Aron Ra: Indoctrination State: Countering Creationism in Texas

a lot of Americans today foolishly believes that our government and our our legal system were based on story of the ten commandments on a fictional covenant between God and Dorji Moses and Jehovah I think would be a better way to describe that or they think that our government was based on biblical values as if there ever was such a thing is not only false but absurd under scrutiny and you don't have to know much history to know that that's wrong but the more that you know the more wrong that is contrary to what many Americans now believe the United States was initially founded as the first explicitly secular government and I know everybody in every other country that I've been to knows that but I still have a difficult time trying to explain that to Americans and a good example this is a Marco Rubio current presidential candidate who said that our country was founded on the slogan In God We Trust even though that slogan didn't exist until her near 80 years after our country was founded and I've actually had people tell me explicitly that they believe that our country was founded by God now our actual human founders included some influential leaders who were neither Christian nor fond of Christians in fact some of our founders wrote scathing condemnation of Christianity but even those of our founders who were Christian knew from firsthand what happens every time religion acquires rule over law the result has always been an automatic violation of human rights this is what theocracy always does until such time as it loses its influence over a hopefully wiser populace who won't tolerate that sort of repression anymore and the only time that religion is polite because when it has no power the more compliant people are the more power religion has which is why for example the very name of Islam commands submission so while our pre-darwinian Declaration of Independence and our National Constitution may have vague deistic references to a creator elsewhere described as nature's God the name Jesus Christ appears nowhere in either document and nature's God as a deist reference but where a Christian may imagine that the later reference to divine providence must refer to Jesus a Jew or a Muslim might assume that it refers to the Father God instead and a Hindu a Sikh or even a pantheist might have a completely different interpretation of God altogether including the god of Einstein and Spinoza which isn't really a deity at all but just the collection of the laws of nature so our founding documents were deliberately ambiguous written the way they were for that reason in order to accommodate any religion or none an Americans are very keen on the second amendment of the Constitution where we have a right to bear arms but we seem to ignore the First Amendment which is where we have a freedom of religion where Congress can make no law even respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and one thing that my countrymen failed to understand is that once a government establishes a religion that invariably also imposes that religion which of course compromises all others so it is not possible to have freedom of religion without having freedom from religion and this is why the First Amendment contradicts the first commandment which is another fact that many Americans seem to have overlooked and don't understand even when I've explained it our founding fathers were in a leek league of wealthy aristocrats well-educated at a time when most people never received a secondary education if they got a first one and the fact that so many of them had such disdain against religion caused a backlash such that early in our history there were repeated waves of religious revivalism and because religion likes to reverse everything they refer to this religious revivalism as the Great Awakening the advantage of faith over reason is that requires understanding which requires education which requires resources of time and intelligent comprehension and accurate source material vetted by scholarship but religion needs none of that because it's just talking out of your ass pretending to know things no one even can know pretending that you'll never die it allows the the lowliest idiot to pretend it he is wiser than the wisest as if he has the direct connection to the ear of the most powerful being imaginable someone that could even make two plus two equal the square root of negative one if that's what it takes a desperate emotional mind will accept irrational answers especially if one doesn't know better and doesn't want to and that as I see it as very often the problem we believe different things for different reasons I believe what I do is a logical consequence of my understanding of the facts and my position will obligate lis change according to my understanding which hopefully will improve and I think that evidence is the only reason anyone should ever believe anything and that the secure confidence should be reserved for those times when evidence is both indisputable and overwhelming whenever there could be a doubt there should be and I think that's what skepticism is critical thinking so as not to be fooled as I understand it a fool is one who too readily accepts improbable claims from questionable sources on insufficient evidence or when one believes such claims completely without any doubt as all of these supposedly sacred scriptures require so it's not at all surprising that the Bible and the Quran both use the opposite definition of fool then the dictionary does they will say that you're a fool if you don't gullibly swallow it all and believe it on faith just because they said so and they're telling you this because they're