The following is from a book entitled Hell and the High Schools that was published in 1922.
“Reader, if you are not a parent, do you not yearn intensely to turn my child, your neighbor’s child, your enemy’s child, from spending Eternity in hell? Were even your enemy’s house on fire, would you stand by in indifference and let his child be burned alive? Yet that child’s being burned alive is as nothing when compared to that child’s spending eternity in hell. You would go to the limit in helping to rescue the child from the burning building. Isn’t saving a soul from spending eternity in hell ten million times more important than saving a human body from a burning building?”
I know we all wake up each morning intensely yearning to save little souls from the licks of eternal flame, and that is why we should all heartily get behind a new bill in Tennessee that would prevent children from being exposed to the theory of evolution. I know you probably think that this controversy was resolved in the Volunteer State back in 1925 when Clarence Darrow made a fool out of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was so humiliated that he gave up and died five days after the trial. But, fortunately, that is not the case. John Scopes was convicted. It took the jury just nine minutes to deliberate. Clarence Darrow lost the case, and the controversy is alive and well.
Teachers are still teaching evolution in biology classes in Tennessee, and this has to stop or a lot of people are going to be paying a lengthy visit to the Lake of Fire. We can get busy saving these vulnerable souls by showing our support for HB 0368 which “protects a teacher from discipline for teaching [pseudo] scientific subjects in an objective manner.”
Bill Summary
This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming. This bill also requires such persons and entities to endeavor to:
(1) Create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues; and
(2) Assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.
I know what you’re thinking. That bill won’t ban the teaching of evolution. That just goes to show you how far the liberals have gone to undermine our faith in God. But the bill is worth supporting anyway because it allows us to undermine belief in the theory of evolution without any fear of reprisal. And, for good measure, we can cast doubt on global warming, too. Ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?” I think it’s obvious.
Jesus would support this bill.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
Oscar Wilde
Hmmmm……….more insanity that is being driven by fundamentalist religion in this country. Kind of getting to be a pattern, isn’t it?
I thought the analytical method employing clear thinking, the use of evidence carefully gathered and the testing of various hypotheses for their replicability was what science was all about. So various scientists have followed this approach and come up with the theory of evolution. What’t the problem? Can it be that the religious people are too stubborn to change their thinking? Maybe evolution does not apply to them. Maybe, it does, and they will go the way of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.
Nature bats last.
John Scopes was convicted. It took the jury just nine minutes to deliberate
Well, yes, but there was more to the story than that. I happened to research this in depth many decades ago. IIRC, Darrow, in his summing up, asked for conviction so that the case could then be appealed and brought before the Tennessee Supreme Court to test the law’s constitutionality. He didn’t state it quite so clearly, but after he finished the prosecution pointed out that “what Mr Darrow is saying is” and Darrow merely smiled.
The point of the trial was to put Dayton, TN, on the map. The town’s leaders got together and decided that the controversy over the new law meant that there had to be a test case, and they could profit from having the test case in their town — and they certainly did. Ironically, the teacher Scopes never actually taught evolution. He wasn’t against it (fewer people then cared one way another on the topic than do now), but he had to teach a lot of subjects in that small schoolhouse and never got around to it. He private told this to Darrow, and Darrow very carefully instructed the students who testified so that they wouldn’t slip up and blurt out the truth that they’d never had those lessons in class.
The fine, IIRC, was only $100 and was either never collected or paid for by one of the many commercial “sponsors” of the trial. Although people from around the country sent hate mail to Scopes the townspeople knew the real story and he was not controversial locally.
When it got to the 3 person Tennessee Supreme Court the split verdict satisfied no one. I forget the details, and yes I could look them up, but the bet result was that the constitutionality of the law was not ruled on and the conviction upheld. However, by that point the spectacle was over and the law not enforced again. The main accomplishment was that by putting this in front of the national press the creationist movement (or whatever it was called then) was ridiculed and for many decades after that it was nearly dormant, returning only after being bolstered by the huge funding fundamentalism got from GOP backers starting in the late 1970s.
Today, of course, such a debate could never happen. In that one the arguments were about the issues in question. Today everything is framed in terms of whose side you are on, and the issues rarely explored by the public in any depth at all.
When I was a kid of 6 or 7 one of these cracker kids started telling me I was going to hell, and it scared the holy shit out of me. I told my father, and he took out his shotgun, went over to the cracker’s house and told the old man that if his kid ever gave another peep of this horseshit to me and my brother, he would blow his head off. Never had another word from them.