Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I’ve heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus’ preferred economic model is capitalism.
It’s in Texas, of course.
I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?
(O)(O)
Scariest quote:
the American system is meant for a religious people.
I guess we should all just leave now…
First of all, this woot guy has to go. How many posts will he be allowed to spam before he’s banned?
Second, this whole thing is ridiculous. How can they be accredited? It sounds like evangelical homeschooling but in an institution. Jesus’ preferred economic model is CAPITALISM? That has to be one of the most ridiculous claims to come out of American evangelicalism. I can’t remember what part of the Bible supports capitalism over socialism, and I bet they can’t, either. Obviously just melding their political ideologies into their theology. Ridiculous.
Since there is no god, here’s a reworded version that means the same thing:
Perhaps I shouldn’t have capitalized ‘nothing’. But they’re always capitalizing their word for nothing, so what the hell.
Are these the same kids who end up manning the chainsaw abortion rooms at the Haunted House for Jesus events in Texas?
That kind of stuff gives me the willies.
“Students will study…with a biblically integrated filter…”
This was in Grade 11 History where they seem fascinated by war.
I love looking these references up:
Deuteronomy 8 states that God makes you rich or poor. Chapter 15, oddly, commands you to give to the poor… and free your slaves after 7 years. Chapter 28 is a litany of blessings and curses… I guess it reinforces God making you rich or poor.
Leviticus 25 is all about proclaiming liberty throughout Cannan… and how to treat your slaves.
Ezekial 46:18 refers to a King not taking from his people to give to his sons… hardly a model of popular redistribution. 46:17 is more interesting, it says anything you give to a slave the slave has to return if he is freed.
Seems to me the model of economics they will learn from these passages was outdated (in a spectacularly bloody fashion) a little over 140 years ago.
Can we let Texas secede and then spread democracy there?
I’m guessing they’re not teaching Godel’s proof.
I’m not so sure its completely bad.
It will certainly make exams a lot easier!
Question
Solve int_{0}^{pi/2} frac{dx}{1+(tan(x))^{sqrt2}}
Answer
God did it!
Jesus’ preferred economic model is capitalism.
I’ve always been curious what right-wing fundies make of scriptures like Acts 4:32:
“And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them.”
This is the cornerstone of radical socialism. If the bible supports any political system besides feudal Bronze Age dictatures, it’s communism.
Comnpared to some of the stuff I’ve seen at fundamentalist schools in my own state, this Texas school is actually relatively mild.
What do you mean by: “It’s in Texas, of course.” Could just as easily have been Kansas!
I can’t wait for the godful version of abnormal psychology. I’d also like to see what they’ll make out of godful comparative religions.
DRAMA
Students will understand God’s divinity through interprative dance and his mysterious ways by studying the paradoxical popularity of Steven Seagal films. They will understand that pantomine was the preferred entertainment medium of Jesus, with the popular line referring to God; “He’s behind you . .and in front of you . . . and above, and below, and to the sides . . .”
I think they’ve just rephrased the old question, “Can God make a rock so big he can’t move it?”
“He’s behind you . .
Ha!
I actually tutored at an evangelical home schooling center in Dallas one summer about five years ago. I didn’t realize it was evangelical when I applied. Most of the students were from public schools, but about two weeks in I was asked to teach one of the 5th grade home school science sessions. The textbook was called something like “Exploring God’s World”, and we were covering the section on matter, mass, and density. One of the “thought” questions was something like: “Jacob is chopping wood in the forest near a lake. The axe head is made of iron. While chopping, the axe head flies off the handle and lands in the nearby lake. Instead of sinking, it floats. Why is this a miracle?” I was thunderstruck. I nodded at the teacher showing me the lesson plan, then chucked it out when she left and taught them without a textbook that day. The next day the administrator said she’d gotten compliments from parents. I basically said, “That’s great, but I quit.”
God uses all sorts of code to teach and protect His creation.
Why is it so hard to imagine He Reveals Himself through Calculus? It is simpler than The Bible, which takes a lifetime of prayer to learn. Whereas, most people can learn Calculus in two or three semesters.
Derek, that’s scary. Not even because they were mad that you through out the textbook but that you had taught them SCIENCE. Iron sinking is not a miracle. How can anyone really believe that?
