The ultra-rich Hobby Lobby Green family not only wants to save women from the sinful use of birth control, but they also want to reform public schools by requiring all students to take Bible-based religion courses. (No doubt the students will only study The One Right, True, and Holy Hobby Lobby Religion, not some Secular Humanist comparative religion stuff.) The Hobby Lobby family wants to save the souls of all the public school kids by forcing their beliefs on anyone who wants to graduate from high school.
The Hobby Lobby curricular reform crowd has not published details of their new Bible study program, but it would not be surprising if it included units on Biblically-based 'biology'. If this is permitted, the Greens and their religious cronies will have a precedent for also 'reforming' public school biology classes. This would doubtless include teaching their version of The Truth about Cavefolk Life with Dinosaurs and many other scientific oddities. If the legal challenges bankrupt the public schools then the schools could be pressured to privatize, allowing the open teaching of the Hobby Lobby dogmas.
Young-earth creationists believe that God made the Earth in six 24-hour days (in 4004 B.C.) Other creationists allow God to take his time, but disagree about how much time. Young-earth creationists have the most remarkable beliefs. Your tax dollars are already being used to teach children about the creation "science" of astronomy, climatology, dinosaurs, and Noah's ark. Right now parents are given tax-dollar funded vouchers to send their children to private religious schools that teach Creation "science".
The Hobby Lobby Greens are already arranging to introduce a 4-year Bible course into an Oklahoma public school system and 'creep' it into other public schools from there. http://www.dailykos.com/... If they get away with this, it opens the door for teaching public school students the Creation 'biology' that is already being taught in private religious schools.
It all starts with Adam and grows out from there:
How would Leonardo da Vinci look next to Adam? One of the most gifted men of the last millennium, this artist, inventor, and engineer would seem a retarded imbecile compared to Adam. After six sin-ravaged millennia of degeneration, it is impossible to imagine how superlative Adam was before the cumulative damages of sin and genetic defects. Who was the smartest man who ever lived? Probably the mud-man, Farmer Adam.
https://biblescienceguy.files.wordpress.com/...
A website with instruction materials for Christian schools teaches us all about the goings on in the Garden of Eden. Before Eve forced that piece of fruit on poor, helpless Adam the two of them lived in an innocent paradise complete with dinosaurs.
These wonderful creatures did not evolve from reptiles or amphibians. God created them perfectly finished. Today we can only guess what dinosaurs were really like in that sinless paradise of long ago.
http://www.christiananswers.net/...
This website has many essays that provide more remarkable 'science' instruction. We learn that it is wrong to judge others by their appearance, especially if they were huge, ferocious-looking dinosaurs with teeth like six-inch daggers. Just because they were big enough to eat people does not mean they actually did. It seems that they chose to renounce a carnivorous orientation.
T-rex and friends The sharp teeth and claws of some dinosaurs have made people think that they were mean, vicious animals. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is often pictured as a horrible killer, attacking every dinosaur in sight. But this may not be true at all. . .
Could it be that tyrannosaurs were mostly plant-eaters, not meat-eaters? The shape of their teeth alone can’t tell us what they ate. Perhaps they used their sharp teeth and claws to tear up tough plants and fruits, not dinosaurs. Obviously sharp teeth can serve other purposes than simply cutting meat, just as kitchen knives can be used for cutting carrots as well as steaks.
Many sharp-toothed animals living today are plant-eaters and rarely (or never) eat flesh. A few of many examples include the Giant Panda, the large Australian fruit bat, and some apes and bears.
http://www.christiananswers.net/...
Unfortunately, Farmer Adam was not bright enough to Just say No. There was a problem involving eating Fruit. People were kicked out of the garden of Eden along with the vegetarian dinosaurs. Things got bad but could have been worse. Even after the Fall it never rained in Southern California (or anywhere else). Maybe that is why the neighbors didn't believe Noah about the water raining from the sky thing. Creationists assure us that people were still living to be hundreds of years old in those days despite their sins. This was because of the denser atmosphere.
Further discussion about Creationist climatology and elimination of evolutionary heresy follows under the ancestral orange nematode
Creationist climatology plays misty about the atmospherics before the Flood. Every day the greenhouse effect kept the average temperature at a balmy 68 degrees F.
