Barbara Forrest says there are two Louisianas. The southern half, a mélange of ethnicities of Spanish, French, Acadians and descendants of slaves, in which Catholic and African religious traditions intermingle. And then there is the northern half of the state with its white Anglo evangelical heritage.
It’s this divide that has made her state a hotbed for the religious right. The Louisiana Family Forum, a state affiliate of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family draws much of its support from northern evangelical conservatives and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal caters to it with his support of creationist causes.
Forrest tells me this as we’re driving around where she lives over the weekend, a place east of Baton Rouge, on a stretch of land that had been farmed by her husband’s family for generations. I’m on vacation down here and stopped by for a visit.
A philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, Forrest has been at the forefront of fundamentalist attacks on religion since she co-authored with Paul Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse, which connects the statements of the movement’s leaders, providing inescapably clear evidence that the intelligent design movement is religiously motivated.
She is also a gracious host. As we drive, Forrest points to the school in Livingston Parish where she first became involved in the issue when the board there tried to introduce creationism into its science classes. Today, as one of intelligent design movement’s most damning critics, a lot of people don’t like her very much, even though they must have to work pretty hard to come up with reasons to dislike her.
As we drive, Forrest keeps up a running narrative of the history of her state. We visit the state capitol and stand on the spot where Huey Long was assassinated. She speaks in the soft drawl and married her high school sweetheart. She will celebrate her 40th wedding anniversary in July.
Forrest says she believes that Louisiana’s battles have been overshadowed by the recent Texas textbook fight in which members of the Board of Education have been trying to sneak creationist language into the curriculum. With its incredible power over textbook publishers, Texas (which buys its books at the state level and is the second largest purchaser of textbooks in the country next to California) has been grabbing the anti-evolution headlines. Meanwhile, Christian fundamentalists next door may soon quietly slip creationist friendly textbooks — under the guise of “supplemental materials” — into local school districts.
In 2008, lawmakers passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which specifically targets “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” as subjects in which educators are required to “promote critical thinking skills.” It also requires “supplemental materials” to be used alongside textbooks in public school science class.
Forrest and the Louisiana Citizens for Science lobbied fiercely against the creationist language, but, in the end, only three members of the House voted against it because they feared crossing Jindal, who is closely allied the Louisiana Family Forum, the chief lobbyists of the bill.
Until recently, the fight had been over how the wording will be implemented and to develop a review process to make sure those “supplemental materials” aren’t just intelligent design books like the latest version of Pandas and People, which the Dover school board famously accepted for that purpose in 2004.
But the Louisiana Family Forum with assistance from the pro-ID Discovery Institute have convinced the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to let them stack the deck in their favor.
So, here’s where things stand now. When there’s a lawsuit, and there no doubt will be eventually, it’s going to be at the local school district level. And it’s going to only happen after a teacher hands out a bunch of religious tracts and starts telling kids that evolution is a lie. And some kid with the guts to stand up and challenge his teacher, a student willing to risk the inevitable hassling of his peers, is going to no doubt be the one to do it.
But until then, a lot of students in Louisiana may be indoctrinated with the message that they have to choose religion or science, but that they can't embrace both.
Tags: barbara forrest, education, louisiana, religion, science
This has an upside. The kid can challenge and DEBATE the teacher and the administration and possibly some of his fellow students. Hopefully he can have some fun before it reaches that courtroom level. The student will have the advantage of all the evidence stacked in his or her favor.
People on the internet can help. All those textbooks and “supplemental materials” can be read and checked and footnoted ahead of time by the real scientific community on the internet where any interested student can have access to the research material, indexed by suppemental material page number. That intelligent student that wants to have the fun shouldn't have to spend a lot of time doing all the research.
Of course the ID/Creationists can also have their own website checking the Scientific Check links, and then Scientific Check can also do another level of footnoting on the ID/Creationists footnote site. This should be a lot of fun. It will be like an evolution/creationism debate, only nationwide on the internet and directed at the hearts and minds of our nation's schoolchildren. Well fun for a short time. The creationism side will probably pull out of the classroom very fast when they see where this all leads and spoil the party.
Dr. Scott wants to close loopholes that will allow creationism to make it into the classroom. If she succeeds in making the process of appointing reviewers more fair, there will still be a problem because on a case by case basis the classroom is still subject to their decision, and they will lose some and win some.
I think they should change the law to say any supplemential materials that a teacher intends to use must be posted 30 days ahead of time on the internet. We will have to overcome the problem of an overly zealous teacher proposing everything in the world to gum up the works, so they can only propose use of a certain small number of pages per month. This will give parents a chance to review the material, and if there is anything questionable they can coach their children on what questions to ask. The goal is to get everything out in the open for the world to see. I know that is the opposite of how religion works, but it IS how education should work.
There's a big difference between Darwin and Bible-based religion but there's really not much difference between Darwin and Bible writings.
Bible writings teach that Adam/man (ruddy) in his initial state (before the garden, Gen. 2:7) was only a soul (animal/mammal - which had to have been a male dominated but dual-sexed (Eve came from him) primate of some kind because humans have a large percentage of primate DNA: similar behavioural and physical characteristics and only primates have fingerprints).