As per the Baptists: If mathematics was created by the Big Cheese and is evidence of his consistency, then we must ask about Gôdel. Since any powerful mathematics is incomplete, with undecidable propositions, is His Scentliness incomplete? If multiple self-consistent yet distinct and mutually exclusive mathematics are possible of any mathematical family, are J and the Gang mutually exclusive?
Or does this all stop at the level of freshman math?
At least these kids won’t have to do homework on a Sunday.
I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Matthew 19:24
The Capitalists for Je$u$ forgot about this one, apparently…kind of inconvenient, nicht wahr?
Lots of ’em would just as soon forget about the synoptic gospels, and rather focus on that judgmental, grasping, slave-owning Old Testament stuff. :-D
You don’t like boobies? How unAmerican.
Look, trust me, just follow the link. You’ll feel a lot better, you’ll come to accept and understand your need for pictures of boobies.
I like boobies.
I’ll actually go as far as saying I *love* boobies….
I also like blue-toes birds, but what does that have to do with crazy-ass evangelicals.
WooT needs to give us more tits
What in the hell happens to kids twisted by that crap?
I’ve seen both outcomes.
Sometimes they rebel eventually in late adolescence and end up in whatever counterculture is in vogue among the kids, Goths or whatever. A fundie church was torched near my old home. No it wasn’t by an atheist. It was the teenage kid of one of the
cultistsmembers who had some sort of grudge against them.Sometimes they buy in and become channelized fanatics. True believers encased in steel rebar reinforced concrete. I’ll bet this is the more common outcome.
If the bible supports any political system besides feudal Bronze Age dictatures, it’s communism.
I’ll always remember a sermon from my formative years. We were living in the boondocks of Utah, and I was a young altar boy in the local small Catholic church. Our priest had been exiled[*] to said Church by the Vatican a few years before we got there, and while he was apparently originally from New York he had quite the “European” attitude to a lot of things. I remember he riled up a lot of the very conservative congregation when he compared Communism to the commandments of Jesus in the New Testament and said something to the effect of “the Communists got everything right except for insisting that there isn’t a God”. I’ve never forgotten it, and it has lead to some interesting discussions with other Catholic priests over the years.
[*] True story – he worked in the Vatican in some capacity before being sent to Utah to be the priest in a backwater diocese because, apparently, he was a bit too much of a “ladies man” and got in some trouble in Europe because of it (no one really said what, but I gathered that he might have had a son or daughter in Spain that we weren’t supposed to know about). Unlike the Catholic priests in today’s scandals, he was the type of priest that you could trust your children with. But he might very well have had an affair with your wife. I think I prefer that kind of scandal personally.
Iron floating isn’t necessarily a miracle, either — ask the Navy.
If the axehead floated, it could be miracle. More likely, it was lousy fabrication by the axehead maker, and Jacob got a hollow axehead that can’t be sharpened and really isn’t much good for chopping wood. Maybe it was made in China, and the interior is full of melamine.
Unless the axehead bursts into flame and starts speaking to Jacob, there are several other tests he should apply to the thing before pronouncing it a miracle. Even the Catholic Church investigates claims of miracles, skeptically.
And if the axehead just floated? Most of your standard, redneck Baptists would probably think it possessed, a sign of deviltry.
So where does this damned book get off making light of miracles and scripture?
Maybe we oughtta have a law: No one can claim to be Christian until they’ve read the blasted book . . .
I Corinthians 13:1-8 — Verily, I say unto thee, sell thy junk bonds to thy neighbor at an inflated price and buy ye a Hummer. Run ye a website with numbers in front of the url, and buy ye a flat screen. And I say unto thee, the bounty of Heaven shall be his who runs a text message contest at $0.99 per message, with recurrent fees placed upon he who does not text “STOP” to 99060. And he who spends his fortune on mad bling, and not on charity, shall see his wealth put back upon him tenfold. For tis by capitalism my Father shows his Love.
Ed wrote:
Honestly I don’t think that would help. They’re confused enough as it is.. imagine if they actually had to READ the irrationality and contradictions!
The miracle is that someone can read that without laughing out loud. Or holding their head in stunned disbelief.
Maybe the miracle is that kids exposed to this sort of crude mind control procedure don’t grow up seriously warped or stupid. Hmmmm, they don’t end up warped or stupid, do they?
