The Stray World

There have been recent argu­ments, which I have myself encountered, on why I should bother chal­len­ging the pre­vail­ing views of oth­ers; why I should attack their cher­ished beliefs although they claim to have done noth­ing to attack my beliefs.

A recent debate comes to mind which didn’t even qual­i­fied as a debate as a tone-troll clum­sily avoided the argu­ment by call­ing those who poin­ted out the atro­cit­ies in his/her cher­ished Quran by call­ing us all haters and wankers.

Well, tough luck laddie/lassie. This is what you get if you debate with people who value hon­esty and clar­ity. To dis­cuss and find out how the world works, we must be will­ing to open our eyes and appraise the evid­ence hon­estly; and not as a huge pro­por­tion of the reli­gious like to do, which is to ignore the parts that con­tra­dict with their moral com­pass and know­ledge of how the world works.

Athe­ism is not a sci­ence, it is simply a lack of belief in god, gods, deit­ies, and other super­nat­ural beings unproven by sci­ence. When we do sci­ence, we must be clear, that we are all athe­ists because the evid­ence does not prove the exist­ence of your cher­ished delusion.

Athe­ism is not syn­onym­ous with sci­ence, but it does lead to the sci­entific method. For sci­ence ped­agogy, teach­ing sci­ence requires one to be an athe­ist, and not slip in per­sonal con­vic­tions about the way the world works accord­ing to your superstitions.

That’s simply the way it is.

I still resent one of my Form 6 Bio­logy teach­ers because the way he taught me evol­u­tion was to sprinkle in copi­ous, naus­eas amounts of doubts on the the­ory of evol­u­tion based upon his Chris­tian upbringing.

Now that I am no longer affected by his abil­ity to mark me down, I can safely say to him: “Go fuck your­self. Your stu­dents deserve a proper sci­ence edu­ca­tion. The classroom is not a place for you to express per­sonal beliefs, it is to teach sci­ence, to spread know­ledge, to encour­age crit­ical think­ing, to appraise the evid­ence with the utmost hon­esty and clarity.”

You can quote me on that.

PZ Myers recently gave a talk at AAI Copen­ha­gen 2010 regard­ing the need to be more athe­istic in class. We should not pander and fit the cur­ricula to avoid chal­len­ging a student’s pre­con­ceived ideas of the world; and Myers is as con­vin­cing as ever.