“Religion” is a very broad concept under which many different views can be understood. Your last sentence “he/she did it IN SPITE OF religion, not WITH RESPECT TO it.” Does not reflect my previous arguments.I'm still having trouble discerning where you stand on this:
"A teacher that teaches we came from Adam, and not Magilla Gorilla, isn't going to prevent one of her students from going on to hybridize winter wheat or the edible banana, find oil, square a circle, or anything else that is pending discovery."
And if indeed that does happen, how did it, if those kinds of teachers crank out "young poisoned minds"?
I assume what you meant to say was, that if those students ever do hybridize winter wheat or the edible banana, find oil, square a circle, or anything else that is pending discovery, then he/she did it IN SPITE OF religion, not WITH RESPECT TO it.
Some of science’s greatest were notoriously religious (Isaac Newton, Abdu Salaam, Louis Pasteur, Mary Schweitzer, Francis Collins), or even member of the clergy (Gregor Mendel and George Lemaitre were ordained priests). A lot of people testify that the education they received from the Jesuits was very stimulating, including the scientific education. I have no problem recognizing that and will explicitly state that it is counterfactual to pretend that all religionists are anti science.
But under the umbrella of religion are also fundamentalist expressions of it. The conservative Christians, the Taliban, the ultra orthodox Jews. In al my posts in this thread I have referred to the fundamentalist conservative Christians. I have stated that the anti science (and anti knowledge at large) attitude from these fundamentalist Christians is a mainly North American phenomenon that has emerged during the 20th century. I should indeed include fundamentalists like the Taliban that completely dismantled the Afghan education. The fundamentalists create an anti science attitude, anti intellectual attitude and even anti knowledge attitude. I have provided examples of that in a previous post.
"A teacher that teaches we came from Adam, and not Magilla Gorilla, isn't going to prevent one of her students from going on to hybridize winter wheat or the edible banana, find oil, square a circle, or anything else that is pending discovery."
And if indeed that does happen, how did it, if those kinds of teachers crank out "young poisoned minds"?
That teacher will display and spread a distrust of science and scientists. Will discourage children to open a science book. Such a teacher will scare the children that if they “believe in evolution” they are heading to Hell.
That teacher will have expressed the message that correcting mistakes is a sign of weakness (the never changing bible vs scientists that have to change their story continuously) and not a sign of strength. A good science teacher shows (through daily practice) that in science empirical evidence trumps all authority. A religious fundamentalist teacher will propagate the opposite (“God’s own word against that of fallible men” – see displays in the Ark encounter).
A good science teacher shows how much scientific knowledge has already been accumulated and stimulate to study. He will share links for self study and life long improvement. A fundamentalist religious teacher will pretend that scientists can be contradicted by a 5 year old.
So yes, even if such a kid choses a science career – despite the teacher – it will start it with a backlog. It will have to overcome more obstacles than a well prepared student. Sciences are already hard for the well prepared. Imagine the difficulty for those who face extra obstacles.
But prove me wrong. The Theory of Evolution doesn’t state that we descent from gorillas. They are cousins with whom we share an earlier common ancestor. This has been printed in textbooks and evolutionary trees probably decades ago, but apparently you hadn’t adapted your mockery of the ToE to that little factoid yet. Surprise me. Show me that Embedded Age Creationists are capable of processing new (old, actually) information.
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