church and classroom

Would the people pushing to keep Alabama schoolchildren from learning about Evolution be pleased to know they're on the same side as Islamic fundamentalist educators in Kuwait? Not about evolution, exactly, but about the need to "protect" religion and "protect" God by keeping those in their care [those they want to control] ignorant of anything that may upset the apple-cart. God is big enough to deal with us using our brains .. the brains s/he gave us, if you buy into that sort of thing ... to their full capacity. And maybe, as Rosemary Pennington quoted South Park's Stan as saying, "Couldn't evolution be the answer to how and not the answer to why?"

In the Klezmatics song "I ain't afraid", they say: "I ain't afraid of your churches, I ain't afraid of your temples, I ain't afraid of your schools, I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God." By fostering ignorance in our own society, and allowing others to foster (and applaud) ignorance in theirs, we perpetuate fear, we perpetuate danger, and we perpetuate needless death.

In his recent op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman quoted Mamoun Fandy, who put it like this: "Nobody in the Arab world
'has the guts to say that what is happening in Iraq is wrong — that killing schoolkids is wrong,' said Mamoun Fandy, director of the Middle East program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 'People somehow think that killing Iraqis is good because it will stick it to the Americans, so Arabs are undermining the American project in Iraq by killing themselves.'”

Friedman was just looking at the situation in Iraq, and at the case of suicide bombers and their exploits. But Americans who applaud anything an American President does, just because he's American and a Christian, or who will blithely accept any behaviour by our administration, because "we're the good guys" are just as bad. There is no time for us to remain stuck in an "us v. them", "rah, rah we're the greatest" high school mentality.