trying to fool you obviously they're both questionable sources making outrageously dubious claims without any evidence at all and all of their power whether it is controlling principalities collecting tithe and regulating or restricting everybody's personal lives all comes from duping the masses deception is the source of all of their power but if you believe whatever you're told without question without reservation is certainly without reason then by definition you're a fool and I believe that the human authors of these and other books pretending to speak for God knew that and that's why they try to reverse the definition so what I see is a division we're at the extremes you have one group that has a deep-seated emotional need to believe and on the other extreme you have people that desire to understand those who have that desire will inquire and those who don't want which is why when somebody falls away from their religion they're ostracized criticized bastardized but nobody ever questions why and in the relatively rare case that somebody comes from a a non religious background and adopts a religious belief the reason they believe that is the only thing we want to know because we want to understand and that's why it is when you're trying to explain science to irrational believers they're deliberately obtuse they're intentionally trying to maintain a misunderstanding they don't want to understand what they don't want to know or they don't want to know what they don't want to know they want to believe something else and they'll find any excuse necessary to rationalize that and if you try to press on to teach somebody who doesn't want to believe to get them to understand a particular premise or concept get them to acknowledge that that progress and then move on to the next step they'll stop you very early on sometimes with the admission that they don't want to know they just want to believe and I don't have a choice to believe whatever I want all I can believe is whatever is indicated but religious extremists have admitted that they believe what they do as an act of will of mind over matter the power of positive thought as if wishes might come true if you can believe hard enough and of course I'm not talking about everybody but there have been people who've told me that they want to believe with all their heart and this tells me that those people are lying to themselves and I've even seen ministers I know ministers who have said defensive this under the colloquialism fake it till you make it just keep lying to yourself until you believe it it matter of fact as an anecdotal example one of my best friends from high school who is now a fundamentalist Baptist preacher when once upon a time when we were teenagers we had a conversion experience you know where I accepted Jesus you know like everybody else does and I inquire to my friend I said how do I know that this euphoria that I feel like I'm wandering around as a days you know the way people hypnotize themselves I said how do I know that this euphoria is real that I didn't just imagine it or didn't come from some other source and he grabbed me by both shoulders with a huge beaming smile and said just keep telling yourself it's Jesus until you believe it which tells me that faith is a willfully ignorant Auto deceptive self delusion and that was my last instant as a Christian sometimes when I pointed out some inconvenient truth that disproves their point their response is that I'm hurting people people to still want to believe what I've just disproved they continue to want to believe it even after they know what's wrong but why would you want to believe something after you know that it's not even probably true and they'll tell me that they're going to believe you know these maybe what the facts are but I want to believe this and that is an admission that they don't care what the truth really is now this doesn't apply to everyone of course some people are born into it and dr. Nate udderly I never questioned it because everyone around them believes the same thing so it must be true right or I've had people tell me that they believe what they do because they want to because they have to because they're afraid not to and what am i one of my friends from about 20 years ago tells me that I'm Christian because I like to believe that not because I think it's true and I don't think he realizes what he's admitted to me and even in the case where they they admit that on some level they know that it's not really true I often hear that even if it's not true we should believe it anyway as if believing it anyway will somehow make us better people and we know statistically that it doesn't if you look at all the demographics for the hot most religious areas in the least religious areas and you compare their crime rate and especially their murder rate and their child poverty rate their education levels you know teen pregnancy all of these things you see that belief in God statistically makes you a worse person but these people believe what they want to believe simply because they want to believe it but it's hard to just make up whatever you want to believe and convince yourself of that on your own alone you will doubt yourself and if you're the only one who believes in some particular lunacy that no one else here is with you then you're considered crazy so you have to make believe the same nonsense as everyone else and the more people who will endorse and support a particular delusion of the easier it is to pretend that it's all really real and you can't have anyone ruining the fantasy so you have to elect judges and leaders who endorse that same belief as well and this has been the case gone through history with a couple of exceptions