Remember the good old days, when you could always trust a creationist to claim their theory was not religious, and then they’d turn around and neatly undermine their own claims for you? Think Bill Buckingham at the Dover trial, who completely won the case for the good guys by saying a lot of stupid stuff.
Wait, good old days? I think I meant now.
The Louisville Area Christian Educator Support (LACES) organization had a conference, where Bryce Hibbard, principal of Southern High School (a public school!) was one of the speakers. He first tries to claim that teaching creationism in the school was perfectly legitimate.
Hibbard and other speakers told the teachers present that it was perfectly acceptable under Kentucky law to teach biblical creationism in addition to evolution in science classes, and he suggested future meetings with biology teachers to craft curriculum.
“I taught biology for 20 years in this state and didn’t know that if evolution is part of the curriculum, that I could have been teaching creation,” Hibbard said. “I thought I was sneaky if I had the kids … present it. So it was presented in my classroom by the kids, but I could have been doing it and didn’t know that.”
So not only does he think it’s OK to teach creationism in science class, but confesses that he’s spent 20 years intentionally subverting the law.
But look what else this same guy said at the same conference:
Addressing a common theme of the night — the kids who aren’t taken to church, and therefore “have no hope” — Hibbard told the crowd they should be missionaries to students, planting the seed of Christ.
“We’re in the greatest mission field,” Hibbard said. “At one point I was told, ‘You should be a youth minister,’ and someone said, ‘No, you’re in the greatest mission field there is, stay in the public school.’”
Huh. Teachers and administrators in a public school who regard their students as targets for evangelical conversion. That sounds illegal, unconstitutional, and a violation of the public trust to me. Can we have him arrested, or fired at least? Anyone out there a victim of the shitty education provided by Southern High School want to bring a case against this goober?
There’s more.
When asked if such biblical lessons in science class — taking time away from learning actual science — would stunt the academic growth of students, Hibbard replied that it would not, as creationism is “just another theory.”
“Certainly, that’s what (creationism) is,” Hibbard said. “A theory is a scientific understanding of what we know today. So evolution is a theory. Creation is a theory. Intelligent design is a theory. The theory of relativity is a theory. Yeah.”
This incompetent was teaching biology? For shame.
What a great teacher! Let the kids present your “fairy tales”, even though you wanted to instead. Let math teachers let their kids teach {um} ‘set theory’, “This pile is bigger than that one, so the bigger one is mine.” Or let the English teacher let the kids teach phonics, they know how to pronounce better than ‘grown-ups’.
So not only does he teach ‘clap-trap’, he gets away with it by letting his students do it for him, even while ‘wishing’ he could do it instead.
I mean, even with Kentucky’s ‘faulty’ curriculum standards, how can this guy, Hibbard, still be a teacher? Don’t they have any standards at all. He doesn’t even teach their nonsense, just lets the kids teach whatever they want.
How do you get past day one in a science class without defining some terms?
Like “theory” for example.
Step back, let them re-load, and point the shotgun at their other foot…..
His brain function being merely a hypothesis.
And a not terribly convincing one.
Except, you poor deluded fool, that evolution and relativity are actually useful theories that describe reality, as in, can be of use in the case someone wants to undergo the higher education that is necessary to take part in the scientific research and engineering prowess that has allowed your country to become so powerful in modern times.
What have creation and unintelligent design produced ?
One crummy “museum” and PhD theses that read like dissertations from barely literate dropouts from high school.
People like him should be sued for damages on behalf of all american citizens.
Under state law it is legal to teach creationism–I’ll assume that if evolution is being taught, as he says, since I’m not sure of the wording.
Of course it’s not really legal, since such laws are essentially null and void under SCOTUS rulings, yet it seems that it hasn’t been formally found to be unconstitutional.
Uh, what is it about “scientific” that this dolt doesn’t understand?
Glen Davidson
When you have a Great Commission to save souls anything is justified.
Here’s what one source states about the Kentucky law:
The Pew Forum
Fighting Over Darwin, State by State
ANALYSIS February 4, 2009
Abominable, but he’s sort of right on the legality.
Glen Davidson
O.K. I just have to be rude about this.
Fuckity. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking bastard.
