Journal Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: Peace in our time. 4
This has garnered lots of comments along the lines of "Great, now schoolkids in TN can give answers based on Islam / Buddhism / Hinduism / FSMism and get full credit and there's nothing they can do about it! Be careful what you ask for, fundies! Hah hah hah!"
It does not work that way. Here's how it will work. Religious answers which will be acceptable, and more generally, religious challenges to school authority which will be acceptable, will be those based in Christianity, specifically fundamentalist Protestantism. And students who profess other beliefs will be even more ostracized than they already are. This is what the sponsors of the bill wish to achieve, and if the bill becomes law and survives the inevitable court challenges, it is what they will achieve. To think anything else is naivete of the highest and most dangerous order
Precedent says otherwise. (Score:2)
The justice system in the US has quite clearly demonstrated time and time again that no public policy will be allowed to selectively exclude rel
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This is a quite different policy Daniel is talking about. It's not about proselytizing or distributing the public school equivalent of Chick tracts, it's about the inclusion of theological discourse as part of the educational process.
So, if the teacher asks the seventh grade class, "Why was the Civil War fought?" and a student answers, "Because God was angry with America for its fornicating ways," it will have to be accepted.
This is from the story in the Tennessee paper:
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My challenge remains unmet, show me a precedent from recent decades that demonstrates that this is anything more than paranoi
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The more I think about it, the more I think you're probably right. As soon as someone steps up and answers a science question, "..because Allah" the whole thing will be tossed out.
Except that the communities where this law will be most applicable don't really cotton to muslims or pagans or pastafarians. These are mainly Christian communities, bible belt, and