Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP – U.S. Headlines
Wisconsin city allows teaching creationism
GRANTSBURG, Wis. — The city’s school board has revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.
School board members believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin. …
There have been scattered efforts around the nation for other school boards to adopt similar measures. Last month the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania voted to require the teaching of alternative theories to evolution, including “intelligent design” – the idea that life is too complex to have developed without a creator.
Some Teachers Decry List of Ideas as Attempt to Inject Christian Values Into Curriculum
By Joshua Partlow
To Margaret Young, vice chairman of the Charles County Board of Education, the required reading lists in her Southern Maryland school system are teeming with “profanity and pornography, fornication and adultery.”
Take, for example, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” an autobiography by acclaimed American author Zora Neale Hurston. Young said the book contained “disgusting” scenes of “inappropriate” sexual conduct. …
One of the more controversial proposals was to invite Gideons International to hand out Bibles to students. …
“Basically these people are telling you how you should be and, if you’re not, you’re a bad person….”
[You may] not seen “Grand Canyon: A Different View,” but others who have, including geologists on the Park Service staff, say it does not meet that test. A compilation of photographs, biblical quotations and essays published last year by Master Books, the book says God created the heavens and the earth in six days, 6,000 years ago, and that the canyon formed in a flood God caused in order to wipe out “the wickedness of man.” The geology of the canyon proves it, the books’ contributors say.
Actually, the universe formed billions of years ago, Earth formed billions of years later and the Grand Canyon was shaped by millions and millions of years of hydrology, chiefly the action of the Colorado River. Other ideas, however dearly held, are myths. Or, as the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service put it in a memo, “The book purports to be science when it is not. The book repudiates science.”
Nevertheless, it is for sale at the six bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park.
“The interesting thing is that, really, from a creationist perspective, we have no trouble at all explaining variation within human kind like this,” he explains. “I like to help people understand that by saying, ‘Look — eight people got off Noah’s ark, and as they increased in number, and then you have the Tower of Babel, and you split up the human gene pool.'” …
[H]e says creationists understand that there are some differences between modern man and the ancient skeleton, and that this is just another example of God’s creativity in designing people. …
Ham says evolutionists simply do not know what to do with this conflicting information. But he says these die-hard Darwinists will fit all their contradictory conclusions into their faulty evolutionary framework anyway.
