1 in 4 Americans Believe the Sun Revolves Around the Earth

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It is not shocking to me to hear that so many Americans have an IQ in the 80 range. I am fortunate to report an IQ of 147, but the majority of my siblings are probably in the 65 range. When I was in the military, my superiors had IQs in the low 80's.. Peoples minds have been dumbed down from listening and watching Fox News, "reality tv", and the indoctrination process of religion, which will dumb any brain down to the consistency of bird seed. Easier to control and manipulate

Your average European thinks that the Sun is made of lava, that Transylvania is an American state, and that there are penguins at the North Pole. Half of the population is dumber "than the average bear", remember that.

An IQ of 80 means that you're too dumb to do most menial jobs, and an IQ between 70 and 80 generally (with some exceptions) means that you can't work without much supervision. The average American has a higher IQ than the average Canadian, Irishman, Finn, and Greek, to mention a few.

The media is politically biased across the entire globe, and the so-called religious indoctrination hypothesis, does a poor job explaining why the people of Singapore have the highest IQs in the world.

Here's the thing: it is illegal for any employee of a public school system to say anything that promotes their religious beliefs over accurate facts (within the school; they are free to do so when operating outside of school, though). It is equally illegal for a teacher to make statements about relgions being wrong (although they are allowed to say that an individual aspect of a religion is not supported be any valid science if that is the case (i.e. ID)). It is permissable for teachers to teach things that have been scientifically proven whether it violates a particular religious belief. Creationism and ID have no basis in fact, so should be excluded from any publicly funded education. You cannot structure a public education that uses its time to teach all beliefs that contradict what science says, and I don't think it should be done. If you think that children should be taught about ID and Creationism in public school, you would have to also include every disproven crackpot psuedo-science and conspiracy theory, even if it has been proven inaccurate.



Which is why private religious schools are allowed to teach all the religion they want. To include information in a science class that blatantly ignores science is absurd.

I'm not disagreeing with you. This is dead on for the most part.

However, who grants teachers the authority to teach in public schools? The public. If the public wants it any other way, the public will have it that way. If we woke up tomorrow under Shariah law, we'd all be learning Shariah law. You can't get around that.

I'm not saying I agree with it or that it's even right, I'm just saying that's how the system is set up. If we as a nation decided we wanted ID included in the curriculum and that attitude prevailed long enough that the courts came to accept it, teachers would be forced to teach it.

It's the consequence of living under a representative government in which people have a say in how they are governed. We can't espouse freedom of religion and immediately impose teachers' anti-religious personal biases on students who are only there because compulsory attendance laws say they have to be there. Personally, I think CA laws are an intrusion into personal freedom, but the sad fact is they are better than the alternative. I send my kids to a private school for a reason, and I have seriously considered homeschooling.

^I agree with this 100%



If something can be scientifically proven false, then it should not be in a science class. Period. It shouldn't matter whether the public votes to teach things that are proven untrue. This is why so many nations have ended up in theocratic societies that completely ignore reality, dismissing fact and instead teaching religious superiority at the request of a religious majority that only compounds the problems with each generation.



There are some in my (massively huge) family who believe wholeheartedly that the sun revolves around the earth. As biblical literalists, they see the passage about the sun standing still in the Old Testament to be undeniable proof that the earth does not orbit around the sun. That same belief structure causes the complete dismissal of astronomy, geology (a couple of them of them actually still believe that the earth is flat), archeology (unless it can be used as "proof" of biblical reality), large portions of history, all of non-Newtonian physics (and parts of Newtonian physics), huge swaths modern medicine, parts of anatomy (especially if you try to tell them that men and women have the same number of ribs), paleontology, chemistry, huge chunks of biology, and physiology. If they can find even the tiniest part of the Bible that can taken out of context and used as "proof" that parts of science are wrong, they will do so. They are of the opinion that science is an atheist consiracy to destroy the American way of life. Even my own parents were firmly against any form of medicine (interfering with god's will) until they had to get us vaccinated for th free public education (and even then they justified it by saying that vaccines were a made up scam). It wasn't until my father's first heart attack that either of them ever went to see a doctor (and now they have shifted their opinion that sometimes god works through the doctors, but only for the faithful).

If you are looking for geographical locations, the biggest concentration actually is in the West Virginia foothills and muntains, but they have their own little colonies in backwoods Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, the western tail of Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, and Nebraska. My family is partially responsible for the religious rejection of science. My maternal grandmother was the youngest of 12 (part of the Mississipi clan). My paternal grandfather is in the middle of 14 siblings (the West Virginia clan). In fact, my family are part of the crowd that thinks the best way to put the US back on the right track is to have as many good christian children (by their definition) as humanly possibly. Parts of my family are convinced that I am gay because I do not have children.