in the history of secularism like when my country was founded but we fell back into religion immediately after that and became really religious immediately our first unambiguously Trinitarian president Christian president was Andrew Jackson our sixth president in 1828 yet every president after him has been a devout believer with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln it has been said that you can't get the vote if you don't profess a religious belief in fact Bernie Sanders recently had to claim a religious faith that I don't think he actually has at least not a way I understand those words our Federal Constitution written in 1787 says that there will be no religious tests to any office or public trust in these United States and the Texas state constitution written about 90 years later also says that no candidate will face any religious tests provided they affirm a Supreme Being to put it another way the Texas State Constitution doesn't care what religion you are as long as you are religious and if you're not religious then you may be barred from public office and we've been trying in Texas to get any non-believer elected so that we could challenge that in the courts but you can't get the votes in Texas unless you claim to be a Bible believing Christian first so fast forward a few years to 1925 and the Scopes Monkey Trial at that time it was illegal to teach evolution in public schools after a few successful contests in court we got to 1987 where it is legal now to teach evolution but it has suddenly become illegal to teach creationism and this was the catalyst that I think prompted what the American Christian fundamentalists referred to as the culture war our science advances but in an environment in undated with superstitious beliefs and this is where I come in I became a activist advocating science education about 20 years ago when I saw how the creationist organizations were undermining science in public schools now the polls that I've seen show that 48 to 51 percent variable of our Americans believe that the universe is less than 10,000 years old and that humans appeared in their current form sometime within that time without any evolution of course we're just created by magic by God that's half of us adding to that and I realize these immigrants do a little bit but not in comfortable ways add to this that 20% of our high school teachers and this includes our high school science teachers are young earth creationists they are incompetent to the task and they are prone to deception in order to control what kids believe I can give many anecdotal examples but my favorite is my son's science teacher who told the class that there was never any such thing as a beneficial mutation my son raised his hand and said the teacher the textbook lists beneficial mutations and he was sent to the office room insubordination I wanted to make that teacher famous but my son's mother asked me not to raise a stink while he was in school and by the time he was out that teacher was out as well secular teachers don't often understand evolution well enough to teach it and if they don't I would rather they not this is why my wife and I write a series of classroom supplement videos teaching nationals what my wife is a curriculum specialist with the next generation science standards which translates into national standards but we don't tell people in Texas that it's national standards we go by the name because they don't know but this enables us to write everything that the students are supposed to be tested on and so that they and these will include evolution ain't you know deep time and other concepts like that endosymbiosis and things like that that creation of schools will try to avoid so a teacher can put on our videos play them to the class and this was also done in home schools because in Texas a lot of people homeschool their kids because they're afraid that their children will learn forbidden knowledge but a lot of other people homeschool their kids because they know what's happened to the education situation and that they're not going to if their kids aren't going to learn science unless they teach them themselves now teachers who understand evolution and are capable of teaching it may still want to not personally endorse it which is another reason is be good to just put in our video and then they don't have to claim responsibility for it because students have been trained by their church groups to disrupt the class on certain key words when they hear evolution Big Bang you know millions of years they both cite pseudoscience and logical fallacies if you get past that then you've got angry letters from parents and if you get past that then the teacher risks reactions from associates and even administrators it all depends on the administrator while this is difficult to prove in every case we do know that at least some high school science teachers in Texas have been fired for teaching evolution even though that's part of the job description so creationism is a form of religious extremism requiring a degree of reality denial every creationist organization that I'm aware of and I've seen all the big names posts a statement of faith and you can google this you put in your Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research whatever the group is whatever the Christian school is and then add the term statement of faith and it will direct you to public declarations which will paraphrase you know they'll say it in different ways but they have they've announced as if this were something to be proud of that they will automatically and thoughtlessly reject any and all evidence that might ever arise should it conflict with their interpretation of Bronze Age folklore