I know of many creationists theme parks / museums, they are springing up all over including one in Cincinnati in the US, and ones in Portsmouth and Bristol England. Now I hear that the Cincinnati is going to be a theme park called Ark Encounter opening in 2014.
For people in this day and age to be allowed to expose their children to such anti-scientific misinformation is disgusting and this type of indoctrination should be illegal, but how can you convince people of that when they think the Flintstones is a reality show?
No more than anyone else that would see children protected. There are laws to stop the abuse of children and perhaps they need to clearly include abuse of their minds from ant-scientific nonsense. No?
ReplyDeleteLaws to prevent child abuse tend to focus on sexual or physical abuse, this is different. I may be wrong but I don't think there is any precedent for the state to interfere with parents teaching their kids whatever they choose. IMHO it would be a really dangerous road to go down. Evidence for Father Christmas is pretty similar to the creationist case, should Santa be banned too?
ReplyDeleteHi, Henglist, I think you you are wrong, the state, in most of the countries I think this post applies, make children's education a legal requirement with a lot of control over what their learning contains.
ReplyDeleteChildren must either go to an appropriate school or learn at home in a suitable environment with a recognised syllabus. I'm not sure but I imagine that if children were being taught that the world was flat, that Hitler was an historical hero, or that the moon landings were faked, their teachers (even if that is their parents) would be breaking the law.
Where this starts to break down is that religious belief is often given special dispensation to teach things that are unscientific as fact. This is generally not a problem, most religious education is separated from science but where I think it needs sorting is in the cases where religious beliefs are taught as scientific truths and scriptures as science text books.
Creationism clearly crosses this line.
So it isn't a case of stopping children believing in fantasy figures like Santa when they are young, but a case of letting them find out they aren't real when they are old enough to know the difference and being taught proper science.