This year, Texas will require its students to take a Bible course. In the supposedly secular public schools.

This could be a bad thing if all the schools bring in their local Southern Baptist minister to teach fundagelicalism…but it would be a great thing if the teachers brought a properly skeptical attitude towards it. Well, except for all the teacher lynchings that we’d be seeing around October.

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A correction from the Texas Freedom Network:

Just a quick note about your post on Bible classes in Texas public schools. Unfortunately, the article you linked to in your post got it wrong – public schools in Texas are NOT required to offer Bible courses. In fact, we were successful in 2007 in changing that bill in committee so that high schools could choose whether or not they want to offer elective courses about the Bible’s influence in history and literature.

The Texas attorney general has ruled that the law, as written, does require that something about the Bible’s influence in history and literature must be in the curriculum somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be a separate course. Of course, many social studies and literature classes have long included samples of sacred writings from Christianity and the other major religions and explain their influence on various cultures. So we don’t think the law will change much unless school districts decide to offer separate Bible courses.

Watch this movie to get a little taste.

Sam Harris wrote a recent op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the nomination of Francis Collins to head the NIH. As you all know, newspapers limit the amount of space you can have, so that was the very limited version — he has now posted a lengthy critique of Collins on the Reason Project.

The American education is a hellish mess, run by the ghastly, inefficient school board system that is too often dominated by anti-education hacks (Texas comes to mind as the preeminent example, but really, the problem is everywhere in the country). The system is so bad that Mark Twain was making jokes about it, and nothing has changed since. Could anything be worse?

Maybe. Paddy K has begun a series of articles on the Irish school system. Imagine the chaos of conflicting interests that tug our schools in different directions at every election banished…and replaced with old men in dresses committed to a common, archaic dogma that provides unity of purpose. That purpose, unfortunately, is not necessarily to produce well-educated citizens, but to produce people who will obey the Catholic church.

It could be an interesting series. We have plenty of schadenfreude to go around.

Tom Harkin is up to his usual tricks: he wants to expand the role of ‘alternative therapies’ by allowing them to be covered by insurance. The quacks are cheering him on, too — every naturopath, homeopath, acupuncturist, crystal healer, shaman, meditator, and iridologist wants their slice of that great big health insurance pie. It’s a disgrace. Strangely, the insurance companies aren’t complaining. This comment explains that, though.

Harvey Kaltsas, president emeritus of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, said the country could save billions of dollars by shifting care for a number of conditions away from pharmaceutical treatment and toward acupuncture. Kaltsas said the number of licensed practitioners has grown to 20,000 from just 300 in 1971, indicating that many people are sold on the practice’s effectiveness.

I think that last word should be stricken out and replaced with the more appropriate term, “profitability”.

The country could also save billions of dollars if, instead of treating cancer with chemotherapy and surgery and all those expensive Big Medicine remedies, they instead used my personal tickle therapy cure — the only expenses are the cost of feathers and my personal time, at $500 an hour. It is so much cheaper than those overpriced medicines! And instead of putting the patient in a state that requires months or years of sustained expense, and years and years of regular doctor’s visits and diagnostic examinations, my therapy is fast — depending on how far the cancer had progressed, I only need to be employed for weeks or months…and then no more medical expenses at all. Ever. I can guarantee it.

The insurance companies should love me.

A young man with muscular dystrophy, who by all accounts is of good character and even exceptional attitude, is in a contest to win a beach vacation. All you have to do is go to this site and click to improve his odds of winning a well-deserved break.

(via Ctrl-Alt-Del)

Man, I get some strange email. This one is just weird…maybe one of you can help this person out.

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I’m really not being mean and trying to banish a fellow science blogger to some barren, frigid desolation — hey, that’s where I live! — but she’s volunteering to leave New York for a month to live in Antarctica. All you have to do is vote for her essay, and presto, maybe they’ll ship her off to somewhere near the south pole. Cool.

This is big news, a first in the history of that institution! The student who led the LU College Democrats, the student club that was shut down by the administration because apparently, anything other than Republican Wingnuttia is the antithesis of the conservative Christian ideals they hope to promote, has written a letter describing the important lessons he learned at Liberty.

That lesson, of course, is to get the hell out and go to a different university.

Give them time, and with a little hard work, maybe the rest of the student body there can master that important skill, too.

He’s going to be lecturing in Phoenix at the end of August on “Why Ben Stein is wrong about science and history“, which really should win some sort of prize for one of the one of the most obvious titles ever. He’s going to have to talk for days to cover the topic adequately, so pack a lunch.

Wish I could go. It should be entertaining, in a Mike-Tyson-battles-PeeWee-Herman sort of way!