I can blame this on many things. After picking a reason at random I have decided.

This is what happens when a country hasn't been attacked on their own soil. People in the US haven't seen themselves being forsaken by the very god they worship. I predict that a some attacks on American soil will be really good for the general demeanor of US citizens.

Quite honestly there is no real way to stop political idealogy from showing up in the classroom textbook.  For a long time now the left has slowly been winning the battle so I frankly don't have a hole lot of sympathy now that its the right swinging things back the other way.

Granted it would be prefered not to have any bias injected into these books but people always want to fight the wars of yesterday for whatever reason.

If the point of this thread is to say "we should stop this guy" I wholeheartedly disagree.  If the point is to say "we should stop any political idealogy from getting into textbooks", well then I do agree.

The point is that both sides cry about this when they start to lose the fight and I really don't care to interject myself into an ongoing war just to be the useful idiot for one side to regain the upper hand.

What is needed is a real solution to the whole deal and so far as I can tell that really isn't possible as long as people are the ones writing books.

So while I hate the way it is, I don't see anyone putting forth a better way to do it that doesn't have helping their side gain the upper hand as its true motive.

PS - I got a good laugh out of the dig at global warming skeptics. Leave it to the AGW movement to keep on trucking like nothing has happened.

Already we have some left leaners making fun of religion and openly wishing the US would be attacked.. lol.

Maybe they'll go back to teaching that multiculturalism and diversity was a failure.

@ vlad

Not a good idea at all. I liked pre-9/11 USA a lot better than post-9/11. People in general are cooler to be around when they aren't crapping their pants in terror.

I'm afraid that you are unaware of what a scientific theory is, no problem everyone needs someone to tell them at some point. It's not like a theory you use in everyday speech, a scientific theory is a group of facts used to explain a feature of the natural world. In other words, when you see the word theory in science it means there is such an abundant amount of data that indicates scientists really are 99% certain that it is the truth (it can never be 100% by definition).

Let's take a look at the example you provided, the big bang theory. Now when I first came across this in school I thought it sounded far fetched, however a few years ago I got to reading about it and it's not just that scientists think it happened, it's more of a case that there is so much evidence that it must have happened.

I'll have a go at explaining the big bang, the evidence we have and how we got to the conclusions we did based on the facts. This is how a theory is formed.

...

In the early 20th century a man called Edwin Hubble had discovered that galaxies existed beyond our Milky way, which we thought was the only one. The discovery was astounding, but what came next was even more so. Hubble devised a way of measuring the location of these galaxies called "redshift", he carefully and painstakingly measured the location of many galaxies and tracked their movement.

What he found was that they were all moving away from each other, and none moving towards another one. How can this be? The only way to explain it is that it's not the galaxies that are moving but the actual space they exist in is expanding. Imagine it like a balloon with dots on being blown up, they were close when the balloon was deflated, but now the balloon is blown up the dots are further away from each other. The location of the dots on the balloon haven't changed, the balloon itself has expanded making them further away.

Fact #1: What this shows is that the Universe is expanding. It has been observed for decades now and measured many many times.

Now, onto the next bit of information. We can observe two things in the Universe, Galactic evolution and the abundance of Hydrogen, which shows the Universe is finite, it has not existed forever. In fact best estimates suggest it is 13.7Bn years old (although I believe it is slightly older still). How do we know this?

The first matter that formed was Hydrogen, all original matter was Hydrogen, one proton, one neutron and one electron. But when stars formed they began fusing this matter in a process which is called nuclear fusion, a process man can even replicate on Earth. This is where atoms fuse together to produce new atoms like Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, etc... This is where all other matter comes from. We know with the amount of Hydrogen we can measure in the known Universe that the Universe must have had a starting point.

Fact2a: Universe had to have a starting point, a moment where it began.

Now, when astronomers look into the night sky they notice something odd, the further they look back, the less evolved galaxies look (Because light takes so long to get here galaxies that are 10Bn lightyears away only just reach us, so we see them as they were 10Bn years ago). If galaxies are less evolved than ours then we must assume that at some point back the Universe began as it is clear that stars and Galaxies have not existed forever. What we can take from this is that the Universe must have had a starting point and that we can actually see through telescopes back to almost when that starting point began by observing galaxies.

Fact 2B: The Universe if finite. This is the same fact as before, but reinforces it to an undeniable level.

Now let's try and make a conclusion the same way scientists do. We know two facts, the Universe is expanding in a metric way and the Universe has existed for a finite period of time. These are two undeniable facts. What conclusion can we draw form those two facts?

If the Universe is expanding and has only existed for a finite period of time then logically it must have had a point where it began, where it was a singularity and started expanding. It is the only explanation. This is what is called the big bang.

From these facts we can explain a force of nature (the big bang). We call this a theory because it is a collection of facts, which is what a scientific theory is.

...

Personal note: Don't think of the big bang like an explosion. If I can go back to the balloon, think of it like that. The balloon was once deflated (a singularity) and then it was blown up (expansion). We know it happened over a period of time and we know it is expanding, just like the big bang theory.

...

Phew, I hope you stuck with me with the wall of text.

@highwaystar101

Sorry, but the Big Bang Theory i not remotely proven, or even "a case that there is so much evidence that it must have happened."

I am an atheist, but I fall into the camp of "We don't know yet". I have no problem teaching The Big Bang as what we think it might have been, as today there is not another option that comes close, but in no way does that say I will state as fact that we know what happened 14 billion years ago.

We make predictions about space all the time, and more times that not, when we get a chance to prove our theories (probes), we are wrong. Nothing in the observed world tells me God did anything, so teaching religion in school like it holds the same amount of water is like teaching people about the spaghetti monster, so I am not defending his point.

I just can't defend yours either :)

So your saying the most war torn nations have the least religion? I think you have that backwards.

How so? The big bang theory is based on sound logic and strong evidence.

Here's a fun way for you to test for it in your own home. Cosmic background radiation is a type of electromagnetic radiation which can be measured by observing the photons produced shortly after the big bang, they can be measured in the microwave section of the electromagnetic spectrum. We have probes that have created fairly detailed maps of this radiation. But the best things about this is that you can test for this radiation in your own home, you can test for the radiation by detuning a TV (Remember the un-tuned fuzziness), what you see is partially this cosmic microwave background radiation created by the big bang.

There's a little test you can do in your own home to test for the big bang.

Anyway, I digress. I think it's fair that people can argue about what happened before and after the big bang (such as debating about Planck time, which is still a hot topic). But I think with the evidence we've found and the facts we take from them (the Universe is expanding in a metric manner and it has existed for a finite time) strongly suggests that at one point the Universe must have been a singularity at some point and expanded from there*.

Saying "it is not even remotely proven" is just plain false when so much evidence exists. It's almost to the point where we can practically be 99% certain. Sorry to be brutally honest Mafoo :).

(*We know the Universe is expanding. Now imagine if I put the universe in reverse time, it will keep shrinking and shrinking until it reaches a single point.)