they have already admit where they admitted that they have already rejected all the evidence there could ever be such that no matter how true the truth really is no amount of proof will ever change their minds the creationists reject evolution specifically but more importantly they also reject methodological naturalism which is an integral aspect of the application of science and creationists want to replace that in some applications with a belief in magic now creationists typically don't admit that they believe in magic they say to believe in miracles but miracles and magic share essentially the same definition that is the super enough supernatural forces or entities to control or forecast natural events in ways which are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics and if you need a further illustration of that you know Adam was created in what was considered in the Hebrew tradition to be a golem spell or you create a clay figurine and you breathe into it the breath of life and you usually have to soak these in sacrificial blood - by the way and of course anything that speaks anything else into existence that's an incantation spell and somehow creationists think that anything that science can't explain is explained by magic you can't explain that therefore God as if God is made of the things we don't know as if unexplained means explained by magic and even the things that science does explain if the answer is complicated then religion still wins because belief in magic wishes is a whole lot easier for some people to grasp then complicated concepts that require prior understanding or in an in-depth knowledge and evoking supernatural explanations doesn't actually explain anything but it eases the mind who can't or won't understand otherwise and remember that a lot of these people don't want to know what the truth really is they think that criticizing natural explanations somehow proves the supernatural that if you think that evolution is impossible that that somehow makes a magical creation possible they don't understand the logical fallacy the false dichotomy they don't understand the concept of the null set or the idea that gods and magic are not the default position that if you can disprove science well that reveals gods and magic no when you don't have an explanation it means you don't have an explanation you're still looking for one and the option that they have suggested is an unsupported assertion and therefore unworthy of serious consideration understand that positive claims require positive evidence even when you're talking about a God now you're free to believe in a god you're welcome to believe in any horseshit you like but if you don't have any evidence to show that your claims are correct that if you have one otherwise I like to put it is if you can't confirm the accuracy of any of your claims to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then it logically you cannot actually know what you claim to know that you really only believe that and it is dishonest to assert as fact that which is not evidently true yet that's what all religions do religion has always been a means of manipulation of the masses and they do this by the indoctrination of faith often targeting young children before they reach the age of reason because if you wait until they're eight or more years old and then you tell them about Noah's Ark and sticks turning into snakes and the Sun stopping in the sky and especially Adam and Eve and all of this requires that they unknowingly already know to be true you're going to have a hard time brainwashing that child but if you get before that age you can convince them of all kinds of irreconcilable nonsense and because religion stunts intellectual development they may never develop the ability to question that and it's not enough that they deceive their own children because of years of the only kids on the block who believe in talking snakes and donkeys and the tower to heaven and guys living inside fish then through peer pressure alone they're not going to believe that very long so all their peers have to believe the same thing too and consequently in Christian schools have sprung up all over my country so that all these kids are taught the Bible as if it were real and no one is taught evolution but that's not good enough because religion is a delusion that needs to infect everybody in 1999 the Discovery Institute an organization dedicated to making creationism seem science if scientific accidentally released a internal memo not intended for worldwide distribution and it held a long term agenda to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral cultural and political legacies and to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings were created by God they meant to replace evolution with creationism not student Christian schools but in every school across the country this was called a wedge because they intended to use pseudoscience arguments to generate doubt not just in evolution but in science in general and thus creating an opening for religious beliefs and their ultimate goal was to reshape our entire culture by promoting evangelical protestant christian fundamentalism at all levels of society including government the wedge document from the Discovery Institute mirrored the agenda of the goals of other fundamentalist organizations like the Cal sadang Institute which ran from the 1960s through the 1990s the Cal sadhana Institute's goal was to eventually slowly legally and peacefully take over all American government and turn it into a theocracy that would enforce biblical law and their founder RJ Rush Tony specified that what he meant by that was the barbaric Book of Leviticus where women could be could