogue as faith—especially evangelical faith—is by defiinition dogmatic. Bottom line: If you want to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or whatever, you need to leave your faith at home because, quite honestly, your superstitions and biases are killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and we rationalists and secularists just don’t have time to listen to your bullsh*t—-especially in class!

    — Candyfloss    Aug 13, 04:41 PM    #

22. Smiley, While we are all waiting on an explanation for the beginning of life that can satisfy scientific standards, maybe you could review your religious knowledge and tell the rest of us about lightning, talking snakes and other galaxies. Isn’t lightning a weapon of Zeus? a result of his anger? And aren’t meteors really fireballs thrown by allah at djinn and desert devils who are attempting to spy on and overhear his conversations? And what about talking snakes and early man? Does religion offer us any evidence that snakes date back about 130 million years ago? Which language did mankind and snakes have in common about 130 million years ago? As for other galaxies, there are none mentioned in any religious book that I am aware of…the Koran clearly posits that the earth’s moon is farther away from the earth than other stars…the bible states that the moon is “a light” and calls it “round.” It is neither. These points are supported by empirical, testable evidence…the questions you pose point to nothing. Your assertions about science being a belief system are laughable. When was the last time that you updated your scientific outlook? Did you, for example, even know that the Big Bang is no longer the theory for how the universe began? Are you caught up on your science enough to make such outrageous claims (and spelling errors, by the way) or are you just not ashamed about espousing antequated views on contemporary subjects?

    — Darren Aversa    Aug 13, 04:48 PM    #

23. Darren – the only thing laughable is that you feel so provoked as to spend so much time on your voluminous posting – Ha! No doubt, you bring great pride to your fellow church-goers – oops, I meant peers!
    Obviously, the deeper meaning of my comments (steve’s, too) escapes you, but at least I threw in the typos to give pseudo-intellectuals a chance to feel self-important :)

    — Smiley    Aug 13, 05:16 PM    #

24. Hey, candyfloss (love the way you think of yourself!): Your “biases are killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and we rationalists and secularists just don’t have time to listen to your bullsh*t—-especially in class!” Signed, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao.

    — steve    Aug 13, 05:22 PM    #

25. The Big Bang is no longer a theory? Wow, you mean by that it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, or Darren, do you mean that, once again, “pontifical” science had to revise its thinking to comprehend that it did not know jack? Oh, and by the way, while you are on the subject of “typos,” please correct your understanding of how to spell “antiquated.” Later, when you calm down, we’ll discuss the “string theory.” You can string us all along with your omnipotent concepts and understandings of religion and the infinite Universe. All bow to “pope” Darren, man of a thousand idiotic questions and no answers!

    — steve    Aug 13, 05:44 PM    #

26. Steve, Sounds more like a personal attack, but you didn’t provide any answers or rebuttals to my points. The Big Bang has been revised to fit the factual evidence that has come to light since it was first posited. Now, could you kindly provide examples that contradict my assertions? I’m not trying to “pontificate” and neither is science “pontifical” in any regards. I didn’t expect Smiley to provide any concrete evidence for talking snakes or “Let there be light/gods”, as the creationist story goes. Those who believe in the bible have extremely few facts at their disposal with which to argue. I do, though, expect you to talk about science in an intelligent way. Science changes the facts to fit the evidence, just as stock pickers change their picks on a dime when business conditions change substantially enough to warrant a new view. That would be a clear case of not being dogmatic. That would indicate that science is by no means a belief system. The big three religions haven’t changed their views in 2000 years, give or take a few centuries. Science has changed its view innumerable times…as the saying goes, the view is never different from the pack. Being at the forefront of knowledge has its costs, but clearly those are outweighed by the benefits of being the first to know.
    So, are you feeling up to providing evidence of science not knowing jack? If not, then just re-post here and I’ll gladly answer my own “idiotic” questions about talking snakes, lightning, and other universes.

    — Darren Aversa    Aug 13, 06:35 PM    #

27. Steve, To be precise, the carbon-14 dating of the cloth’s sample is NOT in doubt, for it is completely accurate. The issue with the Shroud is more concerned with the areas that were not sampled. While carbon-14 dating does have its limts, please remember that it is not the only radioactive dating method used. As I have pointed out before on chronicle.com, religious apologists have tried many times over to show that carbon-14 dating of rock has the earth’s age at some ridiculously young number. As is so often the case, people did not know of Argon-argon dating, potassium-argon dating, or Rubidium-Strontium dating techniques that are also used to determine ages. Science has accordingly adjusted its estimates of ages tofit the new data. Now, as for your seemingly personal attacks, do you mean to say that science doesn’t change its mind often enough? I’d argue that science is incredibly flexible, when the evidence is in flux. A theory becomes a theory only after rigorous testing. This, of course, would exclude science from the realm of dogma and belief systems, which don’t change (as the biology textbook suggested) no matter how much evidence is placed in front of them. Apologists just have little to stand on in front of modernity.
    Now, perhaps you’d like to take a shot at explaining or rebutting my questions. Were they really that idiotic or was the content really that laughable (i.e. talking snakes)?

