Inherit the Wind redux

Published

From The Daily Kos:

Many of us read Inherit the Wind in middle school or high school growing up. It is the story about the Scopes Monkey Trial that began today, July 10, in 1925. We are taught about this moment in our country's history in order to make two things crystal clear to us:1) It is THE example of why our Founding Fathers stipulated the separation between Church and State and

2) Our country has the ability to right both our own as well as humanities' wrongs when reason is applied.

With recent partisan decisions by the Supreme Court concerning Hobby Lobby and women's rights, it is essential, now more than ever, we remember WHY our country's best and brightest fought for the separation between Church and State.

Clarence Darrow said it best below:

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Discuss.

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Specializes in Hospital Education Coordinator.

how is birth control "enlightenment"? I do not think the governemnt ought to control EVERYTHING

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I think the "enlightenment" part comes in when you look at the advancement of scientific understanding. Like, how pregnancy works, how hormones work, how sometimes science is preferable to people over belief in religious constructs. Like that.

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Specializes in Hospital Education Coordinator.

ok, but the individual does not have to work there. They may choose employment elsewhere.

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True, perhaps, but not the point of the quote.

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Specializes in ED, Medicine, Case Management.
ok, but the individual does not have to work there. They may choose employment elsewhere.

Sometimes yes, but not necessarily. What if, given one's mix of skills and work available in one's area, that is the most feasible job? What if that is the job that provides flexible enough hours to allow a mother to be home with her children when they get back from school? Or the only job that is willing to work with an individual's class schedule? What if that is the highest paying job an individual who has a family to support can get? There are a lot of reasons someone will choose to work where they do, and given the economic struggles we have seen, jobs cannot be taken for granted nor can we assume that everyone can pick and choose quite so freely.

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Specializes in Anesthesia, ICU, PCU.
how is birth control "enlightenment"? I do not think the governemnt ought to control EVERYTHING

The "enlightenment" Darrow references at the end there has nothing to do with birth control, but nice job taking a single word out of the context of an entire quote to make the lamest of lame arguments. And as the first poster? Tsk tsk :(

What Darrow is saying is there are fanatics and bigots out there who will always want to take more out of interest for their religion. In so many words he says "you give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile." Topics like teaching evolution in schools or sculptures of the 10 Commandments outside of courthouses may seem like small things (in the larger scheme of an imagined theocratic dictatorship like some of the Middle East), but what Darrow fears is the slippery slope type situation created by small allowances. The enlightenment he mentions is the loss of intellectual exchange as allowed by a secular government; a separation of church and state.

For instance, Galileo (astronomer genius) was kept under house arrest by the Catholic Church for 30 years until his death (17th century) for agreeing with some of Copernicus' observations - chiefly that the Sun is the center around which the Earth rotates. We all know this to be true, I hope. At that time the Church believed in "geocentricity," that the Earth is the center, and dubbed "heliocentricity" heresy. This is an extreme example of the intellectual blackness that a religion-driven authority can put the world in.

Now that I think about it, it's much easier to take a single word out of context as you did than to form a rational thought worthy of discussion.

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Funny to read, but hey, is it really that far off of the possibilities of the precedent set here?

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