Most of the kids in my family are home schooled (women don't work; no exceptions). We only went to public schools because my mom lost her marbles. Even then, they filed for religious exemptions for many classes. I did not take health class, sex ed, many science classes (which required "adequate" home instruction, which I only received according to paperwork), and any history class that covered periods "before creation."

There are huge portions of my family that refuse to acknowledge my existence ever since I married a "heathen she-devil" (a Polish-Catholic). All of my sisters are somewhere on the science is false/the christian bible is true spectrum. As far as I can tell, I'm the only person in my extended family with any real confidence in science.

Not true. Teachers do not require the permission of the public to teach, but the school system's authority based on minimum standards set by governments and professional organizations (the same way as many, many other professionals).



There are just too many religious freedom laws that would need to be overhauled and revised or completely repealed along with too many legal cases setting precedent for this to realistically happen. Part of religious freedom is the right to not have religion forced upon you. This might have been a possibility even a few generations ago, but it will not happen in any of our lifetimes (in the US, anyway).

I guess my biggest stance is that science should be taught in science class, and faith and religion should be taught at home. If you want your kids to make up their own minds (which seems to be the rallying call for many creationists), then let the kids learn science.

Um…NO.

If the government runs the schools, and the government is made up of representatives of the public, then the government chooses who gets to make policies according to what the government (as public servants) wills. Yes, there are professional organizations that set standards and so forth, and I've paid membership dues to one of them. But what a professional organization does is NOT LAW. What a government hands down to local school districts IS law, and if a teacher fails to observe the law in the classroom, the teacher loses his job, potentially even his credentials, and MIGHT even face a lawsuit (though more often it is the school district itself that pays the price for an individual teacher's actions). I was told prior to teaching that it's always a good idea to buy a "liability" or "education malpractice" insurance policy in the unlikely event something like that happened. It's absolutely INSANE what teachers have to go through, since we don't really get to teach anymore for all the paperwork trails we have to chase, but we aren't afforded the luxury of biased teaching. What's truly awful is that there are teachers who do that sort of thing and actually get away with it.

I didn't mind sharing my OPINION on different things, but I also prefaced that clearly stating it as such. If kids disagreed with me, they had room to disagree and we could actually discuss opinions on class material. The nature of what I taught was largely subjective, so that was just par for the course. OK…you hate classical music…WHY? I hate classical music, too, but only because classical music in a postmodern context isn't very forward-looking. It's worthy of academic evaluation because European classical music serves as the foundation for western trends in music, which we continue to hear today in commercial music and film. It's part of your musical heritage, so it's worthy of study.

Today we're listening to the Missa Papae Marcelli. Oh, you're an atheist and hate church music? Understood…don't worry, this isn't a religious thing…it's about the shift in polyphonic styles during the Renaissance. We'll also be listening to a couple of secular madrigals, and you'll note both the influence of secular music on Renaissance sacred music and vice versa, especially with the parody masses. l'homme arme, etc. Tomorrow we'll be listening to 20th century composer [insert relevant composer name] who cites Palestrina as one of his primary influences. Oh, and he happens to be an agnostic, which I thought you might find interesting…

Of course there are kids who will get offended by pretty much anything, so there's never a guarantee that a teacher's life will be trouble-free, but there are ways of addressing religion (IF IT'S RELEVANT) that is respectful to ALL students (I'd do a unit on world music and even dedicate half a semester to student-requested topics. Allowing them to help me develop my curriculum never once interfered with me meeting my required framework and in some ways made lesson planning a LOT easier) and help keep the teacher out of trouble.

Speaking of which, I never got to "pick" my subject matter despite being the teacher in the classroom. There was a framework I was REQUIRED BY LAW to teach. How I implemented that exactly was entirely up to me, of course, but I HAD to teach that framework at the bare minimum. I found it to be best practice to exceed the minimum for the sake of completeness, and a student had to work really hard to fail my class.

Ultimately it's not really about science in the classroom but rather a teacher's ability to keep the classroom discussion relevant and to keep personal biases out of the discussion. The teacher can control that. If you want to keep it empirical, you just simply say that religious topics or, say, alternatives to evolution, etc., are not part of the course…or, even better, are beyond the scope of the course.