    — Darren Aversa    Aug 13, 06:50 PM    #

28. This is another reason many people find lots of Americans insufferable—lots of pontification especially about their christianity—by the way Hitler (Roman Catholic and a fan of Luther) was a christian as was Stalin—Georgian Orthodox. Try reading transcripts of Hitler speeches up until his death. None of those despots were rationalists or secularists by any stretch of the imagination. Second point, most of the above cannot distinguish between belief and faith. Faith (the basis of most of the main religons) is believing something with no empirical evidence—which is is generally pretty useless for describing pretty much any phenomena in the universe.

    — john    Aug 13, 07:03 PM    #

29. By the way some of the early posts on this thread were some of the best and most coherent statements relative to christianity by christians I have seen—congratulations. Gave me some faith in segments of humanity.

    — john    Aug 13, 07:06 PM    #

30. Steve,

    Like most laymen, you misunderstand the meaning of the word “theory” in a scientific context, which is all that matters in this particular discussion. You are using “theory” and “hypothesis” as synonyms, and they are not. The Big Bang Theory, Theory of Gravity, Theory of Evolution, et. al. are very grand things, indeed. There needs to be much data, all confirmed, and all fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in order to make a whole picture. The more pieces that fit, the more likely it is that the emerging picture is “fact.”

    String Theory is not science at all because, as yet, no one has figured out how to test it. It is mathematical theory, and very interesting math, at that, but until it can be tested, it is not, and cannot be, “science.”

    — JS OBrien    Aug 13, 07:18 PM    #

31. Smiley,

    In order to effectively attack science, you must first understand it. The issue of how the first organisms on Earth came to have life, however that may be defined, is simply a hypothesis. Hypotheses are not considered to have anything like 95% confidence, which is what is generally required for any level of relative certainty in the scientific community. The Theory of Evolution does not require that the piece describing how the first life came to be be nailed down at any given point any more than the Theory of Gravity requires us to know exactly how gravity is manufactured, how it bends space, it’s relationship with the other three forces, etc.

    As for “belief systems,” you’re headed down the deconstructionist path that has been followed by countless millions before you. Help yourself. I have no interest in going there, because the destination is not useful.

    I will freely admit that it might not be internal combustion that drives my car’s engine. It might be demons. And I will freely admit that I can’t be 100% certain that the empirical evidence I have that it really is internal combustion may be a figment of my “belief system” and/or imagination. I will even admit that the entire physical world around me may be illusory.

    And having admitted that, I will go back to studying useful things and making decisions based on empirical evidence.

    I see no value in a demon-haunted world.

    — JS OBrien    Aug 13, 07:26 PM    #

32. Darren Aversa (comment #22) incorrectly claims that “the Big Bang is no longer the theory for how the universe began”. That’s an awfully bad way to argue that someone else is scientifically illiterate.

    — CU Alum    Aug 13, 08:10 PM    #

33. To CU alum et al, I should have elaborated and said that the Big Bang has been supplemented by Big Crunch ideas, multiverse theory and the like…just the “bang” part no longer suffices in theory. My apologies.

    — Darren Aversa    Aug 13, 08:55 PM    #

34. Darren Aversa –

    The Big Crunch is a theory about how the universe will end, not about how it began. Moreover, it presupposes the existence of the Big Bang.

    The idea that there might be multiverses is more of a hypothesis than a theory. It’s not even a testable hypothesis, at least with any technology we might plausibly develop in the foreseeable future. But here again the hypothesis is not about how the universe began and does not contradict the Big Bang theory.

    The bottom line is that the Big Bang is the only widely-accepted scientific explanation for the origin of the universe. Your claim that it “is no longer the theory for how the universe began” implies either that it has been rejected or that a different theory has supplanted it. Neither of these things is true.

