Lying to Believe
by Dr. David Eller
I observed the Christian Home Educators of Colorado
rally at the State Capitol on April 8. Please understand that I am
not opposed to home schooling. If a home school can provide a home
teacher who is qualified in every subject at every grade level, fine.
If not
That was not the issue at hand on this day. I heard little
or no discussion of education, and certainly not of science. What
I heard discussed was religion, and specifically the Christian religion.
Of course, people have a right to their religion. But religion is
not education. Nor is the government in the business of promoting
a religious worldview and religious training. |
It would have been hard to discern these facts
that day. Elected public officials like Dave
Schultheis preached to flock about building an
army and creating warriors to transform America.
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What does that have to do with education? And
Bob Schaffer testified that on election day we will
be victorious. I wonder which we he meant. I
doubt it included me. In fact, I doubt it included
many Americans. I wonder if Schultheis, Schaffer,
and others would have showed up and witnessed
passionately at a Jewish Home Educators rally? Or
a Muslim Home Educators rally? Or a Secular
Humanist Educators rally? I bet not. |
Rallies on capital steps tend to be inspiring for
their participants but to have little real impact. Perhaps
much more important and egregious was
the tour of the Museum of Nature and Science
offered by allied organization BC Tours. For a fee,
they take school children to scientific and cultural
venues and out-and-out lie to them about the findings
and methods of science. Westword mentioned
that they peer into the Paleontology Laboratory and
tell students that the workers are making fake fossils
to bury so as to dupe scientists, who will discover
them and perpetuate the myth of evolution. I
wonder how the tour guides know this. Well, actually
I dont wonder, because it is not knowledge,
it is propaganda. Scientists do not fake data, and if
they did, someone would expose them fairly quickly.
Thats what science is: the exposure and
debunking of false claims and facts in the quest for
knowledge. We live for the chance to prove our
colleagues wrong. What is really scary is that these
young minds, unable to distinguish truth from trash,
are being permanently poisoned against science; if
BC Tours is successful, they will never quite trust
scientific claims ever again. Funny how the guides
do not mention all of the mistakes, lies, and contradictions
in religion throughout history.
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Any position that must lie and mislead in order to preserve
its existence does not deserve to exist. If BC Tours is an example
of what passes for education in Christian home schools, then we should
be very concerned. And where is David Horowitz and the state legislature
on the issue? He and they assert you cannot get an education
if you only hear half the story. Where is the scientific, factual,
critical thinking counterbalance to this indoctrination
that they so fear and despise from liberal institutions?
Where is their outrage when it is conservative or Christian indoctrination?
Or is their alleged outrage really hypocritical and disingenuous?
No wonder America is dead last in the industrial world in science
education; we are voluntarily undoing it. |
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