The New Republic

In 2011 Tennessee also ended collective bargaining for its public school teachers, in favor of the Orwellian sounding "collaborative conferencing" so my guess is the next generation of legislators will be equally ignorant.

- Pnaut

April 11, 2012 at 4:03pm

77% of Jews believe in evolution, but only 58% of Catholics, 51% of mainline protestants, and 24% of evangelical protestants. A very odd breakdown considering that creationism is in "our book" and not in "your book", as Lewis Black would say.

- rayward

April 11, 2012 at 4:06pm

In Sunday's New York Times, Ross Douthat wrote the following: "In this atmosphere, religious differences are more likely to inspire baroque conspiracy theories, whether it’s the far-right panic over an Islamified United States or the left-wing paranoia about a looming evangelical-led theocracy." Seems to me this is yet another example of a conservative NY Times columnist making the false equivalency argument. So-called "left-wing"* concerns about theocratic tendencies are based on real legislation being introduced and passed, actual pastors claiming that we are a Christian nation, etc. This development in Tennessee is just one example. (Of course the right-wing paranoia is also leading to crazy anti-Islam legislation, lawsuits against mosques being built, etc. So the fears of us lefties about the rise of right-wing theocracy are quite well-founded, I'd say.) *Labelling these fears as "left-wing" is simply another way to intimate that it's a paranoid, fringe view, not something that a good chunk of Americans feel but I don't think this is accurate, given that large numbers of independents are also turned off at the recent efforts of right-wing Christians to impose their views on the rest of the country.

- shellski

April 11, 2012 at 6:23pm

In every instance regarding prayer in school, prayer at graduation, including the Bible in the curriculum, as well as state support for religious schools, there has only been one side trying to push their way into public schools repeatedly. That side is the Christian right. Pnaut-I wouldn't confuse the teaching of creationism with anything related to collective bargaining. The latter was only a created "right" at the federal and state levels since the New Deal.

- Sgregory00

April 11, 2012 at 7:39pm

As a person with strong beliefs myself, I would have to say that I strongly believe the Tennessee law is backwards.

- Nusholtz

April 11, 2012 at 8:10pm

Repeat. Ernst Becker Denial of Death. When young, we fornicate and "cheat" death by making little copies of ourselves. When old, we imagine that we don't die and that there is an imaginary land in the sky where wicked are punished and good rewarded. Evolution reminds us that we are animals instead of creatures with "souls." As a white "Jew" whose first girl friend was black, I like soul food and blues and consider myself an oxymoron and ethical nihilist.

- skahn

April 11, 2012 at 11:32pm

Because America has given up fighting over [R]evolution? Fighting over [E]volution will never lead to anything, because it's not a real fight -- it's just a shadowboxing busy-work technique to waste people's time so they don't think about anything important e.g. the economy, jobs shipped overseas, declining wage and salary levels, infrastructure, opportunity, and the like.

- ironyroad

April 11, 2012 at 11:34pm

I feel sorry for the science teachers who will have to implement this idea.

- propjoe

April 12, 2012 at 9:19am

ironyroad I think its more like Rove's bringing Republican votes to the polls with gay marriage referendums

- Nusholtz

April 12, 2012 at 10:53am

"I feel sorry for the science teachers who will have to implement this idea." They still let science teachers into their schools?? Then it looks like those Tennessee legislators still have some work to do.

- Fishpeddler

April 12, 2012 at 11:15am

"Why are we still fighting over it"? What country have YOU been in? Did you miss the 1980's, where Ronald Reagan joined the Republican Party to a bunch of so-called Religious Conservatives? Did you miss that the fight over Abortion Rights is an attempt by religionists to legislate their morality over the rest of the country? Did you miss that school-boards in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Texas (and now Tennessee) have been "taken over" by evangelicals in order to push this issue in our schools? We're still fighting over it because the Republican Party has been courting the Religious Right, which seeks to combine Church and State in the form of laws covering morality, using the Bible as justification. Of course we're going to fight over this.

- AllanL5

April 12, 2012 at 12:14pm

This is the classic battle between rationality-driven inquiry, and religious-driven dogma. We've been fighting this battle, off and on, since the 1740's when the Enlightenment first brought forth the then radical idea that "Rule is by consent of the Governed". That was radical for the time, because every earlier government was based on the idea that you needed an all-powerful God (or Gods) backing some earthly governmental power, who's power came from their approval by God or his earthly representative. That so-called "Religious Conservatives" are actually arguing for a stance counter to the founding of America, while claiming this is how America was founded, is simply par for the course. But yes, the battle between a superstitious clinging to ignorance, versus science and rationality, is quite an old one.