These Fuckity Fucking bastards demand – DEMAND – that they have the right to raise their own children as they see fit, including teaching them religious and scientific nonsense, beating their kids for discipline and denying them healthcare.
Then they have the nerve to proclaim that they can go behind the backs of OTHER parents and subvert those parents rights over their own children. If I choose not to indoctrinate my kids with their particular brand of religious hokum, where do they get the bloody right to undermine my decision?
And BTW, most of these funde asshats think that ANY kid who belongs to a religious denomination, even Christian ones, that isn’t their “one true faith” should be converted.
Fucking devious hypocrites.
This LACES group is organized and sponsored by the largest megafundychurch in Louisville, Southeast Christian, which is also one of the largest megachurches in the nation. I peruse their paper and website just to see what they are up to from time to time as I was unfortunately raised and forced to go to that church until I was 18. The whole point of the conference was about ways to subvert the 1st Amendment and find loopholes and ways to push creationism and more dangerously to openly proselytize to students. That’s just the way it is here in Bible belt, which is shocking because in general, Louisville is a pretty midwestern progressive town.
Wow, I feel really sorry for anyone who interacts with this guy. Fire him, posthaste.
I’ll bet we can’t.
I don’t see how believing in heaven and hell could lead to anything less. ANY behaviour is morally justifiable when you have such a perverse view of an afterlife. That’s why i regard islam and christianity to be by far the most dangerous and obscene brain diseases that can afflict a person.
Actually I think he has made it abundantly clear that biology is one thing he wasn’t teaching. Disgusting.
Imagine what these people would say is a Muslim was found saying the same thing.
It’s theocracy, pure and simply. Complete ideological dominance, at all costs.
Yeah, and a friend of mine who dared to teach about evolution and refused to give creationism “equal time” in a Texas high school was harassed until he quit his job and moved back to a “blue” state. His wife got the same treatment in the middle school where she taught science.
My grandson had a “science” teacher in a Texas middle school last year who admitted that he believed that “everything in the bible is true”, so most of the “theories” in the science book are wrong.
Luckily, my grandson gets a decent science education at home from his step-father, his Mom and his grandfather.
I’m sure he’d be fine teaching Southern Baptist Creationistic biology – humans were made from dust which is why we are mostly silicon, women are made exclusively out of male rib bones which is why men have an odd number of ribs and blacks are only 3/5ths human.
You can bet there are a lot more of these self-styled ‘missionaries’ quietly undermining science education and contaminating children’s understanding of the world who aren’t stupid enough to come out and say so.
There should be some sort of treason charge for undermining the scientific and economic future of USA.
@chigau
Well you know, my impression is that you can go all the way to a Nobel in the natural sciences without really thinking about scientific principles, what is science, and so on.
You can easily spend 10 years studying and working on the technical aspects of stuff, you can do experiments, measurements, or theoretical calculations, and become famous doing it, without ever having to worry about what the difference between a theory and a hypothesis is.
I give you an example from my field (not myself :) : you start studying physics: some maths classes, a lecture on how to do calculations in mechanics and quantum mechanics works, how to do calculations in electrodynamics, and some lectures on how to measure stuff in atoms and molecules and how the spectrometer works that you use for it. Then you write a bachelor’s or master’s thesis on some detail how to improve some calculation for proton scattering. Then you do a phd project on how to calculate more efficiently some precision predictions for how the higgs boson is produced. Then you refine these methods some more, this receives much attention, and you become a professor.
No thinking about “science” the way you would like to see it is involved in the entire process.
This whole creationist anti-science stuff is just a Muslim plot to get America down. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Get your fiercest enemy, the fundie Xians, to do your bidding. I stand in awe.
Oops, the /irony> tag didn’t show.
When it comes to equal-time-bozos they forget that consistently doing so would include muslim embryology (the skeleton develops before the tissues does), mormon astronomy (‘greater’ planets revolve around themselves and their sun slower), scientologist crap (arbitrary beeps from a simple machine designed to make such noises and not well-researched biochemistry is the solution for all psychological problems) and homeopathic physics (water stirred in different directions ten times in each direction will gain magical properties).Seems what they really want is to turn public education into hogwarts.
@7
Everything?