I mean look, we’ve taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime and we’re surprised that they treat their fellow Americans like dirt. It’s time we talk about the result of the Left’s systematic march through our institutions, driving religious expression from the public square.
It’s tragic and at some point we have to realize we have a problem as a nation, and the problem is not the absence of laws, it’s an absence of morality — really, the result of a decades-long march through the institutions of America, driving religion and God from the public square.
— Tony Perkins, Talking Points Memo, Fox News Guest Blames Mass Shootings On Fact That Evolution Is Taught In Schools, September 2, 2019
I’ve never once in my life been taught that biblical creation was regarded as anything other than allegorical (or equivalent), and I attended Sunday school from age around 5. Evolution wasn’t taught as such, certainly not at that age, but it was taken for granted. Somehow I still managed to work out right from wrong as best I could, and no doubt I get it wrong even now but I continue to work on it. When it comes to mass shootings, however, in the UK we don’t leave it to people to ‘work out’ right and wrong, we just don’t give them guns. The only guns I’ve ever seen here are those shotguns used for grouse shooting, and even that’s both controversial and tightly controlled. I don’t feel I’m missing out by my lack of access to guns, indeed I feel safer as a result. Teaching creationism is teaching stupidity and ignorance, and I’ll lay odds that these feature far more in gun crime than lack of belief in god, or evolution, ever did.
I grew up in a different religious environment. Evolution was considered a lie of the Devil meant to deceive the masses. I was in my 40s before I began to doubt young earth creationism. Science will do that do you; force you to either change your viewpoint or up your level of cognitive dissonance. 🙂
I guess the fact that evangelicals installed an immoral, lying, race-baiting demagogue in the White House has nothing to do with it.
Don’t the majority of mass shooters in the US identify as Christians or at least were raised as such, or am I missing something?
My kids were learning about evolution in honors level high school biology at the same time I was learning more about it myself, as I hadn’t been taught it at all except for lame apologetics from young earth creationism (and even as a young teen I could see the arguments were very weak). Public schools, even ones ranked highly in a progressive area, do a poor job of teaching about evolution. My kids learned about Darwin and the creatures he studied on the Galapagos Islands, and that’s about it.
Well Tony, you believe in a god who drowned all but a handful of people in a flood. This is the same god who created the human race with full knowledge [at the very least] that they would fail his test and have to suffer during their lifetimes. Yes this is the same god who will torture the majority of the human race for eternity because they failed to believe the right way. And this same all powerful being chooses not to intervene when a gun toting mass murderer goes on a rampage. Explain to me again how the teaching of evolution is the problem