If a student, for instance, INSISTS on skirting evolution by bringing up the Bible and/or Creationism and disrupts class by doing that, the teacher can document what happens, steer the conversation away from the religious topic, and eventually provide evidence that the student is disrupting class because he just doesn't want to do the work. The teacher didn't invite or initiate that aspect of the discussion and the floor wasn't open for student discussion at the time, so the student is clearly in the wrong. If the teacher, on the other hand, says "based on the evidence, there's no way the universe could have been completed in 6 days according to the Bible," the teacher has made the class about the Bible and is compelled to entertain class discussion on the topic. Moreover, this potentially opens up a discussion comparing various creation accounts from at least as many religions as are represented in the classroom. If you as a teacher bring in your personal anti-religious bias and THEN proceed to close discussion or discipline a student for presenting an opposing viewpoint, you're directly violating freedom of religion and speech. Recent court decisions have ruled that a student's constitutional rights don't get checked at the schoolhouse gate. So you make a wrong step by bringing the topic up, your career longevity will be quickly challenged.


Well, yeah, but not the point. The point was any time you have a publicly supported institution, whoever controls the government will ultimately be responsible for curricular choices. Even I have to admit that right now we have something close to a balance of views represented in our public schools, so even if my kids WERE in a public school, I wouldn't have that much to worry about in terms of curriculum. Now, peer behavioral patterns are a different story entirely, and I adamantly do not want my kids to have that kind of influence, which we escape by making them go to the school we picked for them. It's a religious school, sure, but it also has an excellent academic performance record far superior to the local city schools. It's also by far more ethnically diverse than any of the public schools or competing private schools, and even I'll admit that it's utterly shameful that it takes a religious group to put together a FUNCTIONAL comprehensive educational package. But it is what it is, we love it, and our kids love it as well.


Agreed 100%


NO. Let the kids learn science, but give them a balanced offering. Keep religion out of the classroom dialogue if you feel so moved, or allow the kids to express themselves.

You don't exactly hear about educator bias as being an every-day nightmare, but there ARE biased educators and they surface in the media from time to time. And, as we usually see, ONE educator who makes the news is merely a symptom of a larger problem.

For instance, take teachers who have sex with students. You think these female teachers going to jail are the only ones sleeping with their kids? Heck NO! Happens all the time. It's just most of the time kids and teachers have the good sense to keep it quiet. I even knew a high school teacher sleeping with a high school senior at the same school. It wasn't any secret, it's just nobody ever talked about it. She never got fired. I think she eventually left on her own and maybe changed careers, I dunno. Heck, I did my student-teaching semester under a band director who married his former marching band drum major. It only becomes a national issue when someone jokes about it or cries about it and someone goes to jail. It goes on a lot more than we'd like to admit.

Teacher bias isn't any different. Not all teachers do it any more than all teachers sleep with their students, but it does go on and every now and then someone gets busted for it. It's not so much that I don't like science as it is I don't like anti-religious bias in the classroom. If kids are to make up their own minds, they need to be left alone to do so, and that means they have to be provided with possible alternatives. The discussion we're having in this thread assumes that only what we think science means is all that is acceptable, and I just don't think that ONE option or another option is the way it has to go. Like I've said already, there are ways to avoid the discussion and keep everyone happy; but if you as a teacher (just like I have) address something covered by religion, you HAVE to keep the discussion balanced and open to any number of relevant viewpoints or possibilities. And I'm unconvinced that this is something that we actually do in the classroom.

Yes, let's have the children democratically decide what they want to learn instead of the adult with the teaching certification and a fully developed brain.

Oops, school has been replaced with 8 hours of recess.

I would have been happy to replace school with eight hours of art instead because that's the only time I was happy there. In fact, most the time I was sitting at my desk drawing regardless of what was happening around me and the teachers would drone on and on.

Raptor didn't say that. That's what LKL said and Raptor replied to it.


Apparently you didnt understand what I said. The question is whether it was intentional or not.


I've been to many of those places and while they tend to be a bit backward I hardly thing that 1 in 4 believes the sun orbits the earth. Even if they do, so what? They represent too small of the nation's population to be particulars concerned with. Even most of them probably arent as backward as they were a half century ago.
And before we go there; I don't and never will lie awake at night worrying that some intelligent kid in Hog Wallow West Virginia, who could some day discover a cure for the common cold if he didn't come from an educationally backward region and instead received a good education that he won't receive.

Dittos on that, Ana.