On a less serious note, there are any number of reasons that “magic man dunnit” isn’t a good account of mathematics. The closest thing to the “magic man dunnit” account of mathematics given in the modern age was by Alston in “Ontological Commitments” which was, essentially, a reactionary presuppositionalist screed that he threw together after Rudolf Carnap took Alston’s metaphysics behind the barn and put it out of our misery.
Quine wrote an essay called “Truth by Convention” which, I think, sums the situation up better than most. And even if the Analytic/Synthetic distinction is a false dichotomy, there isn’t much to be said against the status of formal mathematics as strictly analytic and the distinction is only technically false because the formulation of the mathematics we tend to use has been constructed to match our perception of the world. The absolute consistency of a nontrivial mathematical system is an out and out assumption, the descriptive power of mathematics is possessed by construction, and it isn’t even the case that all mathematical definitions must conform to something real.
Here, God isn’t even in the gaps — he’s hiding in a social, linguistic, and potentially (though not actually) arbitrary construction.
What a shame if this excellent education were undone by some heathen college. Luckily, when these kids graduate, they can continue studying Christian mathematics at Trinity College:
http://www.trnty.edu/faculty/robbert/SRobbertWebFolder/ChristianityMath/index.html
BIOLOGY
Students will learn the habits of camels: eating herbs, living in deserts and going through the eye of a needle whenever it hits their fancy.
BIOLOGY
Students will learn the habits of camels: eating herbs, living in deserts and going through the eye of a needle whenever it hits their fancy.
Yeah, I guess I was wrong when I said:
I should have put the word “serious” or “reputable” in there somewhere. Also, if you want to kill your brain, you can read this: Mathematics in a Postmodern Age: A Christian Perspective. You can watch Dembski transmute Pragmatism from the question, “Given this is true, what are the consequences?” to “Pragmatism means my definitions don’t have to be mathematically meaningful!” He’s such a pallid tool.
Their American History course starts with the Civil War? That’s effing retarded.
And probably with a showing of “Birth of a Nation”.
The Capitalists for Je$u$ forgot about this one, apparently…kind of inconvenient, nicht wahr?
Oh, they’ve got that one covered. I went to a high end Christian prep school and the rich man and eye of the needle thing were specifically addressed. Being that this school was filled with the sons of the wealthy (alma mater of both Pat Robertson and Ted Turner) their take on it went somethinbg like:
“You see, the ‘eye of the needle’ was a gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which a camel could barely fit.”
The problem with this interpretation is that it is first documented in the 11th century and there is zero evidence of any sort that such a named gate ever existed. A more nuanced attempt to weasel out of what Jesus plainly said is to refer to the line “With God’s help anything is possible” which follows the needle’s eye passage.
What would really be entertaining is if this school decides it needs a class in physics. You know, so they can teach how carbon-dating doesn’t conflict with God’s word (sarcasm), and how evolution doesn’t actually violate anything about thermodynamics.
Heck, they may even prove to be useful.
One of my favorite whipping boys, William Jessup “University” in Rocklin, offers this class as their most advanced math class of them all (from their catalog):
It’s a remedial class. I bet 40% of their incoming students could teach the damned class.
One of the most telling items in those course descriptions comes in the middle of the one for Biology:
“The students will learn … evolutionary models and the creation model … ”
No surprise that they would teach creation as science. That’s to be expected. What caught my attention is the use of the singular “the creation model”. If they consider creation to be a scientific model, shouldn’t they be teaching ALL creation models? The use of the singular was probably completely unconscious. The idea of considering other religious views likely never even occurred to them.
It’s just another example of the dishonesty at the heart of creationist science.
OEJ
Sarcastro –
I’ve heard one better – where the statement is supposed to be “it is easier for a camel-hair thread to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich-man to get into heaven”. Where the “thread” made of camel hair is really hard to get through the eye, but not impossible (like it would be for a camel).
All ways of trying to reconcile a set of religious documents committed to writing by a group that was in a discriminated minority of mostly poor people with a religion practiced by the majority, including the elite rulers.
Yeah, I got the gate-in-the-wall explanation, too. It’s funny how the True Believers can declare mundane things to be miracles (face in a cheese sandwich, etc.), but when they need to look for an actual miracle, they make it mundane.
