Sorry, Scotland


A teacher in East Kilbride, Scotland, openly admitted to being a creationist, and promoting creationist beliefs in the classroom. They’re everywhere, so this is unsurprising, but this is what I have to apologize for:

Education chiefs launched an investigation earlier this month after it emerged that members of a US pro-creationist Christian ­religious sect, the West Mains Church of Christ, had been working as classroom assistants for eight years at Kirktonholme Primary in East Kilbride.

American creationist fifth columnists seeking to corrupt education in Scotland! I thought we were allies.

At least we sent you the stupid ones.

During a discussion on the Big Bang – the scientific theory explaining the origins of the universe – pupils were also said to have been told by teacher Leonard Rogers that people must stop putting their faith in things that cannot be proven.

Wait. “Stop putting their faith in things that cannot be proven”…well, there goes the entirety of religion, then.

Comments

  1. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    This post could also have been titled “Calling a bluff”.

  2. says

    pupils were also said to have been told by teacher Leonard Rogers that people must stop putting their faith in things that cannot be proven.

    I can’t take this anymore. Just can’t. All the variations on this over the years, you’d think just fucking one of them would stop short when saying this sentence, realizing the vapid stupidity of it, but no.

  3. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    All the variations on this over the years, you’d think just fucking one of them would stop short when saying this sentence, realizing the vapid stupidity of it, but no.

    Unfortunately, when pressed, their circular reasoning of the babble proves god exists, and since god exists, the babble is the word or god, seems to utterly escape their “skepticism” as a logical fallacy. Followed by the inevitable “but I’m sincere, so I must be right”….Yeah, sure, hey…

  4. Terska says

    My kids’ 5th grade public school world history curriculum taught that the plagues of Egypt were real. The teacher had to explain how rivers could run with blood or frogs could rain from the sky. There is a section on Jewish history and Bible stories were treated as historical fact. They didn’t treat the Greek myths as factual history. I tried bringing this up with the teacher but she didn’t want to talk about it.

  5. Gregory Greenwood says

    From time to time over here in the UK we get outbreaks of fundies – both home-brewed and imported from the States – trying to shoehorn creationism of other fundamentalist religiosity into the curriculum or some other aspect of public life. For the most part it sputters like something of a damp squib; most Brits are nonplussed by American style evangelism, viewing it as falling somewhere between quaintly eccentric and vaguely annoying, though this attitude is slowly shifting toward greater hostility with regard to the more toxic, bigoted expressions of religion, especially amongst the more progressive younger generation.

    Of course, the general public’s failure to immediately bow down before the ‘wisdom’ of whatever inane religious babble is being promoted this week leads to much public whinging from religious wingnuts about the supposed ‘attacks’ on their freeze peach and freedom of conscience. As usual, they try to characterise their lack of a right to force their beliefs upon others as a form of oppression.

    Overall, they are not as dangerous as the US religious Right, but very much fulfill the role of useful idiots for our own rightwing parties. They can always be relied upon to get into a frothing frenzy over the latest moral panic, for instance, and to back things like Cameron’s recent bid to use the supposed ‘threat’ from online pornography to push for sweeping laws to restrict access to a wide range of internet sites by means of default ‘opt out’ internet filters.

  6. says

    From wonderpants’ link @ 7:

    In a letter to the Henley Standard he wrote: “The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.

    “I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same-sex marriage bill.

    “But he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.”

    Blaming the prime minister for the bad weather, he added: “It is his fault that large swaths of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.

    “He has arrogantly acted against the Gospel that once made Britain ‘great’ and the lesson surely to be learned is that no man or men, however powerful, can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it for everything a nation does is weighed on the scaled of divine approval or disapproval.”

    Resists the urge to bang head into wall repeatedly. What in the fuck is it going to take? We know how weather works now. We’ve known for a long time. It isn’t a gift or punishment from deities, and yet…

    Then, a little further down in the article, we get:

    A party spokeswoman said: “If the media are expecting Ukip to either condemn or condone someone’s personal religious views they will get absolutely no response.

    […] “Freedom to individual thought and expression is a central tenet of any open-minded and democratic country. It is quite evident that this is not the party’s belief but the councillor’s own and he is more than entitled to express independent thought despite whether or not other people may deem it standard or correct.

    “That is what makes the United Kingdom such a wonderful, proud, diverse and free country.”

    You aren’t going to be a wonderful, proud, diverse and free country for long, if you get infected with the current crop of theocrats we have here in the States. Yikes.

  7. mnb0 says

    Wow! One of the few things we can be absolutely sure of, just as sure that Obama has been elected president twice, is The Big Bang. It’s based on a) repeatable observations (an expanding universe) and b) a well established scientific theory (General Relativity). Sorry, Caine, I disagree. The more stupid creacrappers are the better for us.

  8. David Marjanović says

    In a letter to the Henley Standard he wrote: The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.

    War is a natural disaster now?