be killed just for being raped and where homosexuals would be killed as an abomination this was the Christian version of Sharia law where it would be imposed even on unbelievers it was called reconstruction ism or reece also called Fionna me God's law and a number of calcite on Institutes affiliates and subordinates we're connected with other devoutly religious hate groups in fact they themselves are listed in this other bother Poverty Law Center as a hate group but there's also the Rutherford Institute which was founded by Cal sadhana now the Rutherfords Institute's a goal was to get evangelical Christians elected at all levels of government with the ultimate attempts that they complete that ultimate intent that they completely take over political conventions which they have effectively done many of our senators and judges and so forth have been connected to Cal Sudan or Rutherford or other similar hardcore evangelical organizations and institutions information on all these conspiracies are detailed in their own words on various websites and as I said they all but succeeded they still can't enforce biblical law another form of dominionism is represented by the presidential candidate Ted Cruz who reportedly holds to the New Apostolic Reformation in which Christians are to reclaim the seven mountains of culture government religion media family business education and arts and entertainment a lot of this is funded by very wealthy conservatives like the Koch brothers and these are a set of billionaires who have donated tens of millions of dollars to evangelical organizations even though they haven't seen to have expressed any evangelical beliefs themselves it seems that these are the people that understand that religion is useful and a means of manipulation though they also support practically everything that goes on in the Republican Party and there was recently an admission from within that the Republican Party is owned and controlled by the Koch brothers back home in Texas we have our own financier of fundamentalism James Leininger has a couple hundred million dollars and he has invested large sums of his money into various religious and political groups in order to change policy he is the reason that we have a Republican majority on the Supreme Court because American politics is all about money you can basically buy elections James Leininger is also big fan of school vouchers and this is where money from the government that's supposed to go to public schools ends up being rerouted to charter schools and private schools this leaves the privileged kids going to the charter schools and the private schools and the underprivileged kids are now in underfunded schools which statistically cause them to underperform James Leininger like a lot of right-wing Republicans don't like the fact that Texas Constitution has a provision where we must provide a free education for all of our citizens but the only way that they can amend that and the Constitution is to show that the America that the Texas education system has failed and the only way to show that is to have made it fail so they route money to other schools like charter schools which can't be regulated properly and are prone to corruption and almost all of the private schools are exclusively Christian schools teaching that the Bible is the only source of truth in our world which means more kitties being taught biblical lessons as if it were actual history and fewer kids understanding reality James Leininger has also paid tens of thousands of dollars each to seat right-wing Republican Christian conservative creationists on our State Board of Education Texas has a board of panelists who approve all of our textbooks but they don't just approve what's already out there they also change them they request revisions paraphrasing rephrasing however necessary in order to censor certain ideas and promote other ideas according to their agenda publishers cannot refuse these requests because Texas is one of the largest public largest textbook buyers and if California isn't buying that year then what happens is the publishers will produce a Texas specific textbook which will then be distributed to everyone else such this--that's dozen or so volunteers somehow controls the education for everyone in the country and it should specify that some of these people in the board of education have been famously grossly under educated there are some that have advanced degrees but there are others who have only been homeschooled homeschool their own kids and speak out against public education one of them wrote a book saying that public education was a tool of the devil because it didn't promote Jesus another famously said that all this critical thinking stuff is gobbledygook and children should be allowed to jump to their own conclusions so Leininger gave tens of thousands of dollars to each of these largely undereducated people who have no competence for the job and our governor which Linacre also helped place our former Governor Rick Perry has repeatedly chosen the most batshit crazy fundamentalist on the board to serve as chairman of the board and the result of that has been an international embarrassment so the people in other countries in Australia for example know who my chairman of the board is at least at that time because this was the guy who would readily dismiss the combined testimony of a hundred and fifty scientists because he's a dentist who thinks he can stand up to experts I had a debate with this guy where he was supposed to moderate a debate it was two people on the Board of Education that we're supposed to moderate in this debate that my wife set up where I was debating against two evangelical ministers one of them admitted that