“the universe can be calculated by mental methods”
Do Baptists really believe this? Sounds heretical.
“Jacob is chopping wood in the forest near a lake. The axe head is made of iron. While chopping, the axe head flies off the handle and lands in the nearby lake. Instead of sinking, it floats. Why is this a miracle?”
Trick question! An axe weighs less than a duck, so it’s not a miracle.
“Jacob is chopping wood in the forest near a lake. The axe head is made of iron. While chopping, the axe head flies off the handle and lands in the nearby lake. Instead of sinking, it floats. Why is this a miracle?”
Trick question!
It’s a miracle because “Axes can’t fly”!
y’all just failed alimentary (sic) math!
Read “Dembski Does Dallas”. Calculus and Christianity go together like white on rice.
http://thestubborncurmudgeon.blogspot.com
How wonderful – every brainwashed Christian child is one less competitor for my kids to get into the best colleges (when I have kids).
I’ve always suspected that Runge-Kutta could be employed in approximating the truth of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
Don’t worry, I’m working on it.
I’ve heard a similar take, which I cannot verify as true, but it’s slightly different.
The supposed gate was so low, that a camel would have to be unburdened of everything it was carrying, and led through the gate on its knees in order to fit.
Not quite what the Baptist prosperity ministries would prefer.
To all you anti woots, chill out, there is nothing like a click on the woot to bring back a smile after reading about even more fundie madness. Just click the link and enjoy the blue footed magnificence :)
Huh, the explanation I got was that “camel” is a kind of rope. Of course, it would be impossible for this to go through the eye of a needle also, so the meaning is preserved, which (I suppose) isn’t really what they want.
The “gate” explanation has been given to me as saying that a camel could go through this gate called the Eye of the Needle but only if it was unloaded completely — a “you can’t take it with you” moral — but I don’t think that’s as likely as the former meaning, based on (real) Biblical scholarship I’ve read.
Cal,
I’ll back up that interpretation. It’s the one they gave me.
>I’ve always suspected that Runge-Kutta could be employed
>in approximating the truth of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
That’s silly. Everyone knows the Trinity is unchanging, so d(Trinity)/dt is always zero.
anon1234:
so you’re saying that “god makes no differential”
;)
I guess none of these Baptists have noticed that Calculus was developed by Newton, who was an anti-trinitarian? Practically an atheist by the standards of the time?
I guess the Big Guy works in mysterious ways — he can’t trust his own folks with the Secret of Reality.
Right; and that’s also how we know that we’re not allowed to integrate our churches.
Besides, Runge-Kutta is useful mainly to get starting values for predictor-corrector methods, and you can’t use these for theology because, while predictions are OK, corrections are strictly prohibited.
Many states break U.S. history into two parts, the first covering prehistory to Reconstruction, the second from Reconstruction on. In Texas, in public schools, kids take the first U.S. history class in 8th grade, and then “from Civil War on” in 11th grade.
In short, crazy as that line sounds (U.S. history “beginning” with the Civil War), it’s the most academically sound statement in there.
I love math geeks.
I never wanted to be one, but I love ’em.
It was about a year ago that PZ linked to a post I wrote about “Christian calculus”. That item was about a presentation before D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries, in which the speaker recounted asking his calculus teacher, “What makes this course distinctly Christian?” When the teacher did not have a good answer, the guy realized that his college was not as Christian as it purported to be. Apparently Christianity is supposed to permeate everything. (Christian auto shop! Christian computer science! Christian English composition!) How nice to see that someone has figured out how to jam Christian superstition right into the calculus syllabus.
So creepy!
Biology:
Students will understand the nature of God…..
Erm.. an inordinate fondness for beetles?
On camels and needles, the larger point, as I’m sure we already understand, is that it doesn’t matter what obviously self-contradictory nonsense they read, if somebody told them God said it, they will come up with excuses.
I understand that there are Trekkers who try to “explain” events mentioned in classic Star Trek as happening in years already gone by. (I don’t remember specific examples, but for instance if Spock referred to a world war in 1998, for instance.)
I once thought the most natural way of doing it would be to dwell on Newton’s Christianity. Because everyone wants to be just like Newton.
