Re: I am puzzled.
It is not being taught that life "poofed" out of nowhere. It is being taught that life formed from the very basic building blocks when the planet was in its youngest stages of life. The theory of evolution is based on decades of work and research, and countless thousands of examples of tangeable fact, things you can hold in your hand. Evolution is based on what is seen, what is felt. <br /><br />Intelligent design is based on someone saying it happened while providing little more than speculation that it actually went that way. You can pick up any work of fiction and tell enough people its fact and eventually people will think its fact. Just look at every urban legend out there.<br /><br />I am fine with intelligent design being a part of ones faith, and being a part of Sunday school ciriculum, but teaching it in mainstream school along with evolution only leads to confusion. Kids are left with trying to figure out if life came from a primordial ooze or Jesus rode dinosaurs to church. That is only doing a diservice to our children. I know if that was going on in my school when I was a kid I would probably beg to be homeschooled until the school pulled its collective head out of its arse.<br /><br />It is our job to prepare our youth to be independant adults who are a positve functioning member or society, not to figure out more ways to push views onto them or distort their viewpoints. Just what do you think will happen to the future of science if our children are not taught proper science. Why should kids strive to be a member of the scientific community if they are taught that everything we know is bollocks and just turn to the appropriate page in the Bible for all the answers? Our young are not able to fully sift through what is crap and what is not, they just take it all in, believing everything they are told by the adults. To take advantage of that by pushing an agenda is absolutely abhorant, and is a shameful example of what society as a whole is turning into.<br /><br />We would still be in the dark ages if it wasn't for science. If we continue the path we are taking with this steady Jesusification of this country and the dismisal of scientific research and fact, we will continue to fall behind the rest of the world, and become a third world nation. Is that really what we want? <br /><br />It is apples and oranges comparing this issue to Pro Choice. Pro choice means you have the choice to have an abortion or not. Teaching evolution and intelligent design is not giving kids a choice, it is confusing the heck out of them, and they will learn nothing, becoming even less educated than our competitors in the rest of the world. You don't see Japan having this issue, they teach what is needed to function in todays world. <br /><br />Life started as a chemical reaction of basic elements that formed into basic single cell organisms. there is nothing poof about that at all. It is something that can be shown to occur in a laboratory setting. When you can show me an example of intelligent design where an unseen diety spontaniously created a complex living organism, then I'll believe it. That is more the example of "poof" than anything evolution speaks of.<br /><br />I am not trying to insult anyone, I am just trying to reinforce the fact that we as a whole owe it to our children to do the right thing and teach them in a consistant, intelligent manner, not in a confusing ill-informed way that is based purely on emotion and the "flavor of the day".<br /><br />Keep the church stuff in church people, you aren't going to convert everyone no matter how hard you try, you are only going to just push more people away and cause more division, more Us VS Them. Is that what you really want? This whole thing is exactly why I am not religious, just remember that.