he knew that they were transitional species in the fossil record but he wanted to teach students there were none because he said it was important that they believe there are none so here is an admission that it is okay to lie to other peoples kids in order to control what they believe so just before the wedge document was accidentally leaked I had already heard from a number of evangelicals bragging that they had positioned certain judges and senators and so forth for the next stage of their perceived culture war and that next stage was detailed in the wedge document once it finally came out the Discovery Institute is not a science organization as they build themselves to be they're really more of a League of lawyers and so what they had done was to put conservative Christian judges all over the country coordinated effort through all these different church groups voting as a bloc just like their ministers tell them to do despite their tax-free status not having any threat of that and the purpose so that they could countersue whenever anybody tried to school their sue their school districts for being you know teaching pseudoscience and this finally happened in Dover Pennsylvania creationists and the public schools there didn't want to hear the name of Darwin they didn't want to hear about evolution they encouraged their Board of Education their school boards to adopt an intelligent design textbook called of pandas and people the purpose of the phrase intelligent design is an illusion meant to create the impression that there is a scientific objection to evolution their previous attempt to do this was called creation science but the veneer was too thin and a judge saw that it was just pseudoscience propaganda meant to promote religion and this was why in 1987 it became illegal to teach creationism in public schools but religion is relentless and they think they're in a culture war so the invented intelligent design so that they could spew the same nonsense and continue on in secular schools I was in studio in TV for a local I'm sorry in Dallas for a local TV show where they were doing a comparison of worldviews so that three men on stage first they had a evolutionist this is the way they build it as if accepting scientific facts is equivalent to a religion then on the other side of the stage they had a creationist and in the middle they had an intelligent design proponent they did not admit that he was a creationist also because they wanted to create that illusion that this was something in the middle something with scientific justification remember these people knew better and are deliberately lying and the way we know that is investigators in the Dover trial discovered that the text book of pandas and people had been printed in multiple editions including prior to the ruling in 1987 where it was illegal to teach creationism in public schools so they compared the first edition to the most recent edition of what they discovered was that there was only one significant change wherever the word creationism originally appeared it had been replaced in 1887 a macro command replaced it with the words intelligent design including the definition so that intelligent design and creationism are the same thing they have these same definition book creationists are still lying about that the other change that's connected to that was it whenever it's originally said creationists it now says design proponents except one place where there was a misspelling that confused the macro command and it said see design proponent cysts so they knew full well what they were doing they were lying to get around the law to do something illegal these are the people who promote morality so it is not possible to defend a creationism honestly but it didn't matter that it wasn't enough that they caught their witnesses lying again and again and again because it had gone to court it was no incumbent on the court to show that there was no truth to their claims and this is where they thought that having a George Bush appointed conservative Christian Republican judge would assure their success because creationists never admit when they're wrong however being simply being Christian doesn't mean that you're a religious extremist it doesn't mean that you're a reality denialist and the judge in this case was a moderate Christian and a proper judge and he lamented the fact that so many of these witnesses would so proudly tout their religious convictions in public as he put it and then time and again lie to cover their tracks and conceal the real purpose behind the ID policy for example dr. Michael Behe took the stand as the only biologist willing to defend intelligent design and he confidently said that science will never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system but the judge noted that he was presented with 58 peer-reviewed publications nine books and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system however he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution ended it wasn't good enough the court also ruled that all of the testable claims of intelligent design had already been refuted and rejected by science so the science deniers didn't get the ruling that they wanted and nor would they admit that they had lost the court case instead lesions of them found an alternate plan in each of the states many of them they found loopholes in the different education systems laws allowing for different reasons in different places that there would be thousands of schools across the United States that will not teach evolution and there are thousands more that teach creationism work more specifically to teach the Bible as if it were a matter if its historic and scientific fact these