Renata wrote:
Amendment I of the Bill of Rights
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
You'll notice that this is a directive to *government* to keep its beak
out of private matters - religion in this case. There is no
complementary instruction for it to *prevent* citizens from expressing
their religious views within institutions they *pay* for (say, for
example, a school).
In fact, public schools are making a choice based on this l'il ole
amendment - to not support a particular religion's philosophies. It
doesn't make secularism into a religion.
Secularism *most certainly* is a belief system no different in kind
than any other religion. Every time a school chooses a secular
agenda, it chooses an epistemology, a values system, and a particular
point-of-view about the world in which we live. For example,
so-called "multi-culturalism" is a secular values agenda in that it
conciously make no distinctions between the moral "qualities" of
different cultures.
I'm not arguing against secularism here. I'm arguing that you
cannot make choices in a public school setting without embracing
*some* values system and right now the schools have chosen
secular values. This is as offensive to religious people as
choosing Christian values and epistemology would be to an atheist.
There is thus *no* way to run a publicly funded education program
without violating the sensibilities of some significant portion
of the population.
Not all religions on this earth espouse this idea of ID and teaching
ID would thus "favor" that particular religion's views.
For the moment, (unless/until ID is established as legitimate Science)
that's right. But espousing a purely matter/mechanical/naturalist
view of knowledge is just as much a statement of belief. In both
cases, these are inbound *assumptions* about how the world operates
based on individual *belief*. You cannot argue against ID being
permitted in the schools on the one hand and on the other defend the
presence of materialist/naturalism on the other - its hypocritical.
Either both belong in the school system (noting that, for the moment,
ID ought not to be taught as "Science") or *neither* belongs in the
school.
The root cause here is not ID or Scientific naturalism. The root
cause problem is the fact that schools have been collectivized by
means of government and can thus *never* satisfy the entire or even
a significant percentage of the population's worldview.
Until ID can fit under our established precepts of "science", it ain't
science. Science doesn't claim to know all, or always be right, but
it does have rules (testability, etc.) and ID fails in every one of
those rules. Therefore, it ain't science.
Really, you ought to be worrying about the rest of the amendment these
days...
I do. I worry about the 1st Amendment being violated by the politically-
correct secularists who parade so-called moral "neutrality" and who hide
behind code words like "sexual harrassment", "racism", and "hate speech"
to restrict free expression. I worry about the 2nd Ammendment because it
is under continuous assault by the drooling idiot Left. I worry about
the 4th Amendment because it is under assault by every part of the
political and cultural spectrum - the Right wants to peek in our
windows, and the Left wants to confiscate private wealth. I worry about
the neverending abuse of the Commerce Clause whereby government gives
itself permission to intrude upon anything it feels like in some
contrived claim to commerce.
Every single example I have cited here is really an example of one
thing: The collectivization of our lives through government and the
consequent erradication of the distinction between private and public
matters.
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Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/