re: #1043 motorcycleboy

Are you and Sharmuta the same person? Neither namesake likes answering questions — and Sharmuta’s question was rhetorical.

I’ve answered your questions, and put questions back to you, which YOU have failed to answer. Are YOU Sharmuta?

/

Faith does not require empirical evidence! You can’t apply the scientific method to faith, which brings me to the point that this assumption is the basis of the folly of arguing with the faithful for the exclusion of ideas in the classroom over fundamental questions of human existence.

You can teach “fundamental question of human existence”, which seems to be a rhetorical fig leaf behing which you conceal your own particular pet sectarian religious dogmas, in any “fundamental questions of human existence” class you can get your private or parochial school to include, or you can homeschool it, for your own kids and the kids of willing others. But nothing but empirical science belongs in public high school science class. Most certainly, faith indoctrination doesn’t belong in there.

And the argument that ‘the faithful’ have is not only with me, but with the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and Founding Father and Framer Thomas Jefferson clearly outlined what the Establishment Clause of that Amendment meant in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”