Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Support for Christian prayer in U.S. public schools varies widely by state.

American Atheists warns Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling undermines public education and pluralism.

The UK’s hate speech legislation stifles religious dissent.

MAGA is waging war on family liberty.

Sean Duffy turns military graduation into blatant ad for Christian Nationalism.

Catholics are still content to be members of a child abusing cult.

Mormon women are confused that men are allowing them to display porn shoulders. Where will it all end?

Patriotic Bible blesses Trump with $1.3 million in royalties.

World of Woo:  Functional Medicine.

Environment:  What not having safe drinking water looks like.

Children will get sick and die because Trump owed RFK Jr. a favor. RFK Jr. is not just wrong, he is outright dangerous. Dismissing vaccine experts won’t make anyone healthier. How can his vaccine panel make credible decisions when many of its claims are based upon non-existent studies?

Science is vulnerable when it discovers things that threaten authority.

Science education can give kids a sense of awe and wonder about the world.

Could the first images from the Vera Rubin telescope change how we view space for good?

Long Reads:

Unlike the Pew Research survey above, the public likely holds more nuanced views on the role of religions in public schools.

What’s it like to be a giant hairy orangutan puppet?

Jehovah’s Witness church covered up child sex abuse, survivors say.

Watching the world, one quintillionth of a second at a time.

Busting the top 5 myths about the Big Bang.

Are we witnessing the death of international law?

When will the “woke left” protest the cutting of USAID?

Sunday Book Club: Cyber Citizens.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Podcast: The deadly cost of Religious Extremism.

Coffee Break Videos:  Skeptic Dan Barker on apologist John Lennox, with Aron Ra.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week everyone!

[Strega]

Thanks Reg 🙂

[_Robert_]

Assessments of educational quality are not so positive in the United States, unfortunately. To be sure, there are committed teachers and administrators doing good work in many elementary and secondary schools. But overall, the picture is not bright, and this seems especially true in the case of science education.

Joe Rogan is the key science and archeology teacher now. I saw him and his guest discussing ancient aliens, Egyptian helicopter hieroglyphs and ancient Egyptian wooden airplanes. It is to the point where the mainstream “knowledge” is not even worth debunking.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

The challenge facing the current American administration is not the pace of change, but its utter lack of a coherent vision for what should replace existing structures. This is not the “traditional conservatism” so often touted during GOP campaigns, where reform is pursued with caution and respect for institutional continuity. Instead, it is a reckless dismantling of norms without any roadmap for rebuilding.

Meanwhile, America’s greatest strengths—its commitment to science, rigorous academia, and freedom of speech—are being steadily undermined. Christian Nationalism, with its push to impose sectarian dogma on public policy, further corrodes democratic processes and threatens the secular foundations essential to a free society.

The damage extends beyond America’s borders. Tariffs framed as “patriotic” measures have strained alliances and disrupted global markets, while cuts to USAID and foreign assistance have weakened America’s diplomatic ‘soft power’ influence and moral authority abroad. Nations that once looked to the United States for stability and leadership now view it with growing skepticism, seeing a superpower adrift, eroding its own values, and abandoning its commitments to the global community.

This is not a restoration of American greatness; it is a slow unraveling, driven by those unfit to steward the institutions they claim to protect. Claims that the Trump era marks the dawn of a “Golden Age” ring hollow in the face of leadership defined by incompetence and opportunism.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

One solution is to teach children critical thinking as a dedicated school subject, like math or history. Teach children how to question, explore ideas, and understand the history of thought. Learn to spot the differences between valid and invalid reasoning and cause vs. correlation. Understand how arguments are constructed and defended by knowing how to spot fallacies (including our own). Training students to identify common errors in reasoning and manipulative rhetoric in media, advertising, and political speech will stand to them because they can analyze risks, evidence, and trade-offs in their personal and professional lives.

Democracies depend on informed, thoughtful citizens who can evaluate claims before accepting or spreading them. A critical thinker is less likely to fall for conspiracy theories, quack cures, and pseudoscience.

Critical thinking is infrastructure for the mind. It is not a luxury. Without it, even the best education in facts can be undermined by emotional reasoning, tribal identity, or the algorithmic echo chambers of social media.

 

• This reply was modified 9 months, 3 weeks ago by Reg the Fronkey Farmer.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

What’s it like to be a giant hairy orangutan puppet?

