Yet more dumbed down pseduo science in our schools.

[DominiConnor]

The government wants a new, "science" certificate that is absolutely impossible to fail.
Dumb

Given that both Tony and Cherie Blair are both comitted christians, perhaps this is the game plan ?
Evolution is bunk

The government has already put millions vinto schools with a policy of teaching that evolution is nonsense.

DC some religious people report hearing voices in their heads. Some athiests do.

some speak in tongues, some athiests do.

How logical would I be if I said that because some athiests behave in this way, athieism is a mental illness.

How foolish would that be.

Bigotry, in fact.

Your comment was that religious belief was a mental illness. Not some, not some forms, not some practitioners. You gave a blanket comments on a whole class of people. Bigotry.

'I despise religion and regard it as a mental illness'

there it is with no riders or caveats. No limitations. N omatter how you practice your religion or what form it takes, DC despises the religion and considers you to have a mental illness.

MB

DC said earlier in this thread "I'm sneery about stuff like literary analysis".

Literary analysis helps us learn how to raise our thoughts to consciousness and to order our inner world. The skills of observation, analysis, synthesis and presentation are taught primarily through the medium of our mother-tongue.

It is a thankless task to try to use this thread to compensate DC for the education he didn't have. I'm sure your pupils are far more deserving of your energies.

not looking at their course work!

I find parts of this thread quite staggering.
For all he says he values science education, and bemoans its demise, he has shown very little evidence of understanding some fairly basic Biology that we start to cover in year 9 (13 year olds) and tend to finish by the time they are 14-15.

For all he is insistant that single science is the only way to study sciences, he has failed to undersatnd basic stuff that we cover in the double science that he deplores as unworthy. I assume he did all three sciences at O level?

MB - I agree , quite staggering .

I could say lots of rude things but will refrain and go back to bringing up my daughter to have a tidy analytical brain, which I think is a better use of my time.

There is research to say your genetics determine your likelihood to believe in a God. It's intersesting stuff. Most people around the world independently have always come up with something

do yo have a quote for that?

I could ahve thought that complex social behaviour of that sort is very unlikley to be controled by a single gene

I'm not good with links on here. I think they studied twins who had been parted or something. I assume like a lot of genetic things including depression and addictions genetics is just one factor amongst a number.
www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7147

Religious belief is determined by a person's genetic make-up according to a study by a leading scientist.

After comparing more than 2,000 DNA samples, an American molecular geneticist has concluded that a person's capacity to believe in God is linked to brain chemicals.

His findings were criticised last night by leading clerics, who challenge the existence of a "god gene" and say that the research undermines a fundamental tenet of faith - that spiritual enlightenment is achieved through divine transformation rather than the brain's electrical impulses.

advertisementDr Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute in America, asked volunteers 226 questions in order to determine how spiritually connected they felt to the universe. The higher their score, the greater a person's ability to believe in a greater spiritual force and, Dr Hamer found, the more likely they were to share the gene, VMAT2.

Studies on twins showed that those with this gene, a vesicular monoamine transporter that regulates the flow of mood-altering chemicals in the brain, were more likely to develop a spiritual belief.

Growing up in a religious environment was said to have little effect on belief. Dr Hamer, who in 1993 claimed to have identified a DNA sequence linked to male homosexuality, said the existence of the "god gene" explained why some people had more aptitude for spirituality than others.

"Buddha, Mohammed and Jesus all shared a series of mystical experiences or alterations in consciousness and thus probably carried the gene," he said. "This means that the tendency to be spiritual is part of genetic make-up. This is not a thing that is strictly handed down from parents to children. It could skip a generation - it's like intelligence."

His findings, published in a book, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes, were greeted sceptically by many in the religious establishment.

thank you! Very interesting

One of those predisposition type genes by the sound of things.

And one assumes, not multi allele, so you don't get a presebiterian gene or a buddist gene?

Steve Jones, professor of genetics at Imperial (I think) once told me that interesting little nugget.

facinating!

a group of homozygous dominants prehaps??

MB is right, I regard all relginios as mental illness. I cannot speak for Professor Jones though we've drunk together a few times.

I can say however that he has told me that he has seen the way religion specifically fucks up people's ability to reason.
He stated this publicly, and had a considerable body of evidence.
That's actually a key point, which makes religion look more like a contagious mental illness than a genetic defect, though obviously you'd expect a correlation.
I find it interesting that people I regard as smart show clearly degraded ability to reason when they are near their faith.

DC - name dropping is the preserve of fools