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The main reason behind Creationism in schools.

Warrior1461

Critical Thinker
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Apr 2, 2011
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The main reason why the christian right is pushing this in schools is for one REASON. basic survival of their own brand of religion.

Ever since Darwin their world view is getting hammered by society at large. For being scientifically incorrect because it is, not only that the young earth creationism is also theologically incorrect and based on many ideas such as flood geology that were abandoned by even the most devout christian geologists in the early 19th century.

Creationism in schools like to them like the card check law is to the labor unions. Both groups share one thing in common, both are seeing their numbers drastically dwindle for the past 50 years. One reason was free trade, it got cheaper to ship manufacturing jobs overseas thus those obs unions depend on for members declined. With the coming of birth control and Roe V. Wade the religious right got slammed the biggest since the scopes money trial. Today things could not be more desperate for them, after 911 there are more people who call themselves atheists than people of faith, watching planes fly into buildings and turn 3000 Americans into dust helped, also watching The Vatican cover up Priests raping boys and the constant religious insanity of Iran and the Taliban is not helping. Fact is atheism and free thinking is still growing rapidly. Now we have gays wanting to get married and a public becoming more tolerant and sympathetic to them. All this crazy we see from the Christian right and even the hardcore terrorist Islamics are caused by one thing Desperation. They are a people who's traditional way of life is in the death throes. We are heading to a new way of thinking their ways are obsolete. They will not change anything of their culture to adapt and at least keep the heart of what they believe in intact, because they believe they will be rewarded for their steadfast obedience, that they will get raptured to heaven or saved on judgement day. Only thing they will get in the end is total oblivion. Creationism in schools is just one action in a movement that is desperate to stay alive.
 
This is the reason.

There's no need to speculate--they've come out and said "We're doing this to try to take over your culture". They've stated that their goal is a theocracy.

Ever since Darwin their world view is getting hammered by society at large.
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YEC stopped being an intellectually valid position quite a long time prior to Darwin. Lyelle's Principles of Geology, which was the foundation for Uniformitarianism sensu stricto, was one of the books Darwin brought with him on the Beagle, for example.
 
Because a theocracy is the only way their BS can survive. It was the reason behind the taliban and the 1979 Iran Revolution. These countries were moving towards more western ideas, they traditionalists were being more and more marginalized and squeezed out. We are seeing it with the Christian Right, as their form of religion is losing influence in the USA and Europe.
 
One of the great ironies of YECism is that while they think they're protecting TrueTM Christianity, they're actually doing damage to it. YECism has created more crises of faith than all of Robert Green Ingersoll's activites combined.
 
The OP suggests that society is moving towards a religion free culture. It is probably moving in that direction in the western world but that doesn't mean that a religion free society will happen.

I have never had a good idea about what the percentage of true religious believers was in the current US culture. Clearly a lot of people just go along with religion because it is part of their culture and not because deep down they believe it. Another group probably doesn't think much about the issues at all but is happy enough to just accept whatever cultural views they were born into.

But clearly there is a percentage of true religious believers that have little or no doubt about the particular claims of the religion that they are part of. What percentage of the population is in this group? If these people grew up in a religion free environment would they gradually move towards a religious view of the world anyway? My thought is that a percentage of the population will always be religious and even if you did some sort of experiment where you raised religiously inclined people completely without religion they would still gravitate towards religious type beliefs as they aged.

At one point, I thought that astrology was such an obviously false notion that very few people took it seriously. I seem to have been wrong. Some people just believe in stuff like that. I met somebody the other day claiming that their balance was improved because they were wearing some kind of wrist band. Even if you imagine a religion free culture (which I suspect is impossible given the nature of a human population) there would still be a lot of people believing a lot of weird stuff.

Even people that I would classify as skeptical are subject to the formation of almost non-falsifiable views abetted by various biases that they can't avoid even if they happen to be aware of them.
 
UnrepentantSinner said:
One of the great ironies of YECism is that while they think they're protecting TrueTM Christianity, they're actually doing damage to it. YECism has created more crises of faith than all of Robert Green Ingersoll's activites combined.
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Yup, even for some people brought up in the insular YEC fundamentalist lifestyle and culture, eventually they can no longer reconcile attempting to mentally shove round pegs into square holes. And once they start to question anything about YEC/fundamentalism, it all pretty much starts to fall apart; hence the reason why these folks are so committed to keeping their young people as ignorant and brainwashed as possible.
 