@TheGoggles: Excellent point…lol My philosophy of teaching is guiding kids to use their own brains. Always has been. Indoctrination of one agenda or another, whether it's a liberal agenda or my own personal agenda, a pro-religion agenda or an anti-religion agenda, has never been my aim. If the topic were to come up, I'd be like, "ok, THIS is what *I* think. You're not sitting in front of me just to absorb my talking points and spew them back on the exam. You're here to get a cross section of art music from medieval times through contemporary. What *I* think doesn't matter, what *you* think doesn't even matter…what matters is that you even bother to think at all!" Kids that I knew have a pathetic lack of desire for critical thinking, and part of my class involved integrating history, science that was relevant to the subject, math where applicable, and so on. I covered everything and documented it every time. After I checked off a rubric, I'd try to take things a little deeper and get students to listen for distinct differences between music of various periods, and listening tests formed the main basis for my assessment instruments.

And despite all my hard work, students still couldn't tell the difference between a medieval or early renaissance work and something by George Crumb. Here's a hint: if it uses modern-day instruments such as violin, percussion instruments, piano, it's NOT medieval!! ! But if it's clearly modally based, it's NOT classical. Ugh… Now, I had a lot more successes than failures, and the failures were more products of something between apathy and outright defiance, or maybe social pressures against doing well in any class…and I honestly tried to make my class, knowing full well general music is WAAAAY down the priority list, nearly impossible to flunk. I've had three or four takers on that, and to this day I'm still astonished that any student would purposefully do that.

But no, my goal was to enable students to understand what they were listening to such that I could play back a piece from any musical era, even something they'd never heard before, and they could place it within a certain time period. That's how I showed evidence of reaching my benchmarks, and I could do pretty much whatever I wanted beyond that, even at times let the students run the class. I even taught units on how to make beats using commercially available software, we'd do freestyle rap, let aspiring songwriters sing their songs, whatever (which, by the way, checks off creativity-related benchmarks). It's not about "Hey, here's the info, memorize it for the next test." It was always about "hey, anybody can make music, you don't have to be some child prodigy genius to become a composer. Here are the tools. Give it a try…whatever you want to do."

Even if you take a science class, it's never about "X=Y because I said so." It's about "Hey, check out X! Now, watch what happens when you…BOOM…See? No eyebrows!! ! Cause and effect! Good stuff, right?" For teaching to be effective, instruction has to be directed towards modifying the students' behavior, which means the teacher does less actual WORK and takes a supervisory role while students explore the material on their own. We're here to present the information and make sure nobody sets anything on fire. It's the role of the student to decide what to do with the information. The teacher's job beyond that is to assess student comprehension of the material covered. However, the practice of teaching is pointless if there is no intellectual exercise on the part of the student. Conventional assessment instruments don't really gauge that very effectively. They only demonstrate how well facts are memorized and how skilled a student is at taking tests. And I'm convinced there's just more to learning than that.

It's the courts that keep creationism down, not elections. We aren't going to change the Constitution over this.



Yeah, they exist. There was a Christian geocentric on a Kansas school board a few years ago. And sometimes YECs make reference to them.

Where I live is considered pretty backwards,but I'm not aware of anyone that believes the sun revolves around the earth.

These are the hardcore biblical literalists. They probably don't leave the rapture bunkers very often. Here is a Christian creationist trying to explain to Christian geocentrics that they don't understand science.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/article ... eocentrism

No, and I'm not suggesting that we do. And true about the courts.

But a single court never has the final say. It's funny, but in a different thread I pointed out that Plessy. v. Ferguson was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. Given shifting social or cultural climates, it's logically possible, if unlikely, that we could get court appointees that wouldn't stand against making those kinds of changes. Or, how about this: We get a majority enough of support and state support to amend the constitution or get rid of it entirely?

I mean…look…it doesn't matter… The point is if that's the way people want it and they are willing to fight long and hard enough to make it happen, it will happen. Judges retire or die eventually. If enough people supported replacing them with judges who would consistently rule a certain way, the courts would support it no matter what, same as they do now ruling certain ways and effectively legislating from the bench.

On a side note, I'm generally displeased with a lot of court decisions as of late, see my above statement about legislating from the bench. But, seriously, you get enough people fired up about something long enough to outlast the courts, you'll get changes that are near impossible to roll back. And getting back to the topic, consider the implications that would have for the educational system.

THIS is why I go off on so many appeals to law. Right now science in the classroom has a distinct advantage in that it is still possible to have these kinds of discussions in the classroom (if a teacher so chose) without anyone getting into trouble. Your freedom FROM religion is on just as precarious ground as my freedom of religion. All it takes is a shift in fickle society, law, and justice and it's all over.