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Religion in Schools

I'm going to start off by stating some facts. If you've read my previous blogs, you may think that I'm committing the "Appealing to Authority" fallacy, however, it's simply stats that I believe to be necessary to continue.

Just a reminder,
APPEAL TO AUTHORITY: (ipse dixit also called ad verecundiam sometimes) attempts to justify an argument by citing a highly admired or well-known (but not necessarily qualified) figure who supports the conclusion being offered.

I recently watched a presentation by Neil deGrasse Tyson. He states the following:
"Ninety percent of uneducated American are religious. The amount of educated religious people: 60%. These are people with Graduate Degrees.  How many scientists in America are religious? About 40%. A graduate degree in any subject, gets you half-way there. Science is an increment from the overall educated people. Now you go to the Elite Scientist, 7% are religious. Here's my concern, when you're educated and you understand how physics works, and you're mathematically literate, and you understand data, and you understand experiment, and you go up to someone who doesn't have that training, and they're religious, and you ask them why are you religious believing in invisible things that influence your life? What's wrong with you? That's unfair! It's not really unfair, it's disrespectful for the following reason: until that number is 0 (referring to the 7%), you've got nothing to say to the general public...figure that one out first...maybe there's something in the brain wiring that positively prevents some people from ever being an atheist."

The reason I even decided to write about this is due to the constant news about how Creationism (a belief) needs to be thought alongside evolution in schools. I can't believe this is even a debate because it shouldn't be, and I'll explain why.

Think about driving to one of Earth's last uncontacted tribes, who live in the Envira region in the thick rainforest along the Brazilian-Peruvian frontier (You can read about them here). You get there, business as usual, you introduce them to the world, give them some clothes, and you're on your way. Little did you know that the most intriguing thing that they were focused on was your car. If they were able to figure out that the vehicle was actually man made, and not some animal that was never before seen, do you think that they'll be able to formulate an idea of how the car moves?

So during their tribal meetings, the most imaginative of the group starts describing how these magical tiny creatures, with super human strength, sit inside the enclosed contraption and run super fast causing the contraption to move. Now lets say they have a "school" where they pass down folklore from generation to generation. They decide to include that story. Fifty-years pass by and you return with your vehicle to visit the tribe again.

They bring you to their school to show you what they teach; you notice that one of the topics is about cars. They start off and you realize that they have absolutely no idea how the car works. You stop them mid-sentence and say "that's not how this works. You have a fuel source that gets injected into the engine alongside with the air that's sucked in through the intake. A spark causes the fuel to ignite and drives the piston down moving the crankshaft and that in turn spins the wheels."

You leave and there's a group that went with you to the car and saw exactly what you're talking about: they're convinced. You've shown them proof.

They go back inside their school and start teaching how the car actually moves. Another group comes in and demands that their children be thought the magical creatures story. The enlightened group asks "Why? We know how this works." They reply, "The teachings that we were thought were meant to be taken as interpretations, not literal. The magic creatures do exist, but they're so tiny that they're inside the engine itself. Since you can't prove that they're not, my belief should be thought alongside your scientifically tested view."

You can see that this is absolutely nonsense. You can keep going further where the car can come back some time later, they take the engine apart and they find out that the magical creatures aren't in the engine. So now it's the fuel. The magical creatures are so tiny that they're located within the fuel. Then you bring a super powerful microscope to show them the molecules that make-up fuel. They rebut that the magical creatures are the things that make up molecules. You show them atoms, they say it's what makes up atoms. You show them protons, neutrons and electrons. They say it's what makes those up, etc, etc. As Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, "God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem."

So now, let's go back to Religion vs. Science and why I think it shouldn't be thought in schools. If you search Christianity vs. Science or Islam vs. Science or really any other religion you can think of, you'll find an incredible amount of information that disproves countless religious based believes. How do we know they're disproven? Simple. We create repeatable experiments that multiple sources can test. Once we figure out that, for example, the Earth's not flat, the religious leaders instantly say "Well that was just an interpretation."

At one point in time, religious teachings were the law of the land. As time progressed, alongside it, reason, logic, science and technology did the same. Whenever I ask any religious person about anything, they reply with "Well my religious teacher (pastor, imam, etc) interprets it this way." When I follow up with, "Well what happens if you don't like his interpretation," their response is usually "well you find a new one."

An interesting view from Galileo Galilei when he first peered through the telescope. He spoke to his friend and said "apparently the bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

There are a couple of reasons that religion still exists and is followed by billions:
  • Science hasn't found the answer to everything
  • People are afraid of death
If science hasn't found the answer to something, that doesn't implicitly give you the power to make up an explanation. Science will get there eventually. What'll happen then?

My Suggestion
If you're frustrated by the school system and what science has achieved in the last few hundred years, then don't be a hypocrite: be a true believer. Refuse vaccines, don't go to the doctor when you're sick (pray to God that you'll get better), still send your kids to a public school but teach them your ways in the privacy of your own home; after-all, they have the right to discover their path as well.

Most of all, treat the teachings literally: they weren't meant to be interpreted. Follow every last sentence to the T. Believe that the Earth is flat and that it's only 10,000 years old. Just give us enough space to teach the following generations Science so that they can continue to work on figuring out how the universe works and how it came to be.

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