Saturday, January 17, 2009

Fail schoolbook is Fail.

Okay, so in my school (Which is a bit weird. It's a private Christian school, formerly fundamentalist/ ACE/Abeka, but now with high academic standards . All the teachers have different views, and it's all tolerated. It's all the flavours of Christianity wrapped up into one. Except there aren't any Anglicans, and I'm the only practicing Catholic.) One teacher likes to use These and These as a resource for teaching some of us. I haven't ranted on these yet, so it's time.
If those links don't give you enough surprise, let's talk about my new Social Studies booklet.

It starts off by condemning religious liberalism, (Pgs. 2-10.) which would have been fine for me, since 'liberal Catholics' seem to come off as nothing but giant contradictions anyway.
But, by religious liberalism, they mean any and all people who are not fundamentalists.
So yeah, we're covered.
No evolution ever happened, evolution is a lie and the only people who beleive in any form of it are atheists who hate God. (Pgs. 5-8)That's of course a Hasty Genralization.
Social Darwinism
is real Darwinism. In fact, it's a direct result of it. (Page 7.) Social Darwinism led to Marxist Socialism (Pgs. 7-8) Therefore, the Theory of Evolution led to the Holocaust and other atrocities (Pgs.-8.)
That of course simply does'nt follow logically. If you number the premises, they don't substantiate the first, only assume it. That only Beggs the Question.
Socialism is also a result of people who don't take the scriptures literallistically, or more specifically, in the fundamentalist view of scripture.( Pgs. 8-10) (Which by the way, does'nt work.) Even as a Christian who fully accepts what Pius XII says about the bible, the idea of the self-interpreting, self attesting, self-validating self- evident bible ( i.e, what some sola scripturists beleive.) is logical fallacious . It's a big logical circle.
Real Christians are Fundamentalists (Pgs, 10-14.)
This system prides itself on the fact that it's Not objective, Not comprehensive, and certainly anti-many good things. fund
But eh, what do you expect. They're fundies. They're suppossed to be all ridiculous and screwed up in the mind so that we can all laugh at them. But still, don't fall for this craptastic excuse for reasoning.
It uses vague definitions of the Social Gospel in order to entrap just about anyone in it. Basically, Loaded Language, another logical fallacy.
They let the teacher use them because she apparently gets good results with them. I'm surprised that someone with a master's like her would use this useless BS as a teaching tool.

Go Here for definitions of the logical fallacies in italics.

1 comment:

gemoftheocean said...

A survival technique is to parrot the book back "According to X source ... y." But you might also point out that the book is wrong and belief in God doesn't rule out belief in a "how God chose to get everybody here." One of the things a Christian has to believe if he believes in evolution is that at one point God decided to infuse a soul into men. So there's a string or two attached.