It was only as ruddy entered the garden (Gen. 2:8) that he gained a spiritual nature (God's image/higher consciousness/aura) that enabled him to change. 'God is a Spirit'; a spirit is metaphysical therefore, this one primate gained a 'supernatural' other self when he entered this other realm. After they left the garden they retained that spiritual nature.
soul = animal principle
spirit = metaphysical/supernatural
animal = soul
human being = soul + spirit
The reason why the other primates (and other animals) cannot evolve past their 'animal' state is because only this one primate gained God's image, somehow split (male and female), and the two passsed on that nature to their progeny.
The spiritual bent remains in many people because we have a spirit but if based on faulty information will produce 'religion' - the letter of the law.
Science explains the natural and does that very well. Religion tries to explain the supernatural and does it poorly.
Plato believed this world is an imperfect reflection of the perfect and real, reality. Recently quantum physics has said that our supposed reality is nothing more than something akin to a hologram! If God was here this world would be perfect as He is but God is strangely absent. If God comes to earth, He does so through the spirit's of benevolent human beings.
I applaud the efforts of science but until science and the spiritual meet, something will always be missing.
there's really not much difference between Darwin and Bible writings
I think there's an enormous difference, and the version you recount makes that difference seem even bigger. Nowhere in the evolutionary record is there, for example, the slightest shred of evidence for the hermaphroditic human progenitor you postulate.
The truth is that religion has nothing to contribute to our understanding of the origin, evolution and functioning of living organisms, ourselves included. More open to debate is whether it can contribute to our understanding of "the human condition"; but that's a separate debate.
For me, the more interesting question is what can teach us more about the nature of God, science or religion? Whichever side you are on, I think you have to apply the scientfic method because without it, people tend to deceive themselves and believe what they have been told. This might also be a separate debate beyond what we can handle right now.
No one can explain where human consciousness comes from.
Why have humans evolved but the other primates have not! You don't see primates attending church services!
I'm not speaking of a hermaphrodite, but a primate (possiby orangutan) who gained something the others didn't and passed it on to his progeny.
I do agree, religion has nothing whatever to contribute to the understanding of origins but the idea I'm perpetuating is not associated with any religion that I know of. In fact religious people fight me the most on this interpretation.
If you could reset the world to one million years BC and run it without us, some other species might have started the industrial revolution. Whichever species does this will dominate, and block out all the others. We turned out to be in this position. Now we outnumber the others almost a million to one. We control almost 100% of the planet. If any other species was even close to us, such as the Neanderthal, we would have wiped them out thousands of years ago. It is just the nature of the beast. Whichever species can master the making and use of string will soon have killer drones, and have a billion times as much power as whatever species comes in second.
If you follow the premise that exists in nature that the strong rule, then surely the big cats should have been the predominant species, rather than the primate line.
It was something other than brute strength and cunning that caused the dominance! Humankind was virtually defenseless - something else has to have been working in our favour.
When we came down out of the trees, we had to use pointy sticks to protect ourselves from the lions. This worked much better when a group of us banded together to use multiple sticks on the lion. The group learned to work together, and learned to chip rocks to make a hand ax, and spent about a million years in the stone age. Once we were safe from the lions, the emphasis of evolution switched to competion among ourselves, and evolving larger brains was a way to stay at the head of the pack. Eventually with larger brains, we learned to make string, and the rest is our history.
Other animals of the time lived in packs for hunting and safety, not just primates!
What really put us over the top was speech (the ability to express our ideas) but why did we develop it but the other primates didn't?
That is how evolution works. When something useful develops, it is passed on, and if that species eventually splits into two, both of those species have this trait and continue to develop in other ways. It would be highly unusual for two species developing separate and in parallel both developed the same new radical ability. The first one to develop it dominates the environment, and the other species retreats.
*If you follow the premise that exists in nature that the strong rule, then surely the big cats should have been the predominant species, rather than the primate line.*
That is not the premise of evolution.
Exactly. Human intelligence is an amazing and unique fact of existence. It's a blessing and a responsibility. We have the gift to understand that the world is millions of years old,all life is interconnected and interdependent, etc.
Religious institutions have misinterpreted the Bible to support the idea that the world is flat, that the sun rotated around the earth, the divine right of kings, the inferiority of blacks and women, etc.
The Bible is the story of man's evolving relationship with God, and our interpretation of it has been evolving since the time of King James.
This creationism hooey is the linchpin of a Nationalist, xenophobic, bigoted political movement called evangelical Christianity. Has nothing to do with religion.
*Recently quantum physics has said that our supposed reality is nothing more than something akin to a hologram!*
"Quantum physics" says no such thing.
Since a hologram is just a view of an illusion, the Quantum Holigram Reality Theory might turn out to not be provable or disprovable, and that could qualify it as the seed of another religion ... Made in USA
Are there any science fiction writers out there who could develop the concept?
The conflict between Science and Religion lies with the adherents or administrators lack of understanding and the need or desire to distance themselves from an entity or truth they haven’t the acumen to understand or comprehend fully.
Proactol
Weah ah ti-uhd of these gol-dang cah-petbagguhs and Godless Commonist Yankee revenoo-uhs comin' down heah and teachin' this heathen bugaboo about human beins' comin' from monkeahs and guh-rillas. We don't need no science edgy-cation because we have the inside track on jobs with the Health Insuh-ance bizness and God-feah-uhn Republican think tanks. The rest of us are preachers on television. It is the most lucrative bizness of all. Ask and you shall receive.
And weah ain't gonna tolerate no New York Jew lawyers comin' down heah and tryin' to make monkeah's out of us like they did when they stirred up all that trouble with the Negrahs.
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