Pernicious Nonsense In The Very Air We Breathe...

[elfs]

One of the interesting things about Kouryou-chan's ballet class is the sheer number of extremely Christianized people who participate in it. It's not just the way the head of the school always leads every performance in a prayer "in Jesus's name, Amen," (which always reminds me of the Porcupine Tree song, "Intermediate Jesus," which has snippets from some evangelical sermon that ends with the minister laughing in a dark and frightful way, shouting, "That's the only way you're gonna survive, is on your knees! Muahahahahah!"), or how so many people there know each other from the local churches.

No, what particularly caught my attention was that there are whole classes for homeschool students only, and even more particular is that one of the students left her textbooks on the floor during the performance. The book was Understanding The Times, part of a multimedia "educational" series in social studies from Summit Ministries. The series promises:

This curriculum outlines the differences betweet Christianity and other prominent worldviews vying for allegiance in Western culture: Islam, Postmodernism, Secular Humanism, Marxism, and the New Age. In a time when more than half of all Christians lose their faith in college, no other curriculum so effectively prepares its students to defend the Christian worldview against all its competitors.

Even more disheartening is the list of contributors, including:

• Ken Ham, a chronic liar for Jesus who repeatedly pretends to understand the science of biology in order to misrepresent the state of the art in evolution,
• David Barton, a man who repeatedly cherry-picks the writings of the Founding Fathers in order to prove America is founded as a "Christian Nations", and make it seem like the lack of mention of Christianity or Jesus in the Constitution was not because the Founders believed in freedom of religion, but because they assumed it so overwhelmingly that it didn't need repeating,
• Ray Comfort, the bizarre little man who so homoerotically caressed a banana to "prove" it was intelligently designed for the human hand, and who regularly asserts that Hitler was "inspired" by Darwin,
• Josh McDowell, the "Campus Crusader For Christ" and another anti-evolution nitwit,
• Kerby Anderson, another "All the Founding Fathers of America were Christians as only evangelicals understand Christianity today!" maroon,
• Along with many others.

There's an entire population in my comfortable Seattle suburb that reads, believes, and even pays for their children to absorb this pernicious and mendacious nonsense. These are people who are training their children to be unaccustomed to being confronted with dissonance-causing information. At best, another entire generation of children will not grow up to cure cancer^[1] or feed the planet^[2]. At worst, well, I'm reminded of this t-shirt: Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

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^[1]A model of the evolution of cancer implies novel treatment strategies.

^[2]Many comments in the NYT obituary for Norman Borlaug suggest that he should not have saved the billions of lives he did, because his actions led to an industrialized agricultural system, and enriched the petrochemical industry. None of those commentors are from the Indian subcontinent.

Comments

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

I was always a big supporter of the parochial school system and Jesuit high schools, but the way the Fundis are using homeschooling to isolate and indoctrinate their kids has made me a supporter of compulsory public education. Remember, there is a reason those ballet classes are for the home schoolers only.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

homeschooling == JesusMadrassa

And as for Ray Comfort, someone needs to tell him that bananas were intelligently designed by farmers.


It's called, "Agriculture," and is the pre-petrochemical, pre-agribusiness form of genetically-modifying food. ^_^