lessons have also been shown to include anti-semitism and of course a rejection of science as well as a denigration of other religions and the instilling of right-wing political ideologies which is what this is really all about bear with me alone now they also had a program called the good news clubs which is was built as after-school activities and seems perfectly harmless but what they really do is full-tilt evangelizing to young students often regardless of parental consent they not only fill their heads full of Jesus they also train the kids how to react when their parents object to these kinds of lessons so the dividing the children from their parents and I don't know how this goes on without lawsuits all over the place but it's been happening for years the culture war isn't just about instilling religious dogmatism it's also about impressing the oppression repression and political practices consistent with with religious fundamentalism and in Texas that meant no more sex education instead they teach abstinence only my wife was teaching middle school when they had a state-funded Christian conservatives an old guy with a belt up to here who came into the class to lie to the students saying among other things that oral sex didn't feel good and somebody brought up the last time I mentioned this if they brought up that it might be because so many of the kids had braces the reason he gave was that you're so worried about catching a sexually transmitted disease that you can't enjoy the abstinence only is the idea that any pill can serve as a birth control pill if the girl holds it between her knees literally they do nothing more than simply tell teenagers not to have sex as if that would work that all you have to do is deny it one of the strongest biological urges that any organism has and you have to do that at the peak of its chemical and social influence over you and that you have to do this with no understanding of it because we're not going to give you any useful information because we're afraid you'll use it the abstinence-only program brags that it is the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases however just before my wife and I left Texas to go on this tour we noted that one of the local high schools was reporting a chlamydia outbreak Texas has the one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy I think it's the second highest rate of teen pregnancy and we also have the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancy and just to share how bad our education system is one of the news stories no not kidding about this said that the trend in teen pregnancies falls back down once the children reach 25 we also have one of the highest rates of child poverty because it's a negative feedback loop they've cancelled the right-wing Republicans have famously cancelled all of our abortion clinics and have done everything they could to cut the education budget in half and to also end some social benefit programs that would have aided unwed mothers teen mothers and so forth the program has been such a colossal failure that I'm happy to announce that President Obama has just a month or so ago canceled federal funding for it because it was the federal government paying for that for about a decade so it's not enough that our kids are poor and pregnant know they don't know how things work it's not enough that they're religious because the system that did that ultimately wants to control how they vote so that they will elect extreme militant right-wing ideologues wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross and how do you inspire such jingoism through fear and lies in George Orwell's most famous book 1984 says that those who control the past control the future so of course our board of indoctrination also had to alter our history in subtle ways that they hoped no one would notice and the goal here was to promote American exceptionalism the idea that our political system and our values were unique in all the world and that our history follows along manifest destiny which was something that actually taught me in school and this meant by Murray going back to you know people saying that the United States was founded by God and guided by God right directed by God and this meant that certain embarrassing errors in our history had to be glossed over minimized or omitted so for example Christianity is credited with everything good that ever happened but our embarrassing history with slavery and civil rights are minimized as if it wasn't really all that bad or maybe it didn't happen at all rather than admit that the Civil War was fought over slavery our history books now say that it was fought over states rights and slavery was seldom mentioned at all asthma in fact one of the textbooks got sued because they'd refer to the slaves as workers so these in Texas these classes are also often called social studies rather than history because it is a blend of cultural ancestry but our Texas history our social studies textbooks have omitted most ethnic references to indigenous people and other ethnicities and everything has been reworded so that it seems that only white people ever did anything important for example in one of our textbooks when once mentioned hip-hop music it was changed to country-western there was an attempt to remove a few Latino heroes and also it was a failed attempt to remove Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall because they didn't want to have a black role model in a respected position of authority our history books have arguments supporting segregation and while they don't say anything negative about the Ku Klux Klan in Texas Louisiana's textbooks one of them describes the KKK as respected community leaders