What everyone is missing is that math isn’t a gift from god, it is god. It’s an easy mistake to make… ;^)
Capitalism! That’s insulting. Jesus was a full-on Marxist, 1800 years before Marx was even born. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”? Hellooo
That camel-eye of needle-rich man thing is shocking. Can’t they even face up to that? My God.
And do they all lok at each other, smile and think: “Yeah, that’s the stuff to give the troops”?
Godly calculus: Assume an infinite series of angels, such that each angel is half the size of the previous angel, and the first angel is half the size of the head of a pin…
Godly trigonometry: The sin function will not be discussed due to its controversial nature…
David Canzi (#67):
Will the sin-1 be discussed?
Good Math, Bad Math has another fisking of CHBFS.
From ollie (comment #10) we also learn that:
Traditional creationist proof of gods™:
“Gods™ are infinitely powerful (∞), and created something (1) out of nothing (0): ∞ * 0 = 1 (1).
From (1) we get 2*∞ * 0 = ∞ * 0 = 2 (2).
[(2) is of course signifying that creationists rely on finitely many gods – but following the logic there should an infinite number of infinite powerful gods™. But I digress…]
Combining (1) and (2), we see that 1 = 2 ⇒ 0 = 1 (3).
Applying (3) on (1) again, we also see that ∞ * 0 = 0 = 0 * 0 ⇒ ∞ = 0 (4).
Oops, (3) implies we get something from nothing, without gods™ in the equation. And (4) that gods™ doesn’t exist.
Anyway, my point was that creationist gods are infallible…, um, no, what was my point again?”
Dustin,
I hear ye. (Comment #34.)
Good Math, Bad Math has another fisking of CHBFS.
From ollie (comment #10) we also learn that:
Traditional creationist proof of gods™:
“Gods™ are infinitely powerful (∞), and created something (1) out of nothing (0): ∞ * 0 = 1 (1).
From (1) we get 2*∞ * 0 = ∞ * 0 = 2 (2).
[(2) is of course signifying that creationists rely on finitely many gods – but following the logic there should an infinite number of infinite powerful gods™. But I digress…]
Combining (1) and (2), we see that 1 = 2 ⇒ 0 = 1 (3).
Applying (3) on (1) again, we also see that ∞ * 0 = 0 = 0 * 0 ⇒ ∞ = 0 (4).
Oops, (3) implies we get something from nothing, without gods™ in the equation. And (4) that gods™ doesn’t exist.
Anyway, my point was that creationist gods are infallible…, um, no, what was my point again?”
Dustin,
I hear ye. (Comment #34.)
Sarcastro-
Oh, they’ve got that one covered. I went to a high end Christian prep school and the rich man and eye of the needle thing were specifically addressed. Being that this school was filled with the sons of the wealthy (alma mater of both Pat Robertson and Ted Turner) their take on it went somethinbg like:
“You see, the ‘eye of the needle’ was a gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which a camel could barely fit.”
I should have known they’d have an explanation-it’s one of those verses that even godless humanists can recite. And of course the camel is especially likely to pass through the gate if it belongs to cheesemakers-who are, as we know, blessed.
But there’s a lot about the traps and dangers and general ickiness of material wealth in Luke and Timothy, for instance, which really isn’t subject to the same hypocritical handwaving as is the camel-eye-needle verse:
Luke: Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.
1 Timothy 6:9 But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.
1 Timothy 6:10 For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
No camels, no needles, no gates, no ropes, no camel-panniers or camel-burdens that won’t fit through gates.
Rather scary that a godless liberal evolutionist-type knows the Bible better than many Followers of Christ, but there you have it.
I am guessing that those who self-identify as Southern Baptists are far less likely than others in the U.S. to have taken any calculus at all. This being the case, if calculus is truly divine, I’m surprised God hasn’t worked harder to spread its message to His most ardent followers.
Using this logic, maybe atheism, tolerance of gays, and critical thinking are “divine” too.
I’m sorry, but reading their Kindergarten overview is one of the saddest and most infuriating things i have ever done. If this is not child abuse then these people aren’t mentally ill fuckwits.
Can we let Texas secede and then spread democracy there?
It’s been done. The Civil War, remember? And it worked out so well last time…
Mena: Thank you, Pythagoras/Plato/Kepler.