The world before Noah’s flood was very different. It was a lush garden, tropical from pole to pole. The “canopy” model of a watery layer above the Earth’s atmosphere is the best way to understand how this is possible. The Scripture tells us that God separated the “waters from the waters on creation day 2 and placed waters above and on the Earth. The increased atmospheric pressure would have allowed a large amount of condensation at the end of each night cycle. This very heavy dew along with the “mist” would have been adequate to water the ground, so there was no need for rain on the Earth. There was no rain or clouds and the weather was uniform from pole to pole because of the greenhouse effect of the canopy. The weather report would have been the same every day “The high today will be about 75 and the low tonight will be about 60, there will be about 1 inch of water condensed on the ground over night.” This water above would have compressed the atmosphere and created both much larger creatures and greatly increased longevity.
http://sixdaycreation.com/...
Both people and dinosaurs splashed around in the inch-deep mud puddles. Our public school students can have classroom discussions about how the dinosaurs and sinful pre-Flood people interacted (since specific archaeological findings are not cited):
It will take many more discoveries before anyone can say for certain how dinosaurs behaved in the world before the Flood or after. However it is likely that more people killed dinosaurs than dinosaurs killed people. Bible-believing Christians can be sure of one thing. When dinosaurs were originally created, they were peaceful and harmless just like all the other animals.
http://www.christiananswers.net/...
In the Garden of Eden neither the lion nor the T-rex lunched on the lamb. Then "Adam's fall, sinn'd all" and badness was begotten into the world. Eventually the badness got so bad that everybody but Noah and his kids had to be drowned like people used to drown unwanted kittens.
The peaceful conduct of the tyrranosaurs was fortunate since dinosaurs joined all the other critters on Noah's ark:
The Ark had plenty of room for all the animals, including the dinosaurs. It was carefully built to fulfill the needs of each passenger as they rested in safety during the great Flood. Many of the animals may have slept through most of the trip.
Creation math is used to explain how Noah managed to fit all the animals on the Ark. Noah and the critters floated around in the Ark for months until the floodwaters went down. The dinosaurs that didn't make it onto the Ark turned into fossils. The other dinosaurs got off the Ark along with all the rest of the animals. Some of the animals stayed around with Noah's family and some (like the unicorns and the dinosaurs) disappeared. Speculations about the reasons the dinosaurs and unicorns disappeared could make a good class discussion.
Some types of animals wandered off to other continents. It seems that all the kangaroos and most marsupials were drawn down under to Australia. Then animals like kangaroos died out on the Ark-landing continent without leaving any fossils or relatives behind. There are several theories about how the animals were distributed to different continents after the flood.
During the ice age immediately following the flood the ocean shorelines would have been about 200 feet lower than they are today. The water was up on the continents out of the oceans. This would have created a land bridge across Indonesia to Australia and an Aleutian land bridge to the Americas. The animals would only have to get their feet wet crossing some rivers at fordable places. The different ecosystems with unique creatures were created after the flood when creatures were isolated as the ice age subsided. For example the marsupials in Australia were isolated there. Everywhere else they were eaten by the predators but here they survived. The Earths diverse ecosystems are based on: selective survival NOT selective evolution.
http://sixdaycreation.com/...
Apparently the Flood swirled all the fossils of kangaroos to Australia. Maybe ghosts of kangaroos past helped protect their descendants from predators. The Creationists will have to explain why sea-floor subsidence has destroyed the evidence of the former possibility of a land bridge to Australia.
The new Creationist biology curriculum would have to make sure students were not confused by heretical parodies. My personal favorite is the flying dinosaurs theory.
New evidence from an archeological find in China supports the long held Christian belief that Noah's sons rode giant flying dinosaurs to transport duck billed platypuses from Australia, and penguins and polar bears from the Antarctic, to name a few. "Those must have been some mighty big flying dinosaurs," says Pastor Deacon Fred. "Imagine the look on Noah's face when his sons flew in for a landing with a pair of Hippos strapped to the back of one of them things! Glory to God!"
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/...
Regrettably, the Landover Baptist Church is not actually a real fundamentalist church. The authors of this website and other heretical groups like Pastafarians might be guilty of giving students an alternative perspective. Perhaps the students could study the thermodynamics of heretic burning in their chemistry classes.
Cultural issues and many scientific topics would be addressed in a very different way under a new religious curriculum. The sociology and genetics of incest would probably fascinate the high school kids.
The Bible without any doubt teaches that God chose to start
humanity off from only two people. This means that in the first few
generations, marriage had to be between extremely closely related
people, including at least one brother-sister union. The Bible says
that Adam and Eve had daughters as well. Cain could have married
his sister, or niece.
