From: tip@lead.aichem.arizona.edu (Tom Perigrin)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: A few quotes from a few years ago
Date: 10 Sep 92 02:03:09 GMT
Distribution: world, usa, na
Organization: A.I. Chem Lab, University of Arizona

In article <1992Sep8.175152.15724@csc.ti.com> dpage@ra.csc.ti.com (Doug Page) writes:

>Your bring up an interesting point.  Perhaps the government should not even be
>in the education business (?).  Is public education actually mandated by
>the Constitution, or is it something that we have just come to expect from
>government (i.e., an entitlement)?  


It's an investment.   "If you think education is expensive,  you should 
consider the cost of ignorance."

>                                        With the current "amoral" education
>currently teaching the minority world view of secular humanism and claiming
>be "valueless", perhaps we would all be better off if this country went back
>to a private school system (?).

One, I don't necessarily buy that there is a unified effort to teach some 
vague bogeyman called "secular humanism".   I think this is a sound bite term 
used when people aren't getting their way.    But even if that were so,
do you really favor a system which only invests in the education of the
children of wealthy, and leaves large swaths of the population undereducated?

Do you admire the third world educational system?

>
>I would hope that the common denominator approach to ethics/morals would work,
>but it too has its flaws.  For example, murder may have different definitions
>than what even the law dictates.  There are many Moslems in Iraq who would
>view that the killing of the "enemies of Islam" would be outside of their
>definition of "murder".  Being nice to old people would be qualified under
>secular humanism to read more like "be nice to old people, at least until they
>become an emotional, psycological, or financial burden".  This world view
>would actually allow the "elimination" of the elderly that are a "burden to
>society", even though this "elimination" might be considered murder under
>current statutes.  There are some "mainline" Christian denominations that view
>that stealing is OK if your need is great enough; even if it is against the
>law.

I think you have just hoisted yourself with your own petard.   Since some 
Christian sects preach the acceptability of theft, then which specific brand
of Christianity do we teach?  Mine, yours, or the Christianity of the guy
over there with the big gun???


>When it comes time to educate students about social problems, the problem
>becomes even greater.  Look at the way the NEA/Planned Parenthood wants AIDS
>education to be handled.  Briefly mentioning that abstinece is actually the
>only "safe sex", and then speaking at great length about the use of condoms
>and how to use them.  They don't bother to point out that the HIV virus is
>actually small enough to pass through an undamaged condom.  They don't bother
>to teach them that condoms fail ~10% of the time and that studies have shown
>that in married couples where one of the partners has HIV/AIDS practicing
>"safe sex" that 40% of the spouses become infected.  (It's a lot like five
>people going sky diving but only having two parachutes - there aren't many
>skydivers that I know that like those odds.)

Okay,  but don't go overboard in the other direction.

>Getting back to my original post, however, perhaps you can see that this
>country was founded at least in large part upon (Judeo/)Christian ideals rather
>than the other religions that you mentioned.  


But democracy doesn't say that one person (early) one vote,  one person (late)
one half vote.  Nope, equal votes.

>                                                    Like it or not, the Ten
>Commandments did/do have an impact on what is considered right in America. The
>Buddhist/Shinto/Hindu world view places considerably less value on individual
>rights than does Judeo/Christianity. 

As a Buddhist I don't seem to think that's true.   Are you a Buddhist?
Where did you get your training?

>                                      The teachings of Islam clearly do not
>allow for a secular state, period. 

Yes, and lets all following that shining example!

>                                    Atheism, being the reactionary world view
>that it is, would not allow for freedom of religion.  

Not neccesarily,  I know a lot of athiests who enjoy the spectical of silly
people bobbing up and down like drinking ducks.

>                                                       I will not attempt to
>address agnosticism as its definition often varies from individual to
>individual and would waste bandwidth. (I have never met a person who was truly
>agnostic, although I have met many who claimed to be agnostics.  Most were one
>form or another of theists and a few were actually humanists.  It was simply
>the fact that they just didn't realize what agnostic really means.)
>

It must be nice to be the only person who really knwos what an agnostic is.
Especially, since self professed agnostics apparently don't have a clue...


>Doug Page
>

>                          I am, however, attempting to point out that this
>nation was not founded on secular humanist philsophies as some revisionists
>have been proposing in this (and other) news groups.

Yes, well, we all made mistakes when we were young is ignorant.  Even
this country.
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