- AllanL5

April 13, 2012 at 11:35am

I feel sorry for the science teachers who will have to implement this idea. About 30 years ago I was teaching high school English in a non-fundamentalist school district in Oregon. I was astonished to discover that two of the high school biology teachers (who most of the time seemed like intelligent, competent, sane individuals), believed in creationism. Religion seems to drive human beings crazy. Perhaps, human beings are just crazy, period. We now know that whales, crows, octopuses, and apes are quite intelligent. As far as I know, no members of those species are "creationists."

- skahn

April 13, 2012 at 5:24pm

I think that Creationism is a kind of panic reaction. People are desperately hanging on to certainty in a time of economic uncertainty, when social values and the cultural makeup of the country are changing. Could it be related to economic class? Are the near-poor and precariously middle class more likely to fear that their lives are spinning out of control?

- amidut

April 13, 2012 at 7:24pm

Ironically, a true understanding of Darwinian evolution inclines one to political beliefs somewhere from center to right of center. Steven Pinker has made this observation in his brilliant *The Blank Slate*. Contemporary liberals tend to believe in the Blank Slate theory of human nature, that all important human differences are environmental in origin and that genes play at most a minor role. To hear liberals tell it, differences between individuals and groups in status or achievement are due to malice and manipulation on the part of the rich and powerful. (How the rich and powerful got that way is left unexplained.) My point is that when liberals pretend to believe in the well-established truths of evolutionary biology they are being either dishonest or ignorant. No, I'm not talking about "Social Darwinism". I'm talking about biological reality, which is just as alien to liberals as it is to working class people in Tennessee.

- bulbman1066

April 14, 2012 at 3:43am

I feel sorry for the science teachers who will have to implement this idea.

- kpidcoc

April 14, 2012 at 11:03am

No one has referred to the Dover, PA, case in 2005, in which such a mandate, passed at the local level by a school board, led to an extensive bench trial in which the conservative judge not only declared that "teaching the controversy" was a veiled attempt to teach religion--based on a number of cases that had set the precedent for this conclusion--but also castigated the school board members for wasting the time and resources of their community in such a doomed fight. Part of his ire resulted from the clear evidence that the school board had indeed acted out of an explicit desire to insert religious teachings into public classrooms but had denied this intent in court, technically perjuring themselves. Still, this and the cases that preceded it make it clear that any citizen wishing to challenge any such law would succeed if the funds to launch such a challenge were available. The Dover case is Kitzmiller (can't recall the rest of it, but there is a major Web site that published the complete transcript of the trial and that should show up easily in a search).

- vanderso

April 16, 2012 at 12:40pm

bulbman says "a true understanding of Darwinian evolution inclines one to political beliefs somewhere from center to right of center." Completely disagree with that conjecture. A true understanding of Darwinian evolution doesn't incline one to be right of center or left of center. One wonders if your reading of Pinker led to you misunderstand Darwinian theory as a foundation for "right leaning" political policies when neither genetic or evolutionary actions support such doctrine or explains why the Pope is richer than I. ______ It's interesting because I've never met a right leaning individual that understood the principles laid out in Darwin's theory of evolution beyond "we evolved from apes, natural selection, survival of the fittest" coming from their mouths. Evolutionary biology and theory has jumped considerable as well as more scientists find that the uniqueness of humans is less and less unique. First it was feelings, then language, then tools, then self-awareness, then empathy, then fairness and morality. I suggest checking out Frans de Waal's work on these last three items which tend to illustrate fundamental and innate traits that humans have had for tens of thousands of years. Long before the Good Book was written and we had St. Paul telling us sex was so bad. I can note creationists willing to admit that evolution is possible and indeed does occur at say the micro-level and not-so-macro levels. Heck, they may even accept the scientific evidence that finches did indeed evolve differently over a period of time. Apparently it's the scale factor that throws Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents into a tizzy when it comes to humans. Apparently every other species is capable of evolution but humans according to them just dropped from the heavens fully formed. That this idea is somehow less fantastical than our evolving from lesser primate species. Of course there are Creationists that exhibit no level self-awareness of their fantastical thinking when insisting that God made dinosaur bones to confuse us by strategically placing them around the fossil records. I've been searching the footnotes of that well researched tome of science called the King James Bible for the passage where Eve rides side-saddle around on the back of a velociraptor after being banished from the Garden.

- singlspeed

April 17, 2012 at 5:12pm