It also strikes me that many fundamentalists in the United States are starting to get really twitchy about the future, because even they can see the slow progress of U.S. society towards more and more secularism. While about 20% of the U.S. population professes to be irreligious now, among the under 30 demographic that is closer to one-third; couple this with the fact that the most religious people are in the over 60 demographic, and it isn't hard to see that some pretty big changes on the religious landscape are coming.

And the right-wing fundamentalists don't like it, yet they know there's probably nothing they can do to stop it. So I fully expect them to get more desperate, more zealous, more nutty, and more entertaining in the next 10-20 years.
 
Dinwar said:
This is the reason.

There's no need to speculate--they've come out and said "We're doing this to try to take over your culture". They've stated that their goal is a theocracy.

YEC stopped being an intellectually valid position quite a long time prior to Darwin. Lyelle's Principles of Geology, which was the foundation for Uniformitarianism sensu stricto, was one of the books Darwin brought with him on the Beagle, for example.
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I own a book on geology written by a Church of England clergyman who clearly states that the Earth is many millions of years old, and that this does not produce a conflict with religious belief. It considerably predates Darwin.
 
Dinwar said:
This is the reason.
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When I read the OP, the Wedge Strategy was the first thing that popped into my mind. I also note that their dates and future "achievements" have not exactly been met. Not at all.

The Dover trial still stands out as the YEC Movements great failure, with their star witness Michael Behe coming out of it loking like a gibbering fool..

Norm
 
fromdownunder said:
When I read the OP, the Wedge Strategy was the first thing that popped into my mind. I also note that their dates and future "achievements" have not exactly been met. Not at all.

The Dover trial still stands out as the YEC Movements great failure, with their star witness Michael Behe coming out of it loking like a gibbering fool..

Norm
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The Dover trial reminded me not everyone in the Republican Party (the judge was a Bush appointee) is irrational.
 
Creationists criticize science, evolution, biology and methodological naturalism as if they're tools of the devil, and then try to cloak their crackpot creation fables that don't stand up to scientific scrutiny at all with credibility by shoehorning them into public school science classes. They then complain about the failure of US public schools to get kids up to snuff with the rest of the 1st world on matters of science.

It boggles the mind.

Skeptic Ginger said:
The Dover trial reminded me not everyone in the Republican Party (the judge was a Bush appointee) is irrational.
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True that - I tend to lean center-right politically, and not one of the center-right friends I traffic with supports creationism. Maybe it's a younger-generation thing (which one of the posters above alluded to), because the only young people that I do know who subscribe to this nonsense are brainwashed religious types who were brought up in strict religious households. Everyone else I know thinks it's a joke.

The irony of Judge Jones being a Bush appointee was that the creationists (Discovery Institute folks, especially) in the trial thought that the judge was going to be friendly to their cause and not pay attention to any facts.

So good on the judge for paying attention to facts and not letting religious politics get in the way of science.
 
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Warrior1461 said:
Because a theocracy is the only way their BS can survive. It was the reason behind the taliban and the 1979 Iran Revolution. These countries were moving towards more western ideas, they traditionalists were being more and more marginalized and squeezed out. We are seeing it with the Christian Right, as their form of religion is losing influence in the USA and Europe.
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Point. We've seen this extremism in the GOP during the pres. candidate process: Santorum, Bachmann, Palin, and extending to commentators like Limbaugh et al. Their foaming-at-the-mouth theocratic moralizing is the desperate response to being "marginalized and squeezed out"... just as with Taliban and Iran.
 
Would the Christian Right love a theocracy? No doubt. Is that their main concern right now? No. They are simply trying to tread water, no matter what brave face they are putting up in public. They have lost the younger generations - people in their 40's are less religious than their elders, people in their 30's are hardly religious at all relative to their elders, people in their 20's are openly scornful of the teachings of their elders, and kids in their teens don't know or care what religion is.

It has become apparent to me for years now that when a certain generation in America begins to die off, everything changes. Not only will the last hardcore fundamentalist generation die off - all the younger gens who are more or less paying lip service to the faith will lose that last reason to act more devout than they really are.

Americans will still - to a lesser degree - identify as "having faith". That faith will simply be less organized and insular. it's hard to keep up a culture of deep faith when the sons and daughters of stout baptists marry Catholic's and Methodists, and their slightly confused children then go off and marry Jews, Hispanics, Mormons, blacks, and (gasp) atheists.

