Recently, we learned that Islamic terror state ISIS has decided to ban teaching all kinds of things, including evolution:
The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”
The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
…
The new curriculum even went so far as to explicitly ban Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—although it was not previously taught in Iraqi schools.
Parents are trying to keep their kids from school and some are homeschooling. May as well, once the list of things the kid won’t learn is longer than the list of things he will.
When I (O’Leary for News) said, “Stop all teaching of Darwinism in the schools now,” as it happens, I intended to make a point: There is a “Today-in-nothing-to-do-with-Darwin” pattern by which commentators ignore the motives of shooters who explicitly identify with Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Not just “evolution,” mind you.
Evolution, by itself, won’t persuade a guy that he is the Nietzschean superman, or that he is anything in particular. We needed Darwinian evolution for that, with its focus on “fitness” for survival (cf The Descent of Man).
A friend points out that ISIS differs markedly from ID folk in the Western world, who definitely do want Darwinian evolution to be taught and discussed—warts and all. Just about all leading ID theorists want that, and most Darwin followers want to stop it.
That is why ID types vote for academic freedom bills and Darwin followers vote against them.
It is usually opponents of ID who charge, without evidence, that ID types don’t want evolution taught in schools. Why let facts get in the way of a crowd-pleasing narrative?
See also: Re Chapel Hill shootings: new atheist Sam Harris says no atheism to see there (We wonder what Harris would say if the accused had been a militant Christian fundie, with a Facebook Page to match? Readers?)
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