Excellent point. Excellent suggestion. I never even thought to ask that question.

They don't teach about what happened before the Big Bang, because that's the point before which supported theory becomes idle speculation. So you could say that origins ARE left out, at the point where they cease to be science.

To make creationists happy, we'd have to leave everything out of the science book that takes more than a few thousand years.

Because you can still teach evolution while leaving out origins, that's why.

The fundies would pop a blood vessel if that compromise ever made it through.

Exactly. You can't say light from a star six billion light-years away is six billion years old, you can't say that the rock strata in the Grand Canyon shows tens of thousands of years of layers, you can't say the sea-floor shows that the Earth's polarity has switched several times over the last million years... It's not just origins of life, it's a strict time-limit on everything.

Next they'll be calling on toy stores to stop carrying dino toys, they are clearly an tool of the evil liberal evo-fascist conspiricy.

No, dinosaurs were obviously dragons!

You can teach mutation and speciation without origins, yes.

Well, that's true. It's mostly about origin of life, but you're right, it has it's theoretical little threads throughout real science.

Even though it's been scientifically proven that striations in the ground in grand canyon like formations can be made in as little as 20 years (and the rocks made therein are dated as "millions of years old". Whatever.

But that's a different thread. ;)


And BTW...Creationists believe in dinosaurs.... :)

Ye gods it gets worse. Sometimes I wonder if we'll see a new gallileo my lifetime. At this rate you have to wonder.

Of course you can make a striation of dirt in 20 years What takes a long time is for it to become stone.

FWIW, I attended Seattle Pacific University to get my computer science degree. This is a Methodist university that requires a bible course (OT or NT) to graduate. I took the OT course by Hobson's choice.

The professor (a doctor in theology) flatly stated that the OT cannot be treated as a history book. The OT, in his words, is "useful for instruction".

Which are part of evolution, and thus evolution is being taught and the hopping fundies won't stand still for it.

We've already established the biblical scale gullibility of creationists. Do we really need to cover that ground again?

RE should cover things like:

- How and why religion causes major sects of the world's population to blow each others arms off
- How one man's storybook changed the world
- Why it is ok for a religion to be contradictory if it suits ones aims
- Why Christianity through Calvinsim formed Capitalism that would overtake the Western World at the expense of, well, the rest of the world
- Why one should help thy neighbour but not thy too far away or different coloured neighbours
- Einstein vs Jesus: Einstein discovered something that was there anyway. Some reports, widely mistranslated, say that Jesus made water into wine. Why Jesus wins.

Maybe we should stop teaching children biology and science altogether....just tell them a bunch of parables and let them work out their own understanding of the world.....in fact maybe we should ditch modern medicine as well while we're at it and revert to the Four Humours. I hear there are some doctors doing some wonderful work with leeches and mercury