The biological problems caused by such unions today come from
a progressive accumulation of genetic defects since the Fall.
An originally perfect population would not have had any such
problem.
http://creation.com/...
Fundamentalist molecular biology is an exciting new field of study. Mutations do occur, perhaps occasioned by sin. (Would a proximate occasion of sin cause fewer mutations than an actual occasion of sin? This could be added to the math curriculum, too!)
Disease would have been less prevalent only about 1,600 years or so after the Fall (Genesis 3). We've had a few thousand more years for deterioration to occur, for example more bad mutations in us, and in viruses and bacteria. Apparently, the average man in Mrs. Noah's day expected to become a father after he was a hundred years old, and to live more than 900 years. How long would women like Mrs. Noah have expected to be capable of child-bearing?
http://www.christiananswers.net/...
Clearly students would learn some new concepts about reproductive and population biology. Note the useful opportunity for class discussion about female fertility issues. Perhaps Todd Akin could make an instructional video for classroom use. The important role of women would not be neglected in this new curriculum.
Mrs. Noah's world was similar to ours. Its population was swelling rapidly. Various estimates have been made from the genealogy in Chapter 5. A conservative calculation based on four children per family and 18 generations from creation to the Flood gives a population of about one billion. This is equal to the world population during the first half of the nineteenth century. Today the world population is about five times as large. This population may have been spread right around the globe, although we have no way of knowing for certain what the pre-Flood land area was like. It might have been one single land-mass (1:9).
The original journal reference for this is Gill Middleton.
Creation Ex Nihilo 15(2):22-24, March-May 1993.
http://www.christiananswers.net/...
Are the calculations of four children per family based on an assumption that parents were using birth control? What if women lived hundreds of years before the flood and had one baby per year? How would that affect the population? What if human gestation lasted longer than 9 months? The new curriculum could include religious math.
Modern math would help students understand modern conservative policies. Religious-math courses could explain how lazy takers could raise a family of children in middle-class comfort on a minimum wage job. Bible-math courses could teach how decreasing taxes for rich people increases government revenue. Perhaps the religious-math courses could also be used to show that a camel could easily fit through the eye of a needle.
Rich donors or taxpayers would need to provide Creationist literature to replace the heretical stuff that is currently in the school libraries. There are even creationist journals since the nerds who referee reputable science journals refuse to publish the brilliant insights of creationists and climate change deniers. Creation journals do publish papers about Noah's Flood, which convinces the creationists that the rest of us are wrong about all this science stuff. [An example of this is the paper: Chalk and “Upper Cretaceous” Deposits are Part of the Noachian Flood (Answers Research Journal 2 (2009): 29–51). It is even on the internet so it must be true. (Bonjour!)]
Some creationists claim dominion and superiority for themselves. They like to see the world as a pyramidal stack of property their god created--with them on top. These people tend to think society should conform to this model. They, the preferred people of G*d, have been given the one and only truth and salvation. They have a "G*d-given right" to impose their beliefs on everyone else and to make the rules for everyone to live by. Interestingly, their rules tend to be to their personal and economic advantage. They really feel that the rest of us should be grateful to the rich folk for allowing us subsistance and that we are completely out of line to object to their dominion. Changes in the public school education would help the rest of us learn our places in their cosmology.
Evolution puts each of us in an interdependent web. Even if you are a believer, a god that uses evolution does not necessarily prefer people to whales. All creation is precious. Adaptability improves the chances of survival. Winners also may have gotten where the are by dumb luck. Critters who made the mistake of living in the spot where the asteroid hit have gone extinct. The Hobby Lobby religious supremacists are hardly likely to appreciate the idea that they are not somehow superior to everyone else just because their personal G*d says so.
The fundamentalist dinosaur curriculum would promote the ancient social organization where the noble rich folk are at the top of the pyramid. If you want to know more about dinosaurian Biblical life Ken Ham wrote a whole book about it:
An information-packed dinosaur book based on the authority of the Bible! Ken Ham, in his own distinct and understandable teaching style, explains how to understand the big picture of earth’s history… from a biblical perspective. He then applies this biblical foundation to the intriguing topic of dinosaurs! The Bible actually makes the subject of dinosaurs come “alive” as their great mystery is solved! You’ll also learn how to effectively use dinosaurs as “Missionary Lizards.”
https://answersingenesis.org/...
Just be sure that the kids don't confuse "Missionary Lizards" with Missionary positions.