Mystery Science Theater 3000 approximated this with a close neighbor on Darwin’s tree: Joey the Lemur

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

American Atheists warns Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling undermines public education and pluralism.

As long as Unbelievers can opt out of compulsory reading of religious texts, I see no problem with Believers opting out of reading texts they may not like.

In fact, everyone who reads one thing automatically at that moment opts out of reading everything else, simply because attention is limited.

If believers want to make those texts unavailable to others, there is where the problem is.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

A.I. or Human…..take the test here.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

One solution is to teach children critical thinking as a dedicated school subject, like math or history. Teach children how to question, explore ideas, and understand the history of thought. Learn to spot the differences between valid and invalid reasoning and cause vs. correlation. Understand how arguments are constructed and defended by knowing how to spot fallacies (including our own). Training students to identify common errors in reasoning and manipulative rhetoric in media, advertising, and political speech will stand to them because they can analyze risks, evidence, and trade-offs in their personal and professional lives.

Democracies depend on informed, thoughtful citizens who can evaluate claims before accepting or spreading them. A critical thinker is less likely to fall for conspiracy theories, quack cures, and pseudoscience.

Critical thinking is infrastructure for the mind. It is not a luxury. Without it, even the best education in facts can be undermined by emotional reasoning, tribal identity, or the algorithmic echo chambers of social media.

All this is well and good, but the decline in critical thinking skills happened on the clocks of all the vaunted institutions who preceded the rise of MAGA and Christian Nationalism. The later two are just symptoms.

A prime example would be the teachers unions who are more interested in job security than in teaching students how to think and who went along with shutting down schools and all of civilized life from which children could have learning experiences over a disease that didn’t affect school-aged children nearly as much as elderly adults. The response to COVID-19 was a massive failure to critically think from all sides.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

I only got 44 percent right on the aAI or Human test, which kind of fits in with this article that confirms what I’ve khsaid earlier about AI:

Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons
https://gizmodo.com/multiple-studies-now-suggest-that-ai-will-make-us-morons-2000620811

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Yes, I agree with much of that assessment but its never to later to start. Banning cellphones during school hours and ongoing teacher training and development would be good too. In every country.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I am immune to “ChatGPT rotting my brain”:

I bring my thinking to ChatGPT, rather than leaving my thinking to it.

I value thinking as a craft, not a checkbox.

I interrogate my own ideas before accepting them.

I enjoy the process of discovery, not just the conclusion.

I use tools (including me) to refine thought, not to substitute it.

I remain comfortable with “I don’t know yet” while exploring.

I test my own reasoning to avoid hidden assumptions.

I treat thinking as an ongoing responsibility, not a static identity.

At least that’s what ChatGPT told me.

[jakelafort]

Disparate thoughts on a Sunday is fun day unless you are in Bay of Fundy and fundamentalists are instrumental in attacking you, shellacking you and then smacking you. Sunday afternoon on the Island of la Grand Jatte vibes.

Excellent thoughts expressed like a box by our fearless Fronky Farmer in re. to current US administration and lack of coherent vision.

That box takes me to the Kennedy pox in the hen house fox. Well done Murica! Vote your conscience. Cult hero. What could go wrong?

When will the woke left protest something legit? When Zionists can no longer be condemned. That is when. When Islam can be attacked as an idea. That is when. Until then it is one big secular Jew hating religion. When identity of the perpetrator’s of history’s horrors is no longer ascribed to certain groups. That is when. When commonality among ALL humans is emphasized. That is when. When values of the west are recognized as superior to Islamic values. That is when. When cultural relativism is jettisoned so that lefties are no longer congruent with women born into the death cult of Islam suffering immense discrimination, persecution and unfulfilling lives excused by cultural relativism while women in the west are accorded respect and status. That is when.

Blasphemy Laws article highlights the immense betrayal of humanist values. On the one hand lefties going overboard to protect the death cult and its penetration into western law, culture and institutions and the concomitant suffering of untold tens of millions. F free speech!

On other hand lefties all over the globe advancing the cause of Jew hatred and Islamism and denying free speech to those who oppose the former.

https://www.jpost.com/tags/mit

[Simon Paynton]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Mormon women are confused that men are allowing them to display porn shoulders. Where will it all end?

In the comments people talk about how the worst part, in the new relaxation of modesty rules, is the change in God’s unchanging and immutable Word.  How does that work?  It’s a contradiction in someone’s world view.

[Author]

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