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.”

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 don’t wonder, because it is not “knowledge,” it is propaganda. Scientists do not fake data, and if they did, someone would expose them fairly quickly. That’s 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.

 


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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