    — CU Alum    Aug 13, 09:02 PM    #

35. I should add to my prior comment (#34) that most cosmologists now reject the Big Crunch theory in light of recent discoveries. The theory said that the universe’s expansion (which dates from the Big Bang) was slowing down due to the gravitational pull of all the matter in the universe and that it would eventually reverse, ending with all matter (though not all space) again crammed into a singularity.

    Many cosmologists did not believe the pull of gravity would be strong enough to cause a Big Crunch. Some of these doubters believed the universe would continue to expand forever though the rate of expansion would slow, while others believed there was just enough matter to halt the expansion but not enough to reverse it.

    Recently, however, scientists discovered that the rate of expansion is actually increasing, not decreasing. If this is correct, it seems there will never be a Big Crunch and that the universe will instead end in “heat death” (with all matter having deteriorated into energy and all energy having been dissipated into space). The force which is accelerating the expansion has not been identified, and is presently known as “dark energy”.

    Caveat: I’m just a layman. My explanations of these concepts is oversimplified at the least and may be incorrect in some regards.

    — CU Alum    Aug 13, 09:17 PM    #

36. Smiley, Steve, and others should admit we’re all scientists at least some moments in our daily lives — or do you take your car to a faith-based repair shop? I’d prefer a mechanic who can formulate a hypothesis, test his predictions, and revise the diagnosis accordingly until the problem is fixed, don’t you all?

    — Cal    Aug 13, 09:44 PM    #

37. I attended a private Christian school because I was orphaned. It was both academically rigorous AND taught Christian values. Then I attended a small denominational liberal arts college. Both of these institutions had fine faculties and neither victimized the students. Receiving a faith-based education need not be synonymous with indoctrination and a lack of rigor; the kids are indeed the victims and the parents and faculty are ultimately responsible. What I got out of biology was that science has yet to come up with an empirical explanation for everything, but never did I hear “If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.” What I heard from believers was, “God may act through ordinary circumstances, which ordinary circumstances are empirically observed and scientifically explained.” So a plague of locusts can be scientifically explained, but God can be seen to have been present in the infestation. Agree or disagree, but this idea is not an attack on empiricism or science or academic rigor. The problem occurs when religious texts are interpreted literally and used in place of science.

    — Paul    Aug 14, 11:01 AM    #

38. JSOB: Your (& other) attempts to paint people of faith with the “living-in-a-demon-haunted world” brushstroke would offend me if it weren’t so absurdly cartoonish. For those struggling with interpreting the sublime, this thread demonstrates the struggle to which I alluded with my earlier postings: One religion (small r) trying to supplant another as the societal standard. No, not an all or nothing proposition, the difference between the two, though, is that one tolerates the other while the other does not. And, yes, john’s right about Hitler being into religion . . . a faithful Darwinist, he tragically practiced his science/religion (pick one) on millions of innocent victims. Surely, the anti-religious hate speech contained in a few of these postings would bring a grin to Joe Stalin’s mug, thankfully, though, this is not the Soviet Union . . . not yet anyway. However, I’m sure such efforts will persist :)

    — Smiley    Aug 14, 01:20 PM    #

39. Quote:
    “The problem with faith-based education is that it causes the learner to both receive and send information through the filters of that faith, thus negating any hope for dialogue as faith—especially evangelical faith—is by defiinition dogmatic. Bottom line: If you want to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or whatever, you need to leave your faith at home because, quite honestly, your superstitions and biases are killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and we rationalists and secularists just don’t have time to listen to your bullsh*t—-especially in class!”

    — Candyfloss Aug 13, 04:41 PM #

    So #21 I guess “Liberal Bias 101” is the prerequesite for all of your classes.

    — Dallis Miller    Aug 14, 01:58 PM    #

40. Smiley,

    As I said previously, you must first understand science before you can apply useful criticism. In addition, I would read a fair amount of philosophy before you start using deconstructionist arguments around empirical evidence to make your points. Most of what you say has already been relegated to irrelevance by men much smarter than you or I. The fact that you don’t seem to know this doesn’t exactly bolster your arguments.

    But, by all means, let’s construct a thought experiment. Let’s each design a bridge spanning a river. I get to use empirical data about the strength and flexibility of various materials, weight, torque, and wind stresses, past failures and why they occurred, water depth, flow, high-water flow, maximum loads, millienia of data gathered from observation and testing, and the like. You get to use whatever faith you have in whatever God you worship.

    I think my belief system is likely to yield a better bridge, but you may disagree.

    I wonder. If you work in business, do you make recommendations to the management layers above you based on simple faith that you are right, or do you use empirical evidence to make your point? And if you do use empirical evidence, do you think your superiors are benighted?

