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Overnight Open Thread

148
Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus5/05/2009 4:40:59 am PDT

re: #146 Killian Bundy

/state your case why

It’s not my case…

I was merely commenting on how the comments over there seem to be dwelling on how ambiguity will lead to confusion.

Volokh himself writes”

Now I suppose it’s possible for teachers, both high school and college, to carefully avoid calling anything that might possibly be linked to a religious belief system “nonsense,” and instead just say “it’s scientifically unfounded” or some such (though wouldn’t that be disapproval, too?). But that would make the discussion pretty artificial, with the teacher being constitutionally barred from saying what is pretty obviously on his mind. Nor would it be true to the principle that schools should be forthright about what’s true and what’s false: Do we really want high schools and universities to be places where one can’t call astrology or voodoo bunk? And while in some classes the pedagogically superior practice would be to talk about why a particular belief system is indeed unfounded, that often won’t be so: My class, for instance, wasn’t a class about the scientific reasons why voodoo isn’t going to work.

/btw, you’re the lawyer… you’re supposed to tell me what it means!