The Christian Right is doomed and they know it. The Great Melting Pot has been accelerating out of control for a generation now and there will be no going back.
 
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davefoc said:
I have never had a good idea about what the percentage of true religious believers was in the current US culture. Clearly a lot of people just go along with religion because it is part of their culture and not because deep down they believe it.
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The Richard Dawkins Foundation commissioned a poll recently to look religious belief in the U.K. It found things similar to what you are saying here.

They wanted to look at the reasons for people's self-reported religious affiliation in Britain's latest census. The survey found that it is too simplistic to claim a vast majority of Britons are Christians for religious reasons.

Read a summary here:
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644941-rdfrs-uk-ipsos-mori-poll-1-how-religious-are-uk-christians

I'd be interested to know if anyone is going to do the same thing for the U.S. I think a similar clarification would be found.
 
SonOfLaertes said:
It has become apparent to me for years now that when a certain generation in America begins to die off, everything changes. Not only will the last hardcore fundamentalist generation die off - all the younger gens who are more or less paying lip service to the faith will lose that last reason to act more devout than they really are.
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Personally, I think a lot of politicians pay lip service to the anti-evolution stance. They can't ALL be that bull-headedly ignorant about how the natural world works (at least, I hope).

I think they just say, "well, there's a controversy," because the votes of so many uneducated yokels are on the line.

The Christian Right is doomed and they know it. The Great Melting Pot has been accelerating out of control for a generation now and there will be no going back.
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Haven't you heard? "Melting Pot" is now politically incorrect. The preferred term is "Salad Bowl".
 
I've long maintained that if you were able to question large numbers of people of faith in depth, you'd find that a rather large percentage of them would have only a rather fuzzy idea of their particular sect's core beliefs, and that further they would have put together a personal amalgum of ideas that they like, and would have ignored the ones they don't.

As in the typical gay-hate, wherein the sect or individuals will freely quote Leviticus or other sources about prosriptions against homosexuality, yet utterly ignore the same text's proscriptions against all manner of other things as being "quaint" or "things were different back then."
I agree that the more fundamentalist sects may be in trouble or may have to consider change; recently a group of researchers at a prominent Evangelical university released a paper saying that they could no longer support the idea of biblical literacy in regards to Genesis; the evidence for evolution being so overwhelming and the story being so obviously a creation myth.
As well, consider Francis Collins, a microbiologist heavily involved with the Human Genome Project, yet who maintains his stance as an Evangelical. Yet, he maintains that YEC is nonsense, that the bible is allegorical, that Evolution is "How God did it.", and so forth.
 
davefoc said:
Even if you imagine a religion free culture (which I suspect is impossible given the nature of a human population) there would still be a lot of people believing a lot of weird stuff.
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You do not need to imagine, you can see. Japanese, Dutch, and Scandinavian cultures are pretty much religion-free by now. Ireland is not (yet), but experienced the most incredible turnaround on religion so far in history. And yes, plenty of people in these cultures believe in "a lot of weird stuff".
MattusMaximus said:
It also strikes me that many fundamentalists in the United States are starting to get really twitchy about the future, because even they can see the slow progress of U.S. society towards more and more secularism. While about 20% of the U.S. population professes to be irreligious now, among the under 30 demographic that is closer to one-third; couple this with the fact that the most religious people are in the over 60 demographic, and it isn't hard to see that some pretty big changes on the religious landscape are coming.

And the right-wing fundamentalists don't like it, yet they know there's probably nothing they can do to stop it. So I fully expect them to get more desperate, more zealous, more nutty, and more entertaining in the next 10-20 years.
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I agree with everything you wrote except last sentence. I see nothing entertaining about right-wing fundamentalists, and a lot of things scary. Yes they are doomed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the meantime. Up to and including nuclear war -- low probability, but after all, they are pretty much the only people who think it is (or can be) a positive thing.
 
Mark6 said:
You do not need to imagine, you can see. Japanese, Dutch, and Scandinavian cultures are pretty much religion-free by now. Ireland is not (yet), but experienced the most incredible turnaround on religion so far in history. And yes, plenty of people in these cultures believe in "a lot of weird stuff".
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Japanese culture is still very dominated by religion, both culturally and politically. Japan does have a rather vocal minority of right-wing extremists who use State Shinto as a basis for many of their demands. Granted, with a nod to the OP, it hasn't affected their educational system all that much.
 
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