    — JS OBrien    Aug 14, 06:44 PM    #

41. From www.ffrf.org/fttoday/back/hitler.html

    “Mein Kampf: “Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s Work.”

    “Hitler said it again at a Nazi Christmas celebration in 1926: “Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews … The work that Christ started but could not finish, I — Adolf Hitler — will conclude.”

    “In a Reichstag speech in 1938, Hitler again echoed the religious origins of his crusade. “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”

    “Hitler regarded himself as a Catholic until he died. “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so,” he told Gerhard Engel, one of his generals, in 1941.

    “Distrust, fear and hatred of Jews was a lesson Hitler learned early in life. It was taught by his church and reinforced by his culture.”

    Now, Smiley, I await your quotes from Hitler where he explains that he was a “faithful Darwinist.” I mean, the man loved to talk; there must have been something.

    — GalapagosPete    Aug 15, 12:36 AM    #

42. Darren,

    I am a Christian who has little time for fundies myself, but it appears that your objection to religion is just as dogmatic as is some fundies’ rejection of science. You stated that the major religions haven’t changed in about 2000 years. That’s just not true. It flatly ignores much change in viewpoints within many denominations. Of course, you are free to reject religion on whatever terms you wish, and it is much easier to rebut a faith perspective from a scientific one. But don’t accuse others of having a blind spot while you clearly have a very big one yourself.

    And I’ll thank you to stop generalizing to all religious people in your argument with Smiley, et al. You’ve got a sharp wit, but you need to work on your aim. Not even all Christians agree with Smiley’s and Steve’s view on the origins of man. My wife attended Catholic school from K-12. She was taught evolution all along the way. As for myself, I’m skeptical that humans came about in exactly the way the Bible tells us, but I’m just as skeptical that it came about exactly the way Darwinian evolution tells us.

    I’ve also got to point out that I find it odd that you would capitalize “Koran” but not “bible.” Since it seems to be a pattern with you, I assume it’s not just an oversight. Do you really have to stick it to us Christians any way you can? Sure both the Bible and the Koran my just be literature to you, and maybe not even very good literature at that, but they are both titles (or partial titles, in the case of the Bible), and any lit prof worth his paycheck ought to know how to treat those titles. Perhaps this is just more of your dogma coming through. If nothing else, at least acknowledging your own dogmas should give you more credibility when criticizing the dogmatic beliefs of others.

    — Tracy G.    Aug 15, 10:52 AM    #

43. There are idiots and then there are idiots. But “galapagos pete” seems to be in his own category of moron who will accept any propaganda fed to him. So, because of your idiocy and trying to make anyone believe Hitler was a “Catholic,” here is some Truth for you to ponder and for others who have a little more brains and sense than you to read: “There is no question that Hitler was a Nazi. Nazism was clearly his most important religious affiliation, not in the positive way the word “religion” is often defined, but in the general sense that any philosophy or belief system which is most important in a person’s life is that person’s “religion,” regardless of whether or not it is universally labelled as a “religion.” Hitler was also born into a Catholic family, but he rejected Catholicism and in most ways he rejected Christianity in general. On occasion we have read people claim that “Hitler was a Catholic” or “Hitler was a Christian” in a meaningful way, implying that Christianity or Catholicism was the primary impetus for his Nazi reign. Such claims are simply vitriolic attacks occasionally voiced by ideologically-inclined anti-Christian, anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi people. Historians agree that Hitler was pointedly anti-Christian. We are not aware of any published sources from acknowledged academic historians or writers that identify Adolf Hitler as significantly Catholic or Christian in his motivations as an adult. If anybody writes to us to point out such resources, we will be happy to cite them and refer to them here. One detailed publication that describes how Hitler was anti-Christian was written by Jewish writer Julie Seltzer Mandel, as described by Matt Kaufman (http://boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000541.html):

    I vividly remember a high school conversation with a friend I’d known since we were eight. I’d pointed out that Hitler was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, but my friend absolutely refused to believe it. No matter how much evidence I presented, he kept insisting that Nazi Germany was an extension of Christianity, acting out its age-old vendetta against the Jews. Not that he spoke from any personal study of the subject; he just knew. He’d heard it so many times it’d become an article of faith – one of those things “everyone knows.”… Well, sometimes myths die hard. But this one took a hit in early January, at the hands of one Julie Seltzer Mandel, a Jewish law student at Rutgers whose grandmother survived internment at Auschwitz.
    A couple of years ago Mandel read through 148 bound volumes of papers gathered by the American OSS (the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA) to build the case against Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. Now she and some fellow students are publishing what they found in the journal Law and Religion (www.lawandreligion.com)… The upshot: a ton of evidence that Hitler sought to wipe out Christianity just as surely as he sought to wipe out the Jews.

