Ok, let’s teach the controversy and the evidence about everything, not just evolution as creationists demand. When times come for our children to learn about religion, we should bring up the inquisition, the fact that the church preached anti-semitism as doctrine until 1964, that the church tortured Galileo, burned people at the stake for owning a bible in their own language, have the opinion that AIDS is bad, but condoms are slightly worse.
How about we bring up the fact that god when he gave the people of Israel their land told them to just go ahead and massacre whoever was living there, taking only the women “who had not yet felt a man” to keep for themselves. How about we bring up the fact that H.L Mencken wrote a list of 3000 gods that are no longer worshipped? Or maybe the fact that Christianity served a prime role in the subjugation of most of South America through the Conquistadors, maybe the crusades or for those who say “Why do you only talk about ancient history, Christianity isn’t like that now!” perhaps I should bring up the numerous cases of child-rape and other atrocities committed in church run schools and orphanages. The fact that two of the bloodiest conflicts in modern European history were in large part religiously motivated; namely the war in Yugoslavia and the mess in Northern Ireland is hardly up for debate is it?
Perhaps you should teach the children about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the other 3000 gods and goddesses that are no longer worshipped, they are after all equally plausible.
I’d feel a lot safer knowing that the leader of the country I live in will take into consideration that if I die when sent to war, there might be a possibility that those 72 virgin’s won’t be there, or if they are they might be playing World of Warcraft while waiting for their Battlestar galactic marathon?
I realize that to a believer this sounds absurd, that their church should be forced to have Muslim Monday or celebrate Chanukah, but so is it to want to remove evolution from the classroom. Evolution is not a matter of belief or faith; it’s a matter of facts and evidence, there clear as day for anyone looking at it.
The controversy is that when those of us who accept that evolution by natural selection is a fact, talking to someone who does not is frustrating because the people who are unable to accept the evidence or just plain too uneducated to do so are on a “lower level” so to speak. It’s a bit like when you try to explain something to a child, it requires us to not only simplify but adjust the terms we use to people who are usually unable to understand the terms we normally use.
This results in the “adult” bending over backwards to try and make up examples that the “child” might be able to understand, which again leads to prime hunting grounds for quote mining. It’s not that we do not want to discuss with you, it’s that doing so is as Richard Dawkins once said “Like a geologist debating a flat-earther”.
I’m fairly certain that even if I could lay fossils, DNA evidence, and a 100% detailed demonstration of how man evolved from the early primordial ooze it wouldn’t matter, because the evidence creationists and people who protest evolution are looking for is a half-man/half-ape creature out of a movie and even if they are shown this in the form of the gradual evolution from Homo habilis to Homo Ergaster to Homo Erectus to Homo heidelbergensis and then to Homo neanderthalensis and finally to Homo Sapiens refuse to accept it.
One would have to show a chart from the origin of life on this planet itself, with a complete “family tree” of the slow evolution of Homo Sapiens through its many small and larger changes and all this in order to refute a book written in the bronze age, by primitive barbarians (as exemplified in the opening paragraphs of this text and I can elaborate if needed) who didn’t know where the sun went at night.