  9. Richard Smith says

    I guess it makes some perverse sort of sense that, since they’re Christians and therefore have never bothered cracking open their bible and reading the damned thing, working as classroom assistants they’ve never bothered cracking open a dictionary and looking up the definition of a word such as “faith.” They should also look up “irony,” if they ever have the chance.

  10. Holms says

    At least we sent you the stupid ones.

    You need to be more specific! Surely this covers the entire group?

    Say rather, ‘At least we sent you the especially stupid ones.’

  11. kevinalexander says

    We know how weather works now.

    We certainly do. The thunder is angels bowling and rain is them crying when they miss the spare.

  12. says

    kevinalexander:

    The thunder is angels bowling and rain is them crying when they miss the spare.

    And when it rains while the sun is out, the devil is beating his wife. Oh my yes.

  13. marko says

    I work in East Kilbride and live fairly close, the church of Christ are quite active around these parts. My daughter went to school with the daughter of the local minister, it was quite scary to watch them recruiting the kids in the local area for “fun club”. I watched closely, and with much interest as they tried to work their way into my daughter’s school, but fortunately, our head teacher is a bit more savvy than the guy at the East Kilbride primary school and soon gave them short shrift. The Kirktonholme Primary story broke a good few months ago now, I think it will be hard for them to get such a foothold again in any school nearby for quite a while, I was quite pleased to see the hostility towards them when the general public got wind of what they were up to.

  14. WhiteHatLurker says

    Oh, that was the parent that complained about the teahcer. Shudda zapped the guy with the dark arts

  15. stripeycat says

    Caine @10

    You aren’t going to be a wonderful, proud, diverse and free country for long, if you get infected with the current crop of theocrats we have here in the States. Yikes.

    UKIP are smartly-dressed neo-fascists. They don’t want outright theocracy, but religious oppression as a tool of the state is right up their alley. “Diverse” in this context means able to prefer Association Football, Union, or League as your heritage dictates. “Wonderful, proud […] and free” relate to the ability to smack down others they don’t like, and not to have to worry about nanny-state interference except where they think it’s a good idea.

  16. grumpyoldfart says

    The creationists had been working in the school for eight years!

    I don’t believe the other teachers would have been dumb enough not to notice.

    I wonder if we’ll ever hear the full story.

  17. says

    War is a natural disaster now?

    I’ve heard that kind of thing before, but that was from theists of the Eastern variety, so they justified it with reference to the karmic debt incurred by sinful behavior. Eventually, lots of people will just have to die and whatever method is handy (earthquake, famine, epidemic, war) will make it happen.

  18. Rich Woods says

    @kevinalexander #16:

    We certainly do. The thunder is angels bowling and rain is them crying when they miss the spare.

    I’m sorry, but you have a really weak grasp of meteorology: everyone knows that thunder is the sound of Thor striking a frost giant with Mjolnir. And rain is Yahweh pissing down the back of your neck, again.

    *Tch* The things they teach in schools these days…

  19. davem says

    PZ:

    UKIP. Wonder how Pat Condell is reacting to that?

    Not sure about Pat, but their leader Nigale Farage calls for removal of the barmy:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25802437

    UKIP planned to vet all 1,818 candidates to ensure it didn’t have “extremist, barmy or nasty” views

    …so they may be looking for a new leader soon.

  20. rnilsson says

    13
    Caine, Fleur du mal

    18 January 2014 at 3:38 pm (UTC -6) Link to this comment

    David:

    War is a natural disaster now?

    As long as it is god driven, I imagine. Then it would be a punishment, a natural outcome of disobedience or something like that.

    No, god driven war would be UN-natural disaster. Any corroborated witness to that yet?

  21. Iain Walker says

    stripeycat (#22):

    UKIP are smartly-dressed neo-fascists.

    Not entirely true, although neo-fascists (including many not so smartly dressed ones) do make up a proportion of their support. They’re more like a British copy version of American conservatism – xenophobia, anti-immigration, libertarian fuck-the-poor economic policies, climate-change denialism – the Republican Party transplanted to the Home Counties. Or maybe the Tea Party would be a better analogy, since they’re both “populist” parties run and financed by a coterie of rich businessmen.

    They don’t want outright theocracy, but religious oppression as a tool of the state is right up their alley.

    If it was directed against Muslims, possibly. They may attract gibbering fundies like David Silvester, but they’re more a refuge for anti-Europeans, “I’m not racist, but …” types and anyone else who think the Tories are too left-wing and don’t pander to their privileges enough. Religious rightwingers drift into their orbit more for their rightwinginess than their religiosity. They’re not really any noticeably more pro-religion than the Tories.

  22. Iain Walker says

    WhiteHatLurker (#20):

    It’s Severus Snape.

    The difference being that Severus Snape actually knew his subject.

  23. leszekuk says

    I reside in Scotland. These days it’s a pretty secular nation. You don’t get much of this Creationist nonsense. Glad to see it exposed.