    The first installment (the papers are being published in stages) includes a 108-page OSS outline, “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” …how the Nazis – faced with a country where the overwhelming majority considered themselves Christians – built their power while plotting to undermine and eradicate the churches, and the people’s faith… From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within party ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power… By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church… Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading

    …the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

    From: Jadwiga Biskupska (Cornell University), “Hitler & Triumph of the Will: A Nazi Religion in the Catholic Style” in Undergraduate Quarterly, September/November 2004, page 147 (URL: http://www.undergradquarterly.com/EJournal/2004Q2/Biskupska.pdf):
    Catholicism and Nazism have a more complicated relationship than some might think. Hitler both despised and admired various aspects of the Roman Catholic Church. Though the Nazi movement was superficially areligious, even anti-religious, the Nazi’s greatest piece of propaganda and self-aggrandizement, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 film about the Nuremberg Party Rally, Triumph of the Will, is in many ways profoundly religious. The film both makes use of Catholic religious imagery and draws on the Catholic sacramental tradition to give dignity and legitimacy to its construction of Adolf Hitler as the “god” of the Nazi movement… Since the beginning, Catholicism and Nazism had an uncomfortable coexistence. They jarred long before Riefenstahl began filming Hitler’s rally in the summer of 1934… The Concordat, along with many other more famous agreements and treaties signed by the Fuehrer, was quickly violated, and the Church was ineffective in protecting Catholics from all manner of religious and cultural harassment. Alfred Rosenberg, the closest Nazism as an ideology ever came to having a philosopher, was consistently and virulently anti-Catholic… Hitler himself was not purely or simply anti-Catholic or anti-Church, and certainly not so before his rise to power. He was a baptized Catholic, as was his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a number of other prominent members of his administration. Interestingly, though both men rejected their Catholic faith and recognized that they had excommunicated themselves, neither ever formally left the Church. In his extensive, often contradictory writings and “table-talk,” Hitler reveals an ambivalent attitude toward the Catholic Church. As an institution on German soil, he is very much opposed to it, and he ridicules the teachings of Church fathers and the practice of the Catholic faith… he detested the doctrines, of the Roman Church… Institutionalized religion, in Hitler’s view, was a waning phenomenon.” Perhaps, pete, ol’ boy, you should look at how Hitler loved the concepts of Margaret Sanger and believed in the dogma of your galapagos religion: survival of the fittest. It’s amazing that your feeble brain cannot recognize that no matter what Hitler may have said or did, or what others may claim he said or did all violate the Truth of Christianity and are in themself, including the persecution of Jews or any other group of people, ANTI-CHRIST! Perhaps, in your stupidity, you missed that part.

    — steve    Aug 15, 08:38 PM    #

44. Tracy G., I only “stick it to” (your words) religion when religion purposefully muddles facts. I thank you for your comments, especially those about me being dogmatic. As for the bible/Koran issue, I’ll start putting the koran with a lower-case k from now on as well, as that book is a third-rate copy of other literature that does not deserve half of the reverence (I assume) it garners in social circles.

    For my own edification (I’m being serious), could you kindly highlight which denominations/religions have changed substantially over the past 200o years? Which, for example, have acknowledged that there is no such thing as a soul, that intercessory prayer has zero effect, that God didn’t have a clue about the order of things (grass, cows, snakes, mankind) or geometry or the conservation of mass and energy. Which denominations have openly accepted that the bible’s authors simply borrowed many of their stories from other stories (say, the Epic of Gilgamesh) or that Jesus Christ was well-aware of the fact that he was following a tired pattern (i.e. born of a virgin, resurrected into heaven, performing miracles) of mythologic figures and gods? I could go on, but I politely will not. I would be interested in knowing your thoughts though, as these examples were the first to come to mind when I made my initial assertion.

    — Darren Aversa    Aug 18, 08:02 PM    #

45. No the Calvary Christian kids are usually a joke, mostly from the schools and the parents who send the kids to the schools being of low educational attainment… In this particular case, the university had decided the courses basically weren’t broad enough in relating to the general subject matter to “count.” Perhaps the CC schools could consider teaching actual biology, say, or even American history from some perspectice outside of the American Dream swill?…

    — Legend    Aug 19, 05:26 AM    #

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