promoting morality Louisiana uses overtly Christian books including the Bible itself because it's one of those states where it is legal now to teach full-on creationism and our friend Zack Kopplin was a high school student when that became legal and he began in high school he became an activist trying to sue his state over this and a lot of the information that I'm going to be presenting here actually comes from his website where he's named different textbooks and what they say his textbooks in Louisiana not his but Louisiana's books promote paranoid and prejudiced propaganda instilling and spreading right-wing religious ideology including the denigration of gays liberals and otherwise celebrated thinkers like Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain one of Louisiana's textbooks describes Mark Twain as a confused hack one of Louisiana's textbooks says that the goal of environmentalism isn't as reserved or isn't to preserve natural resources for future generations but rather the goal of environmentalism is to destroy the economies of the world's richest nations why does the textbook say that because we're addicted to fossil fuels and we must promote the oil industry so this is the propaganda that we're taught in scarce taught in our schools accordingly there's one textbook in Louisiana that's described that says that homosexuality should be treated as a capital crime and one of the Louisiana science textbooks says that the existence of the Loch Ness monster disproves evolution nationwide our children are taught that the founding fathers were Christian when many were not and we were told that our nation was based on biblical values of the Ten Commandments when there's no truth to that at all but our history books now say that Moses was a historic person that he was born in the thirteenth century BCE even though biblical scholars can't agree on when he should have been born and many say that he was never born at all and archaeologists agree almost unanimously saying that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened if it happened at all and we know we know several reasons that it couldn't have happened at all the consensus among critical scholars is that there's no truth to the Exodus whatsoever but biblical or exceeding our history books back to the Bible and Moses is listed first among the authors who inspired the framers of the Constitution and there's a footnote advising the kids to read the Bible for more information about Moses but the fact is that our founders were famously adamantly against every system of government that is associated with Moses and if Moses existed he certainly would have objected to anything Democrat Democratic our books now say that the political thinking of the framers of our Constitution was based on judeo-christian religious heritage where our laws and rights are believed to have come from God rather than legislatures but logically I think that if gays and atheists have equal rights in one country but face execution in another then those rights did not come from God or they would be Universal and worldwide and if a woman has a right to drive in one country but not in another then we know that that right was bestowed by a human legislator in recent times and again this seems obvious to a lot of people but you should see me trying to explain this to tea partiers religious right people back home in Texas so none of these changes in the books that we've been talking about are factually correct and these as easily this is easily proven but it doesn't matter that you can prove that all of these things are lives because this is what every child is taught in every school everywhere across the country again and again and again by every authority figure they know and it isn't possible to reach all of these kids to undo the damage before it sets in because this is a form of programming many Americans don't realize they've been lied to until they go to college which many don't because my country no longer respects higher education the way we used to and we don't we don't respect academic expertise either so if the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists have achieved consensus on climate change evolution sustainable energy or some other popular unpopular notion religious believers will simply disappear as if the opinionated uneducated ignorant masses somehow know better than all the world's best educated experts specialists anywhere ever and as I said I've been giving this presentation across Europe and I asked them if you've been watching our political circus from abroad shaking your head and wonder at the ineptitude of even those applying for our highest position and wondering what the hell happened to the United States you started out so promising where did you go wrong this is it and this is how they perpetuated through the denigration of Education and the systematic system-wide religious indoctrination attempting to turn us all into sheep thank you you

Channel: Center for Inquiry

Views: 101,382

Rating: 4.8249788 out of 5

Keywords: atheism, Aron Ra, Indoctrination State, Creationism in Texas, debunk religion, debunking religion, creationism debate, creationism in education, debunking christianity, Atheism & Science, Creationists, creationism vs evolution debate, Center For Inquiry, CFI, Skeptics, Skepticism, skeptic, pseudoscience, Reasonable Talk, aronra, aronra speech, aronra indoctrination state, aronra america image, aronra indoctrination children, aronra texas, texas sboe teaching creationism

Id: N0e21oaUDeU

Length: 51min 12sec (3072 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Merari01]

Aron Ra is the best. Always worth it.

[u/[deleted]]

He always sounds so pedantic to me.