Stumble it!O’Leary: Prophetess of Misdirection
posted in Intelligent Design by themaiden |O’Leary… comedian, pinball wizard, rising ID star, big fish in Dembski’s very dirty pool, and now…
Imagine that. In nations where the public school systems are increasingly unable to find common ground among competing interest groups, these home schooling menaces want to provide religious and moral instruction to their own children.
O’Leary knows damn well that the objection isn’t to parents providing religious and moral instruction to their kids. Perhaps, as the article says, this is the motivation for homeschooling, but certainly O’Leary knows that she is misdirecting. The problem is that religion and morals is only part of what the kids get taught. The rest of what they get is bad science– wretchedly bad voodoo snake oil garbage.
These students are part of a large, well-organised movement that is empowering parents to teach their children creationist biology and other unorthodox versions of science at home, all centred on the idea that God created Earth in six days about 6000 years ago.
What the kids get is all that science that hasn’t actually been able to pass muster as science.
He is appalled by some home-schooling textbooks, especially those on biology that claim they have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution. “They have gross scientific inaccuracies in them,” he says. “They would not be allowed in any public school in the US, and yet these are the books primarily featured in home-schooling bookstores.”
One such textbook is Science of the Physical Creation from A Beka Book, a leading retailer of home-schooling books based in Pensacola, Florida. It argues: “Evolution is a concept that attempts to free man from God and his responsibility to his Creator.” Alters worries for the students who learn from such texts (see “Book learnin’”). “If they go on to secular university, home-schoolers are in for some major surprises when they get into an introductory biology class.”
The following is enlightening, emphasis mine.
“Christians increasingly have an advantage in the educational enterprise,” he says. “This is evident in the success of Christian home-schooled children, as compared to their government-schooled friends who have spent their time constructing their own truths.”
Let me translate: The government-schooled friends have “constructed their own truths” by actually looking at the evidence and learning about verifiable facts. This is bad. It should be contrasted with what is good– buying wholesale the mythology recorded in a two thousand to twenty-four hundred book.
And yes this does scare me. It scares me every bit as much as it would scare me if doctors were trained to treat patients based upon the humors. It scares me as much as it would scare me to know that the engineer building the city had been well seasoned with the convoluted ‘reasoning’ required to defend such nonsense as the biblical Flood. See, you can’t train your brain to short circuit itself and expect that damage to be restricted only to particular areas. The damage spills over and pollutes the whole pond.
Oh, and you are still getting that ‘materialism‘ thing